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My friends list is full of entries consisting of a rainbow-colored bar and the text "marriage is love". It's a link, and if you click on it, it's to someone's journal where we're urged to add it to our own journals to indicate our "support for gay marriage" (by which I assume zie means same-sex marriage).
I strongly believe that people should be allowed to marry whom they want, assuming the other person or people also want to marry them. (The entry linked to specifically says "two people who love each other".)
But marriage isn't love. Marriage is, depending on your viewpoint, one or more of the following: a legal contract; a legal status recognized by the government, which affects taxation and inheritance; an arrangement between the people who choose to marry; or a sacrament between people and their gods.
It's not love. It's not even romantic and/or sexual love. [I'll assume that the slogan is intended to mean "eros", and we'll skip the bits about parental love, love of friends, and love of music, chocolate, and sushi.] If marriage were love, there'd be no need to be agitating for the right to have same-sex marriages recognized, because either they'd be automatic—you love each other and "poof!" you're married, no need for license, clergy, or ceremony—or they wouldn't be needed, because people wouldn't love until they married, and nobody would feel deprived because they couldn't marry someone of the same gender.
It doesn't work that way. Not everyone marries for love, of course, even in the modern West. But those who do, fall in love before they stand up and say "I do." Some, but not all, of the people who marry for reasons other than love come to love the people they're married to.
Marriage is not a condition for love, nor is it a guarantee that love will last.
I do appreciate the support and the good wishes, especially from my heterosexual friends. But there are better slogans out there. I've tossed one into the box below, if you want to see what's behind the link.
I strongly believe that people should be allowed to marry whom they want, assuming the other person or people also want to marry them. (The entry linked to specifically says "two people who love each other".)
But marriage isn't love. Marriage is, depending on your viewpoint, one or more of the following: a legal contract; a legal status recognized by the government, which affects taxation and inheritance; an arrangement between the people who choose to marry; or a sacrament between people and their gods.
It's not love. It's not even romantic and/or sexual love. [I'll assume that the slogan is intended to mean "eros", and we'll skip the bits about parental love, love of friends, and love of music, chocolate, and sushi.] If marriage were love, there'd be no need to be agitating for the right to have same-sex marriages recognized, because either they'd be automatic—you love each other and "poof!" you're married, no need for license, clergy, or ceremony—or they wouldn't be needed, because people wouldn't love until they married, and nobody would feel deprived because they couldn't marry someone of the same gender.
It doesn't work that way. Not everyone marries for love, of course, even in the modern West. But those who do, fall in love before they stand up and say "I do." Some, but not all, of the people who marry for reasons other than love come to love the people they're married to.
Marriage is not a condition for love, nor is it a guarantee that love will last.
I do appreciate the support and the good wishes, especially from my heterosexual friends. But there are better slogans out there. I've tossed one into the box below, if you want to see what's behind the link.
| Marriage is a human right. | |||||
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