One Too Many Action Movies
Governor Schwarzenegger has publicly stated his fear that the gay marriages currently being performed in San Francisco will lead to riots, injuries and even death. Who is he kidding? When exactly does he expect this violence to break out? It's been almost two weeks since the first marriage was performed. No violence so far. Are people still trying to decide if they should riot? Does he think that gay bashing could increase with so many homosexuals standing in line around City Hall making a target rich environment for all would be vigilantes? For starters, gay bashing is an act of cowardice. Do you really think a coward is going to attack a few hundred homosexuals at once? And besides, we are talking about San Francisco, one of the most liberal cities in the country. I would expect most of the city's denizens are applauding the mayor's actions, most of the rest don't care one way or another and only a tiny few have issues. Those tiny few are generally religious conservatives who usually have issues with violence as well. In other words, not the kind of folk generally given to starting a riot.
How much more blatantly stupid and incendiary can you get? Is Arnie expressing a fear or a hope? Is he trying to give people ideas? The idea that riots will break out in San Francisco over gay marriage is so ludicrous and so far removed from reality one wonders which of his movies Arnie is living in.
Elephants in the Parlor
I really wish I knew who started the myth that marriage is about family unity and raising children. Historically marriage has been about one thing: preservation of wealth and power. Whether your wealth was a large herd of sheep, or vast tracts of land or your currency was power in the form of dukedoms and kingdoms or whatnot, marriage was about keeping the wealth in the family. Period.
Marriage started as a social contract between two fathers. The woman was basically sold as a commodity for raising heirs. People may think that was a barbaric practice in primitive cultures, but it continued until the end of the feudal era in the 1700 and 1800s. It wasn't unheard of that if a woman failed to produce heirs, whether because she was infertile or she kept birthing females, it was considered a breach of contract. (Never mind that we now know that it's the man's fault if there are no male heirs.) Oh, we'll just skip over the part that only men were allowed to be heirs.
In Rome marriage was an institution only for Roman citizens. Slaves were not allowed to marry. What was the point? They owned nothing. There was no need for any legal description of the passing of property/power/money from one family to another. Children were merely the instruments of that passage. How many wealthy parents do you know who really raise their children? Nannies and wet nurses are as old as marriage itself.
Why is it do you suppose that marriage contributed "to the stability and health of society?" It was because until very recently either you had wealth and power or you didn't. There was no way to move up the social ladder. The only way to for men to have money was to inherit it from their fathers. The only way for women to be "taken care of" was to be married of to the right men. It defined a structure to society that was hard to dispute. That is until the French Revolution when the have-nots got really upset with the haves. We are all familiar enough with history to know how stable French society was during that era, an instability that had nothing to do with the "break down of traditional family values."
Society has changed. Why do people think marriage isn't going to change with it? With the industrial revolution men had greater earning power. Sons were no longer tied to daddy's money (and thus his rules/lifestyle/obligations). Boys born to peasants had at least a chance of making it on their own. Wealth spread. But perhaps the largest change in society didn't come until the 1950s and 1960s when women starting having their own earning power. Suddenly they didn't have to rely on their husbands for their livelihood. If the man was a bastard she could leave and make it on her own. If he wasn't giving her love, she didn't need his money. Women were no longer trapped in loveless and sometimes abusive marriages because they had nowhere else to go.
As for children, don't even try to tell me that children are better off with two heterosexuals who don't love each other (or even hate each other) than with two homosexuals who love and care for each other. All the studies about two parent homes have absolutely nothing to do with the sexual orientation of the parents. They are, without exception, about children living in broken homes and single parents. I can also speak from experience when I say that even divorce doesn't have to be devastating for the children if the parents are mature enough to put their own sense of betrayal and petty justice aside to care for and nurture their children. That isn't often the case.
Society has changed. Pull your head out of ... the sand and deal with it. We need to alter our expectations and beliefs about marriage accordingly. It used to be that once you got into marriage it was difficult to get out. That's not the case anymore. Is that answer to make it difficult to get out of marriage again? No. We should be teaching our children what it means to love. We should be teaching our children about sacrifice and compromise. We should be teaching our children to recognize a love that is strong enough to weather the hard times that will most certainly come, because none of the reasons that people used to "stay together anyway" exist anymore.
Yes, marriage is simply a personal commitment between two people. That's not a liberal construct, that's just the way it is. If you ask me, that's the way it should be.