Stop it. Stop trying to redefine marriage. Just stop it right now.

[DRoseDARs]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=4427900

The thread above was posted in November and has already been archived else I would have bumped it instead of starting a new one but you people, either out of genuine ignorance (of the "Oh, I didn't know that before. Now I'm more educated than I was a moment ago." type) or thinly-veiled bigotry (they know who they are, please refrain from pointing them out), you people keep trying to say marriage is between one man and one woman and always has been and that marriage is a religious term/institution.

*sigh*

Again, anthropologists know this is so much fucking bullshit, have said it is so much fucking bullshit, and yet you keep peddling so much fucking bullshit. Stop it. Stop it right fucking now. Rick Warren (Oh noes, hez mentioned againz!) said that marriage has been defined as being between one man and one woman for 5,000 years. For those of you that bother reading the thread I've linked to above, you'll come to know from the OP and several responses that:



"What we as Americans understand as "traditional marriage" in the United States is only about 200 years old.
Polygamy (polyandry is the reverse, one wife taking several husbands) was the norm up to Roman times and remains practiced in several cultures.
The Romans "systematized marriage by establishing an age of consent and specifying unions across socio-economic classes."
The Church (now the Roman Catholic Church) pushed monogamy, but it still took centuries to take.
Marriage was first and foremost an economic arrangement, secondly about children, finally about love.
The ancient Greeks and later both the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox performed a few of what may be considered "gay marriages" in the Middle Ages.
Today, some societies still have "gay marriages" as part of their traditions, handed down through many generations over the centuries and millennium.
That Amerindians have had gay marriage in their cultures long before Europeans ventured out of the Old World."



We are not Freepers. We have facts and history with which to back ourselves up with, and yet many of you out there keep peddling the Freeper version of reality, from the bullshit about there being only one definition (one man and one woman) to the bullshit about marriage being strictly a religious term (no, it most certainly fucking is not). Civil Unions or whatever other fucking thing you want to call them have no place in intelligent discussion, especially not if you've bothered reading this far and have thus expanded your knowledge of the term. Marriage is a secular term, it is the proper term, it is NOT the property of ANY religious institution, it is a legal/economic term. If people of faith wish to TACK ON religious ceremony, they are free to do so, but marriage remains a secular term. And if anyone one of you out there persists in falsely claiming that marriage IS a religious term alone, please explain to my parents and millions of couples like them how their marriages in courthouses by civil judges, devoid of any religious ceremony or rite, are not real marriages and thus should not be legally binding or recognized.



Redefining "shit" to mean "chocolate" doesn't make it smell, look, or taste like chocolate, putting a crucifix on a candy bar doesn't make sweet confections the providence of The Church, and stapling well-crafted wings to this pig isn't going to make you look like less of an asshole. Stop, just fucking stop. Stop redefining marriage to suit your narrow, ill-informed worldview.

[madeline_con]

1. The words "civil union" chap my hide, too. n/t

[Radical Activist]

2. Even the early Christian church accepted polygamy.

Its embrace of monogamy only came later when Roman politics and traditions came to dominate the church.

[Why Syzygy]

3. This is what I've said all along.

Marriage is a legal contract and should be regarded as such. Contracts don't discriminate.

[sandnsea]

4. Now you're taking god out of marriage

brilliant move - doing the exact thing they say they're trying to prevent.

[DRoseDARs]

5. If your post was critical, God was never in marriage to begin with. That's the point.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, so I err on the side of retort. :hi:

[sandnsea]

6. I'm being dead serious

You're doing the thing they say they must stop. Facts will never matter to them. All that matters is that some 90% of Americans believe in God and respect the rights of others to believe that marriage is a sacrament. Trying to convince people otherwise is playing right into their hands.

