Marriage - An institution that is thousands of years old (For EVERYBODY)

[ck4829]

This is something that is interesting in my opinion. Right wingers tell us that we're trying to mess with marriage, something that is thousands of years old, right?

Well, THEY might be the ones who are trying to destroy it by making it not for everyone.

Funny how they don't want to talk about this little fact:

"There is evidence that same sex unions have occurred since the beginning of recorded history in Egypt, China, Greece, Rome and Japan. Famous lovers include the Egyptian couple Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum and the Greek couple Harmodius and Aristogiton. The first recorded use of the word "marriage" for same-sex couples occurs during the Roman Empire. A number of marriages are recorded to have taken place during this period."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-gay_violence#The_Origins_of_Persecution_of_LGBT_People
Suetonius Life of Nero 28-29; Martial Epigrams 1.24, 12.42; etc.

[grannie4peace]

1. that's far out!!!:):): )

[SIMPLYB1980]

2. The fundies will say that is why Rome fell, Oh the decadence.

They don't realize that History records that Rome fell because of many reasons, but most agree it was Corruption, on the scale that we see from republicans today, that did in the Roman Empire.

[Ian David]

3. You find all kinds of neat things if you google "The History of Marriage"

History of Marriage
A look at the history of marriage and how marriage has evolved through the years.
http://marriage.about.com/cs/generalhistory/a/marriagehistory.htm

The history of marriage
Are you familiar with the history of marriage and customs and laws. Marriage customs reflect public need and opinion.
www.essortment.com/all/historyofmarri_rimr.htm

History of Marriage in Western Civilization
When we look at the marriage customs of our ancestors, we discover several striking facts. For example, for the most of Western history, marriage was not a ...
www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/ATLAS_EN/html/history_of_marriage_in_western.html



Also:

What Gay Marriage Teaches About the History of Marriage
By Hendrik Hartog

Mr. Hartog is Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University and the author of MAN AND WIFE IN AMERICA: A HISTORY.

Four years ago I published a book in which the long legal history of marriage was structured around a discontinuity. The premise was that the marital ways characteristic of the nineteenth- and early twentieth- century United States belonged to an irretrieveable past.


<snip>

What I do know is that at all times over the past two centuries struggles over marriage have occurred on the terrain of American federalism. Again, to return to my confessional theme, four years ago I described that terrain as belonging to the past. In the 1940s the United States Supreme Court fully applied the Federal Constitution's Full Faith and Credit clause to divorces and remarriages carried out under one state's laws that violated the terms of another state's laws. Until then it was possible to be legally divorced and remarried in one state, and a criminal bigamist in another. Thereafter, conservative divorce regimes could no longer sustain their control over any of their citizens who had the wherewithal to travel to a more liberal jurisdiction -- like a Nevada or a Virgin Islands. And then in the 1960s and 1970s, the Court applied the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and an emerging conception of the right to privacy to numbers of state rules that shaped or impinged on marriage: in the Loving decision on miscegenation law, later in decisions on child support, on unmarried paternal rights, on child custody, and on the right to marry. And even with regard to subjects on which the Supreme Court did not rule, both state courts and state legislatures began to act as if the Federal equality and privacy provisions -- or their state constitutional equivalents -- applied. Nearly every state enacted no-fault divorce laws (or their equivalents) over the 1970s and 1980s and, with greater variations, some form of marital property reform. By the early 1990s it looked as if the terrain of American marriage had become largely uniform. It no longer mattered where you lived. Marriages anywhere were about the same as marriages everywhere in the United States.

Today, however, because of gay marriage, the questions and approaches that characterized marriage law over the past two centuries have regained their salience. Once again we confront all the complexities of a state-centered law of marriage, filled with local variations and differences. We have not yet created a new equivalent to the peculiar world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when someone could be legally divorced and remarried in one state and a criminal bigamist in another. And because of the U.S. Supreme Court's Lawrence decision last term, that situated gay sodomy within the constitutional protections of the right to privacy, it seems unlikely that those who marry legally in one jurisdiction, say Massachusetts or the Netherlands, will face criminal penalties in another, say Utah or Alabama (though religious and secular officials who officiate in gay marriages in states that will not allow them will continue to run serious legal risks). But in other ways, the whole technical discourse of the conflict of laws, that required judges in one state to evaluate the portability and relevance of marital practices in another state, has regained the significance I thought it had permanently lost.

A coda: "marriage" is just a word, and today the legal significance of the word -- as housing or describing the place of legal sexual expression, shared property, and, most importantly, core obligations for the care of children -- is much reduced from what it once was. In my book I invested in a vision of discontinuity because I believed that the bright line that once existed between marriage and non-marriage had grown fuzzy and indistinct in the late twentieth century. I still believe I am right about that change. In many ways marriage today is just a word for a particular contractual relationship. Yet, what gay marriage teaches is the obvious historical lesson about words like "marriage." What matters is what matters. And marriage is a word that today, as in the past, matters politically, legally, culturally, and for individuals as they construct meaning in their lives.

More:
http://hnn.us/articles/4400.html


Also:


Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (Paperback)
by Stephanie Coontz (Author)
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51PS3142Q4L._SL500_BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-dp-500-arrow,TopRight,45,-64_OU01_AA240_SH20_.jpg
# Paperback: 448 pages
# Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (February 28, 2006)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 014303667X
# ISBN-13: 978-0143036678

Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:

In this surprising landmark book, family historian Stephanie Coontz explodes every cherished assumption about marriage, starting with the notion of the traditional marriage. Forget Ozzie and Harriet. Coontz reveals that through most of history, marriage was not a relationship based on mutual love between a breadwinner husband and an at-home wife but an institution devoted to acquiring in-laws and improving the family labor force. How did marriage evolve from the loveless, arranged unions that have endured from the dawn of civilization into the sexualized, volatile relationships of today? Coontz argues that the Victorians, with their radical emphasis on marital intimacy and celebration of the individual, simultaneously made marriage more satisfying and paved the way for alternative lifestyles to thrive: divorce, gay marriage, living together, single parenting. The diminished role of heterosexual marriage in our society is not an aberration, insists Coontz, but the consequence of centuries of irrevocable social change. Marriage, A History is an engaging narrative of astonishing scope and depth that will stand as a milestone of social history and provoke debate for years to come.

More:
http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=014303667X