Posted on 03/01/2004 12:46:27 PM PST by george wythe
Marriage, says BYU law professor Richard G. Wilkins, "has always been about one sexual relationship -- the union of a man and a woman." Of course, this would be news to Brigham Young, who said "I do" to some 56 women.
Consider the furor and outrage Mormon polygamy evoked in the 19th century.
The laws sanctifying the one-man, one-woman model of marriage had forced millions upon millions of women "to become a prey to man's lust and a consuming sacrifice upon the altar of illicit passion," the Deseret Evening News thundered in December 1885.
"One man to one woman only," the newspaper proclaimed, was "the exception in Christendom as well as heathendom" and was "one impracticable standard."
The News argued that polygamous marriage "prevails all over the world, and those who pretend to the contrary are very simple or very untruthful." That's a debatable point, even though it appeared in the pages of what The Salt Lake Tribune used to call "the font of truth," but marriage has been a flexible institution throughout history.
Much of the current debate over same-sex marriage reflects a relatively new tradition of fear and hatred of homosexuals in American culture. The concept of homosexuality only appeared in European medical literature in the late 1860s and reached the United States by 1892, but it was the sodomy trial of British poet Oscar Wilde in 1895 that introduced the concept to popular culture.
The "queer eye" was nothing new, however, even in Utah.
When Wilde (popularly known as the "Sunflower Apostle") visited Salt Lake City in 1882, he complimented LDS Church President John Taylor for his fine aesthetic judgment, and the Deseret News reported that young men adorned with enormous sunflowers filled the front row of his crowded lecture on interior decorating. (None of this was a stereotype in 1882.)
The Victorians turned it into an identity, but same-sex sex has been going on since time immemorial and was considered entirely natural in ancient Greece and Rome.
First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill didn't actually say "the only traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, sodomy and the lash," but he may have wished he had.
Rather than treat gay people as social outcasts, many cultures integrated men and women with transsexual natures into their societies. When French Jesuit missionaries found men among the Iroquois who dressed and acted as women, they called them berdache, incorrectly equating them with male prostitutes.
Many scholars now prefer the term "two-spirit." American Indian languages had a variety of terms -- winkte (Lakota), nadleeh (Navajo), hemanah (Cheyenne), kwid-(Tewa), tainna wa'ippe (Shoshone), dubuds (Paiute) and lhamana (Zuni) to identify "a person who has both male and female spirits within," notes Lakota scholar Beatrice Medicine.
Anthropologists such as Elsie Parsons long ago observed that two-spirited men often married other men. Even earlier, William Clark told the first editor of the Lewis and Clark journals that Hidatsa boys who showed "girlish inclinations" were raised as women and married men.
Somehow, male-female marriage managed to survive in these cultures. Marriage even survived polygamy, which had extended the "blessings of matrimony and of home instead of discarding or destroying them," the Deseret News argued. "It surrounds the domestic relations with safeguards and a sacredness that are stronger and more enduring than any others."
Restricting such a good thing seems selfish.
Historian Will Bagley is happily married.
We are in 100% agreement on this. Too bad the majority of people don't care.
Last weekend, I had dinner with several married couples. When the gay marriage issue popped up, everyone was against it. Nevertheless, the majority were supportive of allowing gay unions and against amending the US Constitution.
So unless we change the makeup of the SCOTUS, I don't see any groundswell for amending the US Constitution every time the SCOTUS hands down an activist ruling.
The issue at hand is whether marriage as a social and legal construct is based on love or on rights of succession.
If it be love, then it is about recreation, not procreation and should be redefined prior to being changed.
Personally, I don't care where anybody places his turgid member as long as it is tasteful.
If you find an article supporting your recollection, please post it.
We're here to learn, so different viewpoints are not only welcome but necessary.
Questioning the media is good.
In my opinion, I have seen way to much suffering from homosexuals to believe it's a choice. Why would someone choose a homosexual lifestyle, knowing the incredible array of problems facing them
This is a very tired argument, used by the homosexual activists themselves.
Just because you have sympathy for homosexuals you have known doesn't make your opinion valid.
Just check the Categorical Index of Links in post #24 and read about what experts who have studied homosexuality without pro-homosexual bias have found.
Bestiality has been going on since the beginning.
Pedophilia has been going on since the beginning.
Rape has been going on since the beginning.
Murder has been going on since the beginning.
Just because people have chosen to be perverted and hateful since the beginning doesn't mean we should legalize it.
Perhaps, but insoding we might've unwittingly stumbled onto the original root of another well used word in the english lexicon.
..."twinke."
There simply must be a solution to the dictatorial courts. We're not supposed to be a country ruled by czars and committees called "courts". We're a republic, and the citizens must activly fight to maintain our sovereinty.
The only solution is to quickly start impeaching judges. And if legislators won't do the job, then we must make that fact an issue of future elections and get someone in the State Legislatures and Congress who will take back control of the country to the elected bodies.
"And this is the same as same-sex marriages", the News continued. /sarcasm
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