- underblueskies1016
- 4 years ago
My Fiance and I are having a pretty secular wedding. It is being officiated by my younger brother… so no church, no religious officiant, no religious themes, etc.
My FI’s family is very religious. Mine is pretty religious as well. Because of this, both families were not overly thrilled by the lack of a religious ceremony. I should also mention, my Fiance and I aren’t overly religious but we are not, not religious either.
Anyway, we thought a nice way to include some religion into the night would be to have FI’s father say a prayer before dinner at the reception. This seemed like a great idea at first but now I’m getting more and more concerned.
Future Father-In-Law seems to be taking this prayer opportunity and turning it into his own sermon of sorts. We have already told him that we are just looking for a prayer… short and sweet. He agreed and I thought the issue was done.
Well, this past weekend we spent some time at my FI’s parents’ house and my Future Father-In-Law brought up some ideas for the prayer. And this is now where I’m really upset…
Future Father-In-Law wants to include into his prayer about how marriage is between a man and a woman ONLY.
1. This is not a belief of ours. My Fiance and I think that as long as two people are in love, they should get the same opportunities as everyone else to get married and have a family.
2. We have several very good gay and bisexual friends who will be attending the wedding. For obvious reasons, we don’t want a prayer that includes marriage being between only a man and a woman.
My Fiance luckily stepped up and protested this. He tried to talk to his parents about how that is not one of our beliefs and we don’t want it presented as such on our wedding day. Future Mother-In-Law just got very quiet and left the room and Future Father-In-Law started preaching to us about what the Bible says and how his prayer is going to reflect what the Bible says. Fiance and I tried to continue the conversation but Future Father-In-Law walked away and nothing was resolved.
Now I don’t know what to do. How do we bring up this conversation again? We are not trying to change FFIL’s beliefs, we just want him to respect our decision about not using that ONE phrase in his prayer. Obviously I don’t want to ask him NOT to do a prayer now but at the same time I’m worried that he’s going to go against our wishes about this.
What would you do?
(Also, sorry if this was posted to the wrong board. I couldn’t decide what the best catagory for it would be.)