lmao what the victory is that now i can have healthcare rights and joint tax rights and the ability to see my partner when they're sick in the hospital or dying etc etc etc. that's why it's a victory.
also, here's the transcript of a video regarding how marriage has changed over time.
Hello friends! I've just traded my seven year old daughter for a goat.
You see, I've been living, as we all do, in accordance with traditional marriage rules going back thousands of years. That's why I've been girding my loins to stone any bride who isn't a virgin, going dates on ghosts, and why I was recently fired for kissing my wife in public...just as it's been for thousands of years.
But wait, what was marriage traditionally? What is the real definition of traditional marriage? Well, I'm glad you asked. Let's go back 4,000 years to Mesopotamia where the laws around marriage were close to the laws around slavery. As with slavery,
Hammurabi's code specified how wives should be paid for, who owned the children, and even the terms for getting a refund on your spouse. So that's a nice tradition.
But then the Bible had to come along and redefine everything. Traditional marriage in the Bible is pretty polygamous.
Abraham had three wives (or at least two wives and a slave he had sex with).
Caleb had five.
David had 18.
Moses: Just two. And King Solomon had 1,000 wives (although to be fair, 300 were concubines). The Bible's rules about marriage are very clear:
Rape victims must marry their rapists;
if a woman's husband dies, she has to marry his brother even if he's already married to somebody else;
interracial marriage is strictly forbidden; and
if you marry a woman who turns out to not be a virgin, you have to stone her to death. Really, the whole Old Testament makes marriage seem like it's more trouble than it's worth, which probably explains
the advice in 1 Cor 7:28 which is essentially "dude just never get married."
In ancient Rome, it was considered gross for husbands and wives to be in love. According to the
Stoic Seneca, nothing is more impure than loving one's wife as if she was a mistress.
And Plutarch called it disgraceful when a senator was caught kissing his wife in public. He was removed from office over the scandal.
So that's what traditional marriage looked like...except maybe not, because it kept changing.
Early church officials were pretty opposed to marriage.
St Jerome wrote around the year 400, "We must never be in the bondage of wedlock for as often as I render my wife her due, I cannot pray." Jerome surrounded himself with a circle of women who had taken a vow of virginity and wrote letters to them about what they should wear.
Around 500, Emperor Justinian redefined marriage again with the Corpus Juris. Under those rules, fathers could give away their daughters when they turned seven; Christians couldn't marry Jews; and a husband was allowed to beat his wife, but if he did, he had to pay her afterwards.
So that was traditional marriage...for a while, until it changed again.
Around the 13th century, the Catholic Church decided to get into the wedding business and made marriage a sacrament. Pope Alexander redefined marriage to be an agreement between spouses instead of their parents.
But it still wasn't great for women.
In the 15th century, Bernard of Siena told parishioners to cool it with all the wife beating and they should treat their wives with as much mercy as they would a chicken or a pig. And Martin Luther wrote that he gave his wife a box on the ear whenever she was "saucy."
Ok, so traditional marriage was basically treating women like a punching bag. Actually no, it was much worse.
In 1736, jurist Sir Matthew Hale wrote in [The History of the Pleas of the Crown," that a husband cannot be guilty of raping his wife since a wife had given up herself in this kind to her husband which she cannot retract.
By the 1700s, marriage had been redefined over and over and over. But the one thing it had almost never been was something you do with somebody you love. The advice in the 1700s was to marry someone you could learn to tolerate, thereby anticipating the Kramdens by several centuries.
If you wanted to get married in colonial America, all you had to do is say you were married...as long as you were white. Slaves still had to get permission from their masters. As for women, the very being and legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, wrote William Blackstone. The very being, Blackstone literally thought women ceased to be when they marry...tradition! Former slaves were finally able to marry after the Civil War. And in the late 1800s, South Carolina became the first state to rule that men were no longer allowed to beat their wives. It wasn't until 1920 -- less than a hundred years ago -- that wife beating was outlawed nationwide. These changes were radical redefinitions of traditional marriage, and they were redefinitions for the better. As a society improves and the people in the society improve, those people improve marriage.
It was in the 1920s that people started marrying more for love than for property. The term for it at the time was "love marriage" and people were fascinated by this new idea that you could be in love with the person you marry and you might not be allowed to beat them up. This was all coinciding with suffrage, improved economic mobility, and a stronger society in general, so it was no surprise that marriage grew stronger as well. And yet, there was still resistance. Conservatives at the time said this new definition of marriage would completely destroy the institution by the end of the 20 century.
And there were still more changes coming.
It wasn't until 1967 that the Supreme Court overturned bans on interracial marriage in
Loving v Virginia. At the time, states justified those interracial marriage bans by claiming that they were, you guessed it, "traditional." They also claimed the Bible justified the bans and that interracial marriage was an attack on religious freedom.
One judge even wrote, "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."
In 1971, the Supreme Court overturned laws dictating that when a husband and wife have a legal dispute, males must be preferred to females. The young attorney who argued that case, by the way, was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who may understand better than anyone else on the Supreme Court why it's OK, and sometimes necessary, for marriage to change.
It wasn't until 1979 that states got rid of head and master laws which said that a husband can do whatever he wants with his wife's property. And until 1993 --
1993! -- it was legal for a man to rape his wife in some states. If you want to be technical, outlawing spousal rape was a radical redefinition of marriage going back thousands of years. Because remember, marriage is one man and one woman, enslaved, not in love, polygamous, married to a rapist or your brother in law, or never married, with a seven year old girl, beaten as you would a chicken or a pig whenever she's saucy, barely tolerated with no being or legal existence, and definitely not a different ethnicity. And we didn't even talk about non-Western cultures where marriage has developed in even more definitions.
Look, marriage has been a lot of things. But when you get down to it, it has always been an agreement between people. And as people strive to improve themselves -- to become a more fair and just society -- the marriages that they formed improved with them.
So today, you might only have one spouse. You might even be in love and you might be a union of equals. These are experimental changes to the traditions of marriage. It wasn't long ago that women were treated like property and people of color weren't even considered human. As society learned from those mistakes, people updated the rules of marriage.
Even more recently, LGBTs were thought of as dangerous perverts unable to form real relationships. And now, people are changing marriage again as we realize the fundamentals of same-sex marriage are the same as straight relationships. Letting same-sex couples get married is actually completely traditional. It's part of the tradition of constantly improving the institution of marriage.