[Aramant]

I was watching television a couple of days ago. I forget if it was the news, or something on the Discovery Channel or a similar station, but there was a feature on "breakaway" churches either in Canada or the United States... or both. Essentially, some individual parishes or diocese or whatever you'd like to call them decided as a group to do certain things that their religions officially disallow. One example was the induction of a number of female priests into a Catholic church.

If this turns into a significantly wide-spread movement, it's possible that another religious reformation could occur some time in the relatively near future. If that's the case, same-sex marriages might become religiously sanctioned by these new denominations at some point.

As a bit of a tangent, it's interesting to think about how new religions or branches thereof were (eventually) accepted publically in the past, but the idea of a new faith or denomination coming into being now is generally met with derision. For example, Hollywood seems pretty into the whole Scientology thing, but the impression I get for the most part is that the majority of people think it's insane. More specifically with these breakaway churches, even if they gain enough support, I have to wonder if they'd ever get official recognition, either by secular or non-secular groups.