Marriage means One Man & One Woman, race no longer an obsticle

Those who believe that this definition was established by or created in accordance with the wishes of some deity will also assume their position to be unassailable. Who can argue with god?

I don’t grant divinity to that concept of marriage when it limits instead of frees, when it excludes instead of includes. To me it’s as outdated, as an accepted definition, as the word “citizen” referring only to white male property owners. In this country, the men who were writing the Constitution were the same guys who got to decide on the definition of citizen. Societies have redefined the concept of citizen many times. Marriage, citizen; they’re not static terms, not divinely inspired terms. They are words that mean different things in different times. Definitions “evolve” along with our society.

Within my lifetime the concept of equal human being has undergone two major revisions. White men have long held a superior position in our society. It was traditional, it was the way the Christian god supposedly preferred it. Then rather suddenly women and Blacks became social equals with the white man. This had never happened with the Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans or native Indians. The white men gave them limited rights but never granted them equality. The white men didn’t hesitate to exploit minorities since they considered them less than equal. They were property like the wife and the maid. Thus far only Blacks and women have nearly completely escaped that limitation.

I have no reason to suppose that a redefinition of the word marriage will threaten society, devalue the already devalued straight Christian definition of marriage or bring on the apocalypse. They can keep right on believing that it means what they think it does and the rest of us can live according to our own beliefs.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 16th, 2008 and is filed under Humanism/Human Rights, abuse by others. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.