Overturning marriage as we've known it
Stephanie Coontz, director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, and author of Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage says, in the New York Times that it's not marriage rights for gays and lesbians that would upend marriage as we know it.Heterosexuals were the upstarts who turned marriage into a voluntary love relationship rather than a mandatory economic and political institution. Heterosexuals were the ones who made procreation voluntary, so that some couples could choose childlessness, and who adopted assisted reproduction so that even couples who could not conceive could become parents. And heterosexuals subverted the long-standing rule that every marriage had to have a husband who played one role in the family and a wife who played a completely different one. Gays and lesbians simply looked at the revolution heterosexuals had wrought and noticed that with its new norms, marriage could work for them, too. ...
posted by Paul Wilczynski @ 1:39 PM
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