Marriage, Explained

Found on Joe.My.God. today:  Dan Savage gets right to the heart of the marriage argument.



All that Dan says is correct.  Until straight people changed the laws - with no little opposition from conservatives, mind you - in the late 19th/early 20th century, women in the English-speaking world who married lost their legal identity, being subsumed into that of their husbands':  a single woman, in legal terms, was a femme seule (single woman); a married woman, however, was a femme couvert (hidden woman).  A woman's property, with rare exceptions for very wealthy women, belonged entirely to her husband, down to her smallest personal possessions.  If a husband wanted to, in theory he could sell all her dresses - though of course, I doubt any man who enjoyed three homecooked meals a day and some nookie at night would be that stupid.  But realistically, women had no legal say in the disposition of their money or property:  a husband, for example, could demand that an employer pay his wife's salary to him, not to her.  And so forth.

The point being, until the laws on property and divorce were changed, women were in a legal sense owned by their husbands:  I don't have time now to go look up the references, but I can tell you that both Queen Victoria and Virginia Woolf - and it's hard to think of two more contrasting personalities - at different times in their writings made the identical statement:  women are slaves to men.

But most people's historical knowledge does not extend any further back than their parents' time or their grandparents'; yet they believe that the way mama and daddy lived is the way people always lived, as far back as Adam and Eve.

It just ain't so.  Marriage in the Old Testament often included multiple wives:  go look it up.  But oh my goodness, you never hear the Bible-thumpers arguing to bring back polygamy, do you?  A while back, I wrote a lot more in my post about the history of marriage, and the difference between civil marriage and religious marriage, if anybody wants to read it.  Bottom line:  just as Dan said, straight people have been redefining marriage for centuries, millennia, as it pleased them.  But people forget that:  it didn't happen in mama and daddy's time, so they don't know anything about it.

Legal marriage serves a number of very useful, necessary purposes for society and for individuals.  There's room enough for gay people - my God, it's not like we're asking to abolish it, we just want to get on board with it!  

Not that everybody needs to be married:  I'm thinking of some straight and some gay people.  Some folks are just not equipped for the job, some just can't stand to be "tied down," and some just don't want that much responsibility.  But for those who do, it should be an equal opportunity institution.