Homosexual Agenda Ping - here's the last few paragraphs for you.
The author certainly sounds very academic and all, and is basically holding to a social Darwinist viewpoint - that there is no unchanging platform of - well, of ANYTHING. Everything changes with time, that is good, so let's speed it up.
Or because women don't wear corsets anymore and seldom have hired help, therefore marriage shouldn't be restricted to one man and one woman.
Make sense to you? (Scratches head....)
Let me know if anyone wants on/off this pinglist.
"Culture also changed to blur the distinction between what a man and a woman owed in marriage. The expectation that women leave the labor force permanently at marriage has vanished, as has the idea that a man becomes a "good father" merely by dropping his paycheck on the table. Fathers who are engaged with their wives in the day-to-day work of parenting and mothers who work are the norm rather than the exception.
Even though men obviously do not do half the housework or women provide half the income, we have institutionalized a third type of marriage. This partner marriage allows couples to choose the gender-segregated roles of provider marriage if they desire, but employers or states no longer can enforce such assumptions on all couples.
Since there are no legally specified differences in what men and women must contribute to a marriage or what they can hope to get from it, there is no legal need for partner marriage to be between a man and a woman. The assertion that a legal marriage needs one of each opens a door to laws that would again give different rights to husbands than wives.
In the 1980s fundamentalist groups helped to defeat a federal Equal Rights Amendment that would have blocked such a rollback. The "defense of marriage" for which such organizations are calling today is the same struggle but with a different face.
It's shortsighted to assume that conservatives will stop "defending" marriage if they manage to keep two men or two women from marrying. Their next logical step would be to spell out again in state and federal law how the differences between men and women should be "defended" in heterosexual marriages. That is a threat to the marriages that most Americans have and value today.
Marriages are different than they once were, and that is not a bad thing at all. "
"Or because women don't wear corsets anymore and seldom have hired help, therefore marriage shouldn't be restricted to one man and one woman.
Make sense to you? (Scratches head....) "
I think the author was saying gender has become less relevant in modern of marriage. We have the freedom to change 'roles'. You have 'house husbands'. You have women who are the breadwinners of the house, etc. In essence he's saying that the roles of husband/wife with the man and woman in a marriage have become negotiable and flexible. Therefore, since either man or woman can assume the role of 'wife' or 'husband', why not have two men or two women assuming these roles? I think this might make perfect sense....if this were the theater. (After all, men played to roles of women during Shakespeare's time.)