wmam said:
Most people believe it as what we see today with all the pomp and circumstance. Before there were magistrates or judges, ship captains, preachers and so forth to preform such rituals, what was marriage? Did man and woman just say........"Hey, we're married!"?
Actually, I think that one of the more proper ways to define marriage is the tying together of families. Interfamilial ties has always been one of the building blocks of primitive societies, though this is, while not quite obsolete, no longer essential for society's function; however, I think that even modern societies can benefit from the tying together of families by this route. However, it isn't entirely necessary, in my opinion, for partners to involve their inlaws in order to be properly married because what we think of as marriage is, essentially, two unrelated individuals becoming adoptive members of each other's families. However, if neither has any family to speak of, such as in the case of two men who were alienated and disinherited by their worthless relatives because of their sexual orientation or people of the opposite sex who can no longer properly refer to their relatives as family, two people can become more family to one another than blood relatives.
In essence, I am saying that marriage is one of a few sorts of relationship that make otherwise unrelated people family to one another. Another example of such a bond is adoption, which is as at least as old and important as marriage and would have had to occur frequently in societies in which life could be short. In fact, the function of marriage as tying families together would have worked as a network of related individuals who could become adoptive parents in the case of poverty or the death of one or both parents.
While my definitions do not provide as strong an argument for homosexual marriage as for heterosexual marriage, at least in primitive societies, homosexuals who have established interfamilial ties could potentially operate as adoptive parents, including such cases as children born without a then nearly required partner. If we were to revive the notion of building, through marriage, interfamilial networks, teen or merely unaffordable pregnancy would not be such a terrible problem as to necessitate abortions (save it for another thread, please). The participation of homosexuals would be not only a boon, but, once their place in families was established, we would wonder how we dealt with extramarital children without being able to call upon the assistance of relatives who do not already have their own children to raise.
The correlation between the hispanic community's tendency toward widespread interfamilial ties and their usual support of same-sex marriage leads me to believe that, if the gay rights movement were to work toward reviving the idea of keeping strong familial ties, the marginalization of homosexual men and women would come to a swift end, and the boon that homosexual couples could become to their extended
families would lead them to becoming a centrally important part of society, and I don't think that same-sex marriage is likely to be appreciated without this. This has only extended relevance to the topic of the thread, of course, so I'd appreciate any further discussion of it in this thread being brief and unremarkable.
In conclusion, all I think one really needs in order to say that you and your mate are married is to behave as part of one another's families. The more involved you are in each other's extended families, the more married you are, and I think that it is just silly to behave as if a state "license" contributes anything other than a convenient package of legal arrangements and outright stupid to behave as if a church wedding does anything other than provide a ceremonial formalization to a bond that is likely to have existed already.
Oh ....... and as a disclaimer......... I know that there will be some that just have to attack me for saying certain things because they are either so PC that it would make you puke or they just don't have a life.
Or happen to be homosexual, like myself. I'm as politically incorrect as they come, but I think that it is my place to take your support for marginalizing people such as myself as a personal and very intended insult. For the sake of civility, I will refrain from responding to it as such, but know that your words on the subject will not be liked or appreciated by people such as myself and that you can contribute only resentment by commenting on it further in this thread.
How you can defend such a petty and worthless definition of marriage mystifies me; it's anti-family to trivialize marriage so deliberately and completely, and I am left wondering how you treat your own "marriage."
