I saw a link to this article on Daily Kos and it’s just too good not to pass on to the folks at Delaware Liberal.
Sam Schulman at The Weekly Standard has an article about opposition to same sex marriage, but it’s not for the reasons you might think. Basically, same sex marriage is just too much fun, and marriage is not about fun. No joke.
But there is a difference between a married couple and a same-sex couple in a long-term relationship. The difference is not in the nature of their relationship, not in the fact that lovemaking between men and women is, as the Catholics say, open to life. The difference is between the duties that marriage imposes on married people–not rights, but rather onerous obligations–which do not apply to same-sex love.
What are these onerous obligations?
Gay marriage is concerned with “romantic love,” which the author argues is a modern interpretation of marriage. He believes that marriage consists of four duties:
The first is the most important: It is that marriage is concerned above all with female sexuality. The very existence of kinship depends on the protection of females from rape, degradation, and concubinage.
Let me stop right here for a minute. At least he’s being honest about his motives – it’s all about controlling women. Marriage certainly does not protect women from rape, degradation and concubinage. These things happen to married women a lot, even in 2009. In fact, until the 20th century (in the U.S.) marital rape was permitted and is still permitted in many conservative, religious countries.
Second, kinship modifies marriage by imposing a set of rules that determines not only whom one may marry (someone from the right clan or family, of the right age, with proper abilities, wealth, or an adjoining vineyard), but, more important, whom one may not marry. Incest prohibition and other kinship rules that dictate one’s few permissible and many impermissible sweethearts are part of traditional marriage. Gay marriage is blissfully free of these constraints.
Yet another one about control.
Third, marriage changes the nature of sexual relations between a man and a woman. Sexual intercourse between a married couple is licit; sexual intercourse before marriage, or adulterous sex during marriage, is not. Illicit sex is not necessarily a crime, but licit sexual intercourse enjoys a sanction in the moral universe, however we understand it, from which premarital and extramarital copulation is excluded.
I might add here, I don’t think he’s doing it right.
Fourth, marriage defines the end of childhood, sets a boundary between generations within the same family and between families, and establishes the rules in any given society for crossing those boundaries. Marriage usually takes place at the beginning of adulthood; it changes the status of bride and groom from child in the birth family to adult in a new family.
Marry ’em young, before they get too independent! If you don’t get married, how will you know you’re an adult?
So, to summarize, same sex marriage should not be allowed because it’s just too much darn fun. Marriage is not about fun, it’s an awful burden of perfunctory sex and control of women.