The beautiful thing about the Church of England is that it includes a wide spectrum of opinion and tradition, from high church (smells'n'bells) to scruffy low church, from liberal to conservative, left and right).
I don't agree with everything, but it's a great space for people with different backgrounds and opinion to mix and learn from each other. It can be very radical in a quiet, British, socks-and-sandals sort of way.
Ha! Didn't think I'd be writing about the CofE on HN!
I do know that [family member], who is gay and married, has said that she feels welcomed in our church and that she wishes she'd had one like it to support her when she came out.
It's one of the only institutions I can think of that seems to be allowed to openly discriminate against homosexuals and until more recently women in some regards as well.
I hope you didn't take my comment as me jumping on you, I'm just curious because I don't think I could call any church in the CoE liberal when the leadership are so conservative.
This is wrong in so many ways; "marriage" is a concept that exists in many cultures with many different different understandings, and those understandings have historically been fluid over time even within the same culture. Its most consistently a property arrangement between the parties; in the West its been separated from an essential intent for procreation for quite some time, though there are religious subcultures within Western societies for whom that may remain more important than it is in the broader society.
You need to review your history on marriage including, but by no means limited to, what the bible has to say on such matters.
The biblical view of marriage is vastly different to simply "a man and a woman wanting to procreate", itself took on and in places redefined millennia of tradition that pre-dated it, and given how much of that definition the church now ignores (allowing divorce, no longer requiring the stoning non-virgins, to cite two of many examples) I don't think ignoring something that isn't actually stated in the text anyway should be a significant problem.
Whether officiated by a religious order, the state, or the word of those involved, 'marriage' is just a word, a concept, and has many permutations.
The new Marriage is unbounded by anyone else's beliefs.
The old Marriage is concerned with law, religion, and society. And sometimes we need to drop down a gear and consider these things, but law, religion, and society do not a marriage make.
It is the combination or mixture of elements that gives rise to something new, something neither of the elements alone is capable of, that is a 'marriage'.
And it is good that way.
So are you saying that when people marry in old age, it's not really marriage?
Married and marriage have plenty of meanings in English...
The function and intention of marriage has changed through time and locality.
To pick a singular aspect of a complex social construct and use that to base its purpose and definition on is myopic.
For property purpose more generally: controlling inheritance was part of that, but a related part (and perhaps a more significant part in early societies where inheritances were small) was economic support the other direction, up the family tree rather than down. Where children (and grandchildren, and lateral relatives) care for their parents (and grandparents, etc.) in their old age instead of their existing nonfamily social support networks, establishing broader family bonds through formal unions is important to that.
The UK does better than most countries for supporting LGBT rights, but it took a long time. The UK discriminated against homosexuals for many years, and we still have some way to go to fully recognising rights of LGBT people.
