9th Circuit Court of Appeals: Still looney after all these years

[lucrezaborgia]

(02-10-2012 12:33 PM)myotch Wrote:  Now, while homosexual sex may have happened as long as interracial coupling has happened, homosexuals historically have not married same-sex partners, as a rule, even in places and times where homosexuality was accepted and even encouraged.

Historically, wives (and children!) in Western societies were property and in times of pederasty, women were viewed vastly different depending on what part of society they were a part of. Demosthenes, a Greek politician, allegedly said: "We have hetaerae for pleasure, pallakae to care for our daily body’s needs and gynaekes to bear us legitimate children and to be faithful guardians of our households.”

Let's not kid ourselves about marriage being some sort of sacred institution that has never changed. A lot of our ideas on marriage are taken right out of Greco-Roman playbooks and even then, they had vastly different ideas on marriage than we do today. Later on, Emperor Augustus tried to make marriage a special institution, but his motivation was the falling birth rate of the nobility, not because he honestly believed it to be sacred.

Historically, men were allowed to fuck anyone else they wanted, even in marriage. Most people in the past didn't even have their marriages recognized by the state or church. There was no need to! It wasn't until the Reformation that churches pushed for marriage to be regulated by the state via the church.

Before the Reformation, it wasn't necessary for a priest or anyone to conduct a marriage ceremony other than the couple. Medieval society allowed for couples to marry themselves as long as they said certain words in certain places. In "A Medieval Family: The Pastons of 15th century England" there is a crisis where the daughter of one of the family members marries a servant in secret. A priest investigates but then finds out that since the couple said the certain words that they were married...much to the horror of the family!

Marriage today, with all the rights that it entails onto the couple, are vastly different than what has been historic. Marriage and what it entails changes all the time. It's not some monolithic institution that never changes.