"Love and marriage, love and marriage...go together like a horse and carriage..."

Having just finished (like a month ago) Marriage, a History, by Stephanie Coontz, the song doesn't make so much sense anymore, besides dredging up an unavoidable association of Married, with Children. I was born in 1978, which doesn't excuse my lack of knowledge of history, but I've only ever known a world where equality in marriage is a given. Not so much anymore. I learned that women hadn't been allowed to apply for credit cards without their husbands' permissions before the 1970's, and illegitimate children got inheritance rights only around the same time.

To summarize the book: The reasons for marrying used to be simply for political or economic gain. If you happened to fall in love, that was just icing on the cake. The concept of marrying for love only started taking a foothold in the eighteenth century, and the "traditional" marriage politicians keep lamenting the decline of was pretty much a mid-twentieth century fluke. In the author's opinion, that decline was inevitable because we as a society have made marriage a choice - it is no longer required to be the building block of society.

Think about it: we no longer need to marry in order to have successful lives or satisfying relationships. We have the choice to fulfill economic, social, and political needs outside marriage, so we are free to marry for love. Does it now follow that when the reason for that relationship is gone, we should be free to end that relationship? And in my opinion, it is that ability to end it that makes marriage so powerful in today's society. The people that choose to marry, and to stay married, are making a statement about their level of commitment to each other and to their relationship. The rarer something is, the more valuable it is.

It's because marriage is what it is, a public statement about the commitment between two people, that I believe that the opportunity to marry should be offered to people of the same sex. Sure there would be same-sex couples who wouldn't embody the ideal of marriage, or they would get divorced, or have kids that would have to shuttle back and forth between parents. But there are many, many thousands of same-sex couples who would make ideal parents, and be good role models, and would love their husband or wife with every fiber of their being to the day they died and beyond, and how can we deny them that chance to say to the rest of the world, "This is what we mean to each other, and we can say it with one word: married."

So really, what do we want to make marriage mean? Do we really want to make it about one penis and one vagina, or do we want to make it about love and commitment and compromise and respect and that moment on your deathbed when the last thing you hear is the person you shared that with for the past fifty years of your life cry out, "Goodbye, my love! I love you!" Isn't that what we all want? Why would you want to deny that to anyone?