re: #179 freetoken

More fantasy “history”, this time from Gov. Christie:

Christie says Supreme Court’s ruling on DOMA ‘was wrong’

Ah yes, the magical “2000 years”. An implicit Christian reference.

Except 2000 years is likely bullshit as well.

A study of medieval rituals in same-sex unions raises a question: what were they solemnizing?

If these words, taken from a manuscript preserved in the Vatican and dating from the year 1147, were for a bride and bridegroom, no one would find them startling:

“Send down, most kind Lord, the grace of Thy Holy Spirit upon these Thy servants, whom Thou hast found worthy to be united not by nature but by faith and a holy spirit. Grant unto them Thy grace to love each other in joy without injury or hatred all the days of their lives.”

That prayer, however, is part of a ritual joining two men in some kind of a solemn, personal, affectionate relationship, a ritual that, according to John Boswell, the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History at Yale, “functioned in the past as a ‘gay marriage ceremony.’ “

Amid the debate about whether Christianity should bless unions between homosexuals, Professor Boswell contends that it already has.

Scouring collections of medieval manuscripts from Paris to St. Petersburg and from the Vatican to the monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai, he has turned up more than 60 texts, dating from the 8th to the 16th centuries, of Christian ceremonies for what has been variously translated as “spiritual brotherhood,” “adoptive brotherhood” or what Dr. Boswell believes to be a more neutral term, “same-sex union.”