Marriage, Marriage Equality, Republican Party, conservative, fundamental religion, catholic, Romney
I know I’ll take some heat from conservatives on this but,
who really gives a rat’s ass. Marriage equality seems one of those polarized
political topics that simply will not go away.
Here’s my attempt to add some historical and socio-cultural
facts to the mix.
In this exchange Fox’s Chris Wallace get's owned by Ted Olson and shows his
utter lack of knowledge of the history and purpose of marriage as he states,
"WALLACE: So
society doesn't get to say that marriage should be between a man and a woman,
even though society has said that for thousands of years."
Marriage, as we think of it today has its origins near the
end of Charlemagne’s
rule about 814. The word “marriage” didn’t even exist
until the late middle ages, sometime around 1250 – 1300 and wasn’t something
much more than a spoken agreement between individuals before 1545, sometimes
witnessed or recorded but more often not.
Some of the earliest records of what has come to be called
marriage date back to Mesopotamia from Hammurabi’s Code, crafted
somewhere around 1790 BCE and consisting of 282 laws. The Code addressed all manner
of life issues from river dunking through eye poking and teeth smashing.
Hammurabi even took a swipe at early healthcare reform, “If during an unsuccessful operation a
patient dies, the arm of the surgeon must be cut off.” Even Fox News doesn’t advocate for the
systematic butchering of incompetent doctors.
Reaching far back
to antiquity what we think of today as “marriage” was nothing more than a
contract to secure inheritance rights and demonstrate that a woman was the
exclusive property of a single man, and thus was between a man and woman. Not because “God” decreed it to be thus or
even because a culture thought it should be so but, simply because the nobility
needed to ensure 1) their children would inherit their property and power and
2) to ensure their children, were actually their children.
To put it another
way, marriage has always been a legal contract based on the needs of society at
the time in every culture in which it existed.
Marriage is a voluntary contractual phenomena designed to ensure the
participating parties have proper access to the rights and laws of the cultural
in which they live. It is not and never has been a religious or moral
institution.
The first
inklings of this notion of marriage entwined with some form of the divine came
from bishop Ignatius of Antioch around 110, "It
becomes both men and women who marry, to form their union with the approval of
the bishop, that their marriage may be according to God, and not after their
own lust." Ignatius also felt, “For whosoever does not confess that Jesus
Christ has come in the flesh, is antichrist; and whosoever does not confess the
testimony of the cross, is of the devil; and whosoever perverts the oracles of
the Lord to his own lusts, and says that there is neither a resurrection nor a
judgment, he is the first-born of Satan.”
Fortunately for the
majority of America ’s
non-Catholic population, some 238,739,200 of us, no one is proposing a
constitutional amendment to declare more than 81% us the Anti-Christ or Satan.
As an interesting footnote; the above doctrine makes Mitt
Romeny an anti-Christ and presumably unacceptable to most Republicans as a
presidential candidate, of course, the doctrine also makes most Republicans
anti-Christs as well.
To put it another way any person who believes marriage is a
“Christian” institution must also believe more than 81% of Americans are
anti-Christs; sorry but it’s one of those inescapable logic things.
In our modern
American culture marriage is an entre to the basic societal power unit whereby
citizens are guaranteed various protections and rights. To deny any group the
basic right to voluntarily enter into this fundamental power unit is to deny
members of that group their basic right to participate in our culture. It is nothing more than a modern form of
banishment.
Additionally when
carefully studied and analyzed there is absolutely no historical evidence that
marriage has ever served a different purpose throughout history in any culture,
that is until now, when some fundamental religious groups are attempting to use
marriage to exclude a group of Americans from basic rights and create a second
class layer of our culture.
The irony is most
of those opposed to marriage equality do not qualify as “Christian” by the
person whose Holy definition of marriage their arguments relies upon.
No comments:
Post a Comment