Defining Marriage: Definition & Nature of Marriage Has Changed Dramatically

Men invented marriage to secure alliances and to ensure that their holding would pass to their sons. Religion came into it later. Marriage for love is a modern invention.

I read someone comment recently that the only reason there is legislation/regulation regarding marriage relationships is due to the fact that society uses the family unit as the means to rear young. And that if children weren’t involved, there would be precious little reason to have any regulations regarding adult consensual relationships. It was a statement written in the mid 1800s in Europe, and for the time and place, I think it was likely an accurate assessment. I find it interesting that as our own society has become more flexible with regard to who can marry, why and how/why they can disolve the contracts, that less and less people really care about how it’s regulated.

I think there are still a lot of people out there that “believe in” traditional marriage, but I think there are less and less people today who really are worried about who is marrying whom generally. And we have a very flexible model now of family and child-rearing. I do think that the less marriage serves real function in society, the less people care about it–not surprisingly.

Please forgive my copy & paste job, but this was too good…

10 Reasons Why Gay Marriage Will Destroy Our Civilization

by Ross Levine

1) Because the only thing standing between heterosexuals and their latent homosexual desires is the knowledge that gay people cannot marry, so that if you sanction gay marriage, the latents will turn blatant in droves;

2) Because if you allow gays to marry, gay people may get so many tax breaks that the decrease in revenue for the U.S. Treasury could bankrupt America’s War on Terror and allow the infidels to destroy us;

3) Because the profits that wedding planners would reap from the additional ranks of gay brides and grooms would not offset the losses that the drug industry, a pillar of our civilization, would suffer from the quantity of anti-depressants no longer purchased by homosexuals distraught over their second-class status;

4) Because if you sanction homosexual relationships in this way, you leave the moral majority with scarcely anything else left to decry as a threat to civilization as we know it, and so civilization must fall, because the moralists will be so demoralized they won’t want to hold civilization up anymore for the rest of us slackers, and even our two-party system may crumble into an unrecognizable pile of donkey and elephant dung;

5) Because to permit gay marriage is to allow for the possibility that marriage has a sexual as well as a reproductive component, and to acknowledge this is so antithetical to everything in our society except that which is justifiably put forth in the realm of advertising and entertainment in order for our companies to make money, a substance without which our civilization cannot endure;

6) Because if you grant homosexuals the right to marry, and thus include them in this particular institutional mainstay of our civilization, they will cease to be family black sheep and societal scapegoats, both of which, given the principle of unification before a common enemy, lend indispensable strength to the American family and the civilization it exists in;

7) Because giving America’s blessing to such inverted nuptials is tantamount to a repudiation of the Holy Bible, to which our civilization is presently more indebted than any mere secular Constitution, and although our society has survived clean-shaven faces, being kind to lepers and the consumption of crustaceans, mankind lying with mankind and womankind lying with womankind shalt not and must not be abided;
What do we want? Tax breaks! When do we want them? Now! “Giving America’s blessing to such inverted nuptials is tantamount to a repudiation of the Holy Bible, to which our civilization is presently more indebted than any mere secular Constitution.” (Photo: Reuters/John Gress)

Because granting gay rites will mean that other connubial infidels such as bigamists, beastie boys and nec-romancers will also demand their own keys to the altar, and thus we must limit marriage to one man and one woman, with a rider stipulating that these marriageable hommes and femmes retain the same genital material they possessed while in the womb;

9) Because unless same-sex unions are opposed, our civilization cannot continue in its role as the world’s quintessential democracy, where the majority must preserve the right to impose regulations upon the minority, that to grant a minority the license to take full advantage of the special privileges allotted to the majority would weaken said majority by spreading among its ranks the impression that there is no steep and punitive price to be paid for individual expression;

10) And finally, unless we stop legalized same-sex marriage from securing a place in the pantheon of legal rights afforded American citizens of all 50 states, the United States, in proving herself eminently true to the words scrawled at the base of the Statue of Liberty, will once again become, as she once was, a haven for freedom-seekers, and can our civilization really afford to dispense so much freedom, when, after all, the more freedom you grant to others, the less you may claim for yourself?

21 July 04

Ross Levine (via mikec) wrote: “… and even our two-party system may crumble into an unrecognizable pile of donkey and elephant dung;”

Arguably, this has already happened.