Monday, March 01, 2004
A History of Marriage
Craig's post from Sunday is really the best thing on this blog so far, so don't miss it, but since I am so preoccupied by the marriage debate these days and its sidecar of conservative hate and hypocrisy (CH&H for short?) I must mention it some more.
A Brief History of Marriage in America This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow
and
from salon.com's War Room '04 http://salon.com/politics/war_room/index.html/index.html we have:
From miscegenation to gay marriage
The New York Times columnist Bob Herbert looks at the similarities between arguments once made against interracial marriages and those being made today against same-sex marriage. It's time to get a grip, he says.
"One of the particularly absurd arguments against allowing gays to marry is that such a lapse would send us skidding down that dreadful slope to legalization of incest, polygamy, bestiality and so forth."
"That line of thinking reminded me of a passage in Randall Kennedy's book, 'Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption.' In a 19th-century miscegenation case, a black man in Tennessee was charged with criminal fornication. The man's defense was that the woman, who was white, was his wife. They had been married lawfully in another state. 'That argument,' wrote Mr. Kennedy, 'was rejected by the Tennessee Supreme Court, which maintained that its acceptance would necessarily lead to condoning `the father living with his daughter ... in lawful wedlock,'" and "the Turk being allowed to 'establish his harem at the doors of the capitol.'"
"We have a tendency to prohibit things simply because we don't like them. Because they don't appeal to us. They don't feel quite right. Or we've never done it that way before. And when things don't feel quite right, when they make us uncomfortable, we often leap, with no basis in fact, to the conclusion that they are unnatural, immoral, degenerate, against the will of God. And then the persecution begins."
LEAPING? With no basis in fact? I don't believe it. And then it says, "And then the persecution begins"? Actually, if it isn't that severe, that obscene, that explicit, it just allows people to return home to their boring ass lives and their boring ass 401k statements (if they have a job, that is) believing that their families are now safe from the deviants that surround them. I don't have a lot of gay friends, but I do have one very good one and I hate to see him hurt. I won't stand by while assholes like Bush and Robertson and Fallwell obliviously throw stones.
Craig's post from Sunday is really the best thing on this blog so far, so don't miss it, but since I am so preoccupied by the marriage debate these days and its sidecar of conservative hate and hypocrisy (CH&H for short?) I must mention it some more.
A Brief History of Marriage in America This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow
and
from salon.com's War Room '04 http://salon.com/politics/war_room/index.html/index.html we have:
From miscegenation to gay marriage
The New York Times columnist Bob Herbert looks at the similarities between arguments once made against interracial marriages and those being made today against same-sex marriage. It's time to get a grip, he says.
"One of the particularly absurd arguments against allowing gays to marry is that such a lapse would send us skidding down that dreadful slope to legalization of incest, polygamy, bestiality and so forth."
"That line of thinking reminded me of a passage in Randall Kennedy's book, 'Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption.' In a 19th-century miscegenation case, a black man in Tennessee was charged with criminal fornication. The man's defense was that the woman, who was white, was his wife. They had been married lawfully in another state. 'That argument,' wrote Mr. Kennedy, 'was rejected by the Tennessee Supreme Court, which maintained that its acceptance would necessarily lead to condoning `the father living with his daughter ... in lawful wedlock,'" and "the Turk being allowed to 'establish his harem at the doors of the capitol.'"
"We have a tendency to prohibit things simply because we don't like them. Because they don't appeal to us. They don't feel quite right. Or we've never done it that way before. And when things don't feel quite right, when they make us uncomfortable, we often leap, with no basis in fact, to the conclusion that they are unnatural, immoral, degenerate, against the will of God. And then the persecution begins."
LEAPING? With no basis in fact? I don't believe it. And then it says, "And then the persecution begins"? Actually, if it isn't that severe, that obscene, that explicit, it just allows people to return home to their boring ass lives and their boring ass 401k statements (if they have a job, that is) believing that their families are now safe from the deviants that surround them. I don't have a lot of gay friends, but I do have one very good one and I hate to see him hurt. I won't stand by while assholes like Bush and Robertson and Fallwell obliviously throw stones.
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