[Pithlet]

18. Then it seems you want to take their side, even if that isn't your intention.

Because now you want to take away my marriage, too. I'm married. Not civil unioned. I'm not having it any other way. I will fight like mad for myself and for anyone else who wants their marriage against you and anyone else who wants to take it away. You either join us in that fight, or you join up with the other side and fight them to take it away from us. It really is that simple. Look, I realize that civil unions have to be a stepping stone to the eventual goal for civil rights sometimes. But that's all it should ever be. Civil unions are not marriage. I also realize that your intentions are good. But it doesn't change the fact that your ultimate goal is the same as the enemies, even if you don't realize it. Destroying marriage for everyone else who isn't straight and/or religious. That's what "taking marriage out of the government business" will do. That's what "civil unions for all" will do. And if such a proposal ever actually became serious, I would fight it with everything I had, and I think you and others who would propose such a thing would be surprised to find out just how many others would fight it, too. Marriage is the goal. Not civil unions.

[yardwork]

20. So we're supposed to pretend that the facts aren't there?

Anyone is welcome to sanctify their marriage with a religious ceremony. Nobody is trying to take that away.

We're trying to make sure that no minority is denied the right to marry and the 1,000+ benefits that accrue to married people in the U.S. What's wrong with that?

[sandnsea]

21. Oh for fucks sake, YES

My fucking god. It's like offering the opposition bullets because the honest thing to do is to tell them they exist. This is the way wrong way to go. It's a civil rights issue that extends legal rights to families and couples. Period.

[yardwork]

22. Okaaaay.

[Gwendolyn]

7. Really excellent post! Thank you!

You ----> O8)

[tkmorris]

8. *Applause* Damned right

Superb post. I especially liked this bit: "We have facts and history with which to back ourselves up with, and yet many of you out there keep peddling the Freeper version of reality". Exactly so. I don't want to be on the side of propaganda and bullshit, that's what Republicans are for and they are better at it. I have wondered for some time why no one calls them on this "traditional marriage" crap.

:kick:

[RetiredTrotskyite]

9. Thanks For A Great Post

This is a FABULOUS post! Unfortunately, most Americans don't give a damn about the truth. They just want their little religious fable to run the lives of everyone else. There are honest Christians out there who are fair minded--unfortunately it seems as if the majority are like the sheeple in Rick Warren's Mega(bucks)Church.

[TreasonousBastard]

10. I've been saying for a long time that most people...

on any side of the issue don't have the foggiest idea of the history of "marriage" and define it for their own reasons according to their own biases and agendas.

Here's a pile af articles for anyone interested, most written by actual historians:

http://hnn.us/articles/5216.html

My understanding of marriage thorough the ages has that it's been primarily to establish paternity and bloodlines (with property rights always in mind) and was almost always arranged, often with a dowry. Until recently, that is, when the silly notion of choosing one's own mate gave rise to divorce in over half the marriages and the incredibly complicated legalities involved. It appears that we are not really very good at exercising this presumably basic human right of choosing our own mates.

The primary stated objection to civil unions is that they don't afford all the rights of marriage. OK, so then don't have any rights in marriage, and let all all the rights and legalities be in civil unions.

Since "marriage" seems to be inextricably bound to romantic love and child rearing, civil unions have the advantage of not assuming children or sexual relationships if they are not there and work perfectly well for platonic relationships of friendship and trust. There is that nonromantic love that the Greeks knew about, but the Romans didn't seem very interested in.

[silverojo]

11. Who CARES about the history of marriage?!?

It's the FUTURE we're trying to define! Hell, there was a time when interracial couples couldn't get married, if you're going to go by "history".

The whole point of GLBT marriage rights is to CHANGE marriage to be a more accepting, all-encompassing institution.

[DRoseDARs]

12. Your post is fail, and I'm sure you honestly didn't mean it to be.

The arguments against gay marriage are based on false premises that are not supported by historical fact. If anything, allowing gay marriage isn't CHANGING anything, it's restoring what had been done throughout history. The "traditional marriage" proponents are the ones trying to "change" marriage into something it never truly was.

[ThomCat]

13. My parents were had a mixed marriage.

She was Jewish and he was Catholic, and neither was observant. He wasn't about to get married in a Jewish ceremony, and she didn't want a Catholic one. They got married by a Justice of the Peace in a friend's living room.

No religion was involved in any way, shape or form.

You are absolutely right. There religious nuts who insist that marriage is a sacred religious institution are making shit up. It's civic institution that's recognized and embellished by religion.

