Well, at least they may have been cooler with it than today's religious fanatics, says Mo Rocca, in his AOL (AOL? That's still around?) blog.
In a nicely researched, brief blog post, Mo says the Pilgrims, for all their religious devotion, believed only two acts, sacraments, as the Church called them then and now, should be blessed by the church -- and marriage wasn't one of them.
His piece, which is more thoroughly researched than many op/ed columns on the matter these days (see Sun-Times, Chicago, for instance), points out that these Pilgrims, who were way into the Good Book, found no scriptural basis for marriage, and thus believed it to be a purely civil matter. In fact, the whole act of performing marriages within a church is relatively recent, concocted by the Catholic Church in the 12th Century. So much for all those arguments that 'this is the way it's always been' and 'you're insulting and upsetting people's religious beliefs by making them accept gay marriage,' etc., etc.
Facts can be an annoying thing sometimes, can't they?
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