Redefining Marriage for the Better

I've been watching a lot of historical dramas lately: Camelot, The Borgias, The Tudors, etc.  Basically, you feed me an epic historical drama and I'll consume it happily.  I can't get enough of them.  And one thing they've caused me to ponder lately is the continually changing nature of marriage.

The Religious Right likes to tell us that we can't allow marriage equality because we wouldn't want to "redefine marriage" (god forbid!).  I guess these people haven't watched enough historical programming.  As it turns out (and it’s too bad they don’t teach you this in history class or something) women used to be bought and sold into marriage. Marriage was not a union of love, but one of mutual benefit for the bride and grooms’ families.  For example, if your family was broke but possessed a title of some kind, and another family was filthy rich but not of noble birth, they worked out a deal to marry their children so as to benefit both families.  Women (and often men) really had very little to say about who they actually wanted to marry.

More recently, the point of getting married was for a man to have someone who could bear his children, clean his house and cook his food, and for a woman to have someone to provide her with a house to clean and food to cook.  It was a union of mutual survival, not love.

In fact, the idea of marrying for love has been laughable for most of human history, so I can’t figure out why we continue to buy this myth that marriage is now and has always been about falling in love and then making babies.

The reality is that these days, marriage is really all about choice.  You can choose if you will marry or if you won’t.  You can choose whom to marry and then whether or not you want to have kids.  You can choose who will work or not work.  Parenting is shared much more equally than in the past, and when you fall out of love, either party can choose to get a divorce.  So what part of this picture are gay people so ill-equipped for?  They can fall in love, they can raise kids, they can work and share and do all the things everyone else can do.  Why are people so threatened by them getting married?

When marriage is defined by love, as it is today, then there is no valid reason at all to exclude people who simply choose to love someone other than who you would choose to love.  Should we also exclude assholes from getting married?  Or people with especially bad grammar?  Just because YOU wouldn’t marry someone doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to get married to the person they love. 

And don’t get all high and mighty and use the “slippery slope” argument.  You know, the one where if we allow gay people to marry then why not marry horses or children.  I think it’s pretty easy to just draw the line at two consenting adults and leave it there (polygamy is a whole different can of worms we can discuss later).