Stephanie Coontz, in today’s Times, makes a point about marriage that’s worth remembering:
Traditional marriage, with its 5,000-year history, has already been upended. Gays and lesbians, however, didn’t spearhead that revolution: heterosexuals did.
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.
But it’s easier to blame gays and lesbians for ruining marriage, because we’re The Other. Religious conservatives like James Dobson know that banning gay marriage will play much better than banning birth control, making women stay at home, forcing wives to submit to their husbands, or re-criminalizing adultery. Many people who wouldn’t think of enforcing those rules, because those rules might someday apply to them, have no problem banning gay marriage.
People will never proscribe their own liberty, but they have no problem proscribing that of others.
Yes, I just love when radical heterosexual activists try to defend the “millennia-old institution of marriage.” They’re ignoring a pretty ugly history that basically consisted of trading pre-pubescent girls for the sake of financial, social or political gain on behalf of the men involved.
They still can’t wrap their heads around the whole separation of church and state idea. You don’t have to like gay marriage. Your church doesn’t have to approve of it, recognize the relationships, or perform the ceremonies — and neither do you. But in terms of law and civil rights, you can’t discriminate against people solely on the basis of tradition and religious prejudice.