Entries associated with the tag "Marriage":

• When bad theology meets bad biology. PZ Myers retells the story: "A woman donates one of her kidneys to another woman in need. Later, the recipient leaves the Christian faith. Now the donor wants her organ back. 'Smith [the donor] was aghast when she heard of the conversion, and she quickly wrote a letter asking Felks [the recipient] to reconvert to Christianity or return the organ, saying it was donated under false pretenses. "I feel helpless," she says. "Part of my body, my DNA, is stuck inside a person who's going to hell."'" Myers probes the layers of idiocy here, and in the process reveals the denominational choices of several of his own organs.  [UPDATE AND APOLOGY:  THIS STORY IS BOGUS.  The fact that PZ and many others were also taken in doesn't make me feel any better.]

• "Appearances are not deceptive; it only seems as if they are." Considered by John Quiggin at Crooked Timber.

• A female science prof is married but doesn't wear a ring -- and many people in her life object. "I keep thinking that eventually some of my relatives might change their mind about the significance of a wedding ring, as my husband and I remain happily married and my ring-wearing siblings/cousins and others divorce, but it hasn't happened yet."

• What is the most absurd thing you believe? Some answers here and a few more here. Not sure I'd want to have lunch with these people, though. (Note: Not quite the same as the book What We Believe But Cannot Prove.)

• What would A. A. Dornfeld think?  The Beachwood Reporter isn't alone in being fed up with the Sun-Times's local-journalism-as-stenography these days. It is alone in finding the best put-down: "This is Chicago: If your mother says she loves you, you ask a few officials if it's true and then print it."

Fun: Feministing finds the most baffling abstinence poster yet.

Not so much fun:  The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, and Morals tries to put the opposition to gay marriage on a scholarly, non-bigoted, non-religious basis. Co-editors Robert George of Princeton and Jean Bethke Elshtain of the University of Chicago present eleven papers delivered at a Princeton conference in December 2004.

Admiring reviewer Glenn Stanton writes in Christianity Today:

"We are moving from this natural, universal model to a greater embrace of what I call 'disembodied procreation' in same-sex unions, where sperm and egg meet only in a Petri dish and foreplay is a legal contract.  [In one article] Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, considers family changes during the past 40 years. The pill and legalized abortion, says Wilcox, have dramatically separated sex, procreation, and the larger family unit. Each now stands on its own. Undermining the need for marriage and family, these medical 'advances' have disproportionately hurt the poor."

The people making these arguments--whether they use sectarian language or not--are, technically, not bigots.  They're not just out to stigmatize gay people. They want to see a world without contraception, so that the version of marriage they grew up with can be forever frozen in amber. 

UCLA law prof and major blogger Eugene Volokh pretty well reams out the argument against gay marriage based on so-called "natural law." Money quote, if you will, but the whole thing is well worth your time:

"God seems to have designed the human body in such a way that the penis, the mouth, and the anus can be used in lots of different ways; why should we infer, simply from the fact that one use (penile-vaginal sex leading to reproduction) is so important, that it's the One True Proper Use of genitalia? Likewise, God has designed humans in a way that allows some of them to be attracted to members of their own sex; even if you believe that this preference isn't innate, but is caused in part by upbringing or by personal choice, it's clear that the possibility of this preference is indeed present in humans (and, as I said, other animals). This too casts doubt on the theory that penises or the sexual act have One True Inherent Purpose or One True Inherent Mode Of Employment."

(Hat tip to Ed Brayton, whose site also has some good comments.) 

“It is probably not a coincidence that Christianity, and Christian notions of marriage, evolved in a largely peasant population,” writes Dustin Wax over at the group anthropology blog Savage Minds, which (from the point of view of us amateurs) provokes either fascination or a short nap.

“Marriage in such societies is generally not, as today’s formulation has it, a ‘relationship between a man and a woman,’ but a relationship between extended families in which the relationship between the particular people married is secondary at best--and often simply irrelevant. Thus, in many societies (such as the Biblical Hebrews), the practice of levirate (in which a man marries his brother’s widow) or sororate (in which a woman marries her sister’s widower) allow the kinship bond between families to remain unbroken regardless of the death of a spouse--structurally equivalent siblings become interchangeable in marriage because their function is identical.”

Hence arranged marriage, too, because the real purpose of marriage is to add to “social networks through which labor and trading can be arranged . . . .  A large extended family might be allied by marriage with a dozen or more other extended families.”  (Hmm, says I. That might be why, as recently as the early 1800s, I find three or four children in a single family of my ancestors marrying into the same other family.)

"It’s easy to see, then," Wax continues, "why marriage is so important in this kind of society. What is difficult is to understand what function it retains in a society such as ours (‘we’ here being post-industrial Westerners, especially urban Westerners) where labor and trade are organized through market, not kin, relations. Under the logic of industrial capitalism, marriage is not only unnecessary in many ways but can even be counter-productive.” All you veterans of commuter marraiges raise your hands. (There’s more, and the comments are good too.)

One more reason why you might expect the religious-minded to think twice before embracing the free market and all its works.