Follow Up

Okay, so I'm lying in my bathtub pondering... like I do. And it occurs to me... what is "traditional marriage" anyway? For most of the last several hundred years, marriage involved the wife becoming the property of the husband. She had no rights in the marriage. If the husband predeceased his wife, she became the property of the eldest son. She could not inherit property. She went from being the property of one man to another until all the men were dead and she became destitute. Marriage was a method of transferring ownership of women from one man to another. It was controlled by the church, but until recent centuries the church was the state.

Today, marriage is different, in some places anyway (don't get me started on Sharia). A few decades ago, women came to the realization that they were human beings and started demanding rights. Now, they can inherit property. They are not married off at the earliest possible breeding age to the highest bidder - they can select their own breeding stock, or choose not to breed at all. They can decide to walk away from a marriage. Marriage is now more than a transfer of ownership of a woman from her father to another man - it is essentially a business partnership; an agreement between two people to become one legal entity in exchange for certain benefits from the state. These benefits include, but are not limited to: joint health care coverage, tax benefits, inheritance rights, joint ownership of assets, visitation rights, etc. And since church and state are separate entities, this contract does not need to be ratified by the church. A church may perform its own ceremony, and that ceremony does not need to be ratified by the state. The contracts are already, for all intents and purposes, two separate things.

Because we are already far removed from what the "traditional" notion of marriage has been for all of these thousands of years, it seems illogical, if not downright contradictory, to try to hold on to the only tiny shred of definition that "traditional" marriage may still hold at this stage. The only reason to do so is to withhold rights from people whose lifestyles you do not agree with. Now, you may do that in your church ceremonies, but the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution does not allow the state to do that in the framework of our laws. If a contract is offered to two consenting adults that gives them benefits, and the only reason to deny those benefits is your belief system, that is discrimination.

We have already thrown off the shackles of all of the other ridiculous notions associated with "traditional" marriage - arranged marriages, dowries, marrying off thirteen year-olds, forced submission of women, racial purity... why hang on to this last atrocity?

Good night and good luck.