A Stitch in Haste

"One god? That I can understand. But one wife? That is not civilized!"
--Sheik Ilderim, Ben Hur

Be sure to review Stephanie Coontz' op-ed in today's New York Times on the history of heterosexual marriage. Money quote:

Heterosexuals were the upstarts who turned marriage into a voluntary love relationship rather than a mandatory economic and political institution. Heterosexuals were the ones who made procreation voluntary, so that some couples could choose childlessness, and who adopted assisted reproduction so that even couples who could not conceive could become parents. And heterosexuals subverted the long-standing rule that every marriage had to have a husband who played one role in the family and a wife who played a completely different one. Gays and lesbians simply looked at the revolution heterosexuals had wrought and noticed that with its new norms, marriage could work for them, too.

Read the whole thing.

The anti-gay forces who invoke "traditional marriage" aren't looking back 5,000 years, but just 50 — to the fictive Ozzie and Harriet vision of middle-class suburban America. Which truly was paradise — assuming of course that you were white, Protestant, native-born, heterosexual, and physically, mentally and emotionally healthy. If not, then too bad, so sad — try Canada.

When they say it's about "defending" "traditional" marriage, they lie. It's about imposing their stale, monotonous and monochromatic view of society (that never really existed anyway) on "the others" in a patently un-American manner that legitimizes exclusion and bigotry in the name of their "right" to live in a false past.

Other thoughts at Eleventh Avenue South.

I meanwhile have earlier posts on "traditional marriage" here, here and here.