Abstract

Wedding Vows

Marriage is about making a beloved alien one of mine, flesh of my flesh. Marriage means taking someone unrelated by blood into our family, for good. Socialists and feminists through the centuries have had simply terrific reasons for wanting to get rid of marriage. All over the world, families are violent and abusive--at least an extraordinary percentage of them are--and family status is used as permission for violence. Throughout history, family has been the linchpin of a pervasive social view that encourages favoring one's own bloodline, tribe, race and nation above all others. Beginning with wage income for women and picking up steam with accessible contraception and abortion, more equitable divorce laws and daycare, the family has gotten freer. Family is at once more open to definition by individuals and, except economically, better supported by the government. For both gays and straights, marriage is a bold assertion of vision against the odds, to try to stay together, to attempt to deal with all the difficulties that people in relationships confront, because of a subjective bond that two people feel. Why make same-sex marriage legal? I want to have an unquestioned right, in all fifty states, to visit my partner in the hospital, to make medical decisions if she is incapacitated, to have equal rights to raise our children, if we have any and then split up.