Well, they can keep their embellishments to themselves. x(

[Swamp Rat]

14. k&r

[Mnemosyne]

15. One more KnR!

Morning Swampy! :hi:

[HamdenRice]

16. Agree and disagree

But it is a well thought out and well reasoned analysis, even if I disagree with some of what you wrote.

If I had to generalize about what "marriage" (and it's translation into various languages) has meant for most people for most of human history, it would be something like a union of one man and one or more women -- with the emphasis "or more." In almost every culture before early modern Europe, the ideal was one man with several wives. Most men were too poor to achieve that ideal. But the ideal goal was polygamy.

A closely related ideal was one man with one or more wives plus several concubines, who were lower status sexual partners of the pater familias.

Chinese civilization embraced the marriage ideal of one man and several women or one man, one wife and one or more concubines. Again, however, this was an ideal, and most men were too poor to acquire more than one wife. So there was a disjuncture between the ideal (polygamy or monogamy and concubinage) and the most typical reality (monogamy).

So for most of history the ideal of marriage was heterosexual and polygamous. That said, there were always variations on the ideal. John Boswell showed that the medieval Catholic Church had rites of marriage for same sex unions, and at least through the 12th century had no particular opposition to homosexuality.

Pre-colonial southern African societies generally embraced the ideal of polygamous marriage between one man and several women. But for reasons of political expediency, also embraced woman-woman marriage when it was necessary to create an heir in certain circumstances.

So we can agree that the Christian fundamentalist claim that marriage has been one man and one woman for 5,000 years is clearly erroneous.

But I think the problem is that although we can demonstrate that the fundamentalist claim is false, and that world history shows great variety in marriage, the marital "tradition" of the United States is largely descended from Western Europe and particularly England, which for unique historical reasons early on fixated on heterosexual monogamy. It doesn't matter that the African American and Chinese populations can trace their roots to polygamous cultures, or that Catholic Americans belong to a church that blessed gay marriages nearly 1,000 years ago. Culturally, African Americans and Chinese Americans and American Catholics trace their cultural marital roots largely to western Europe and particularly England which colonized the 13 colonies and gave us our legal system.

Also, I think you're wrong when you say that in this English tradition marriage was secular. It wasn't. It was largely religious, and was carried out by the Church. Although there were always secular motives (like property) involved in marriage, the churches had full control of marriage until quite recently. It's really secular marriage (and hence the availability of divorce) that is very recent in Anglo-American cultural history.

The domination of Anglo-American marital culture was finalized by the capitulation of the Mormons on the western frontier to monogamy. It was the defeat of Mormon polygamy that fixed the idea of monogamy in this country, and established heterosexual, monogamous, religiously sanctioned marriage as a kind of uncompromising ideal. The defeat of the Mormons marital culture on the frontier coincided with a parallel effort to wipe out all kinds of other informal frontier sexual arrangements -- from common law marriage, to frontiersmen living with Native American "sqaws," to miscegenation.

That said, it seems to me that all attempts to argue about what marriage in this country should be like going forward should not be based on the past. Marital policy should be based on the needs of society now. It no more matters that early modern England became fixated on a religiously sanctioned monogamous heterosexual model of marriage than it does that Chinese men of the 18th century preferred having a wife and several concubines. Neither of those models address where American society is today.

[DRoseDARs]

17. I addressed polygamy in the previous thread and I know you read it (you posted in that thread)...

...so I won't revisit it in this post. I will concede your point about the 200-year figure, but I must point out I said nothing of English tradition (immaterial I guess) because this isn't a uniquely Anglo debate. However, talking about the past most certainly IS relevant. "Traditional marriage" proponents are basing all of their arguments on false premises about marriage and correctly betting that the general population is too ignorant of the true history of marriage to know any better. "Lie by Omission" is standard practice alongside "Outright Lie" with these people. To NOT discuss history is folly. To wit, pointing out that The Church performed gay marriages itself flies in the face of the modern Roman Catholic Church with their hypocritical participation in the Prop8 fiasco.

[nichomachus]

19. In the last 150 years, the Mormons have redefined marriage three times n/t