It just occurred to me. What’s to prevent people who aren’t homosexuals from getting married, once all the legal issues are sorted out?
After all, marriage has always been about property, obligations and privileges, about defining and guaranteeing rights for the parties involved, their families, and the children. Until recently, love had nothing to do with it. And even sex isn’t always all that important, particularly among the aged, or those married for a long time…
Marriage was strictly a business arrangement, conducted between families, often without the bride and groom even being consulted. Its about who gets the farm when the old man croaks. Today, all sorts of quasi-matrimonial relationships have evolved, such as divorces, separations, sharing dependents, alimonies, child-support, common law arrangements, shacking up, open marriages, marriages of convenience, look at the PM of France. Zoot alors!
In modern societies, this is even more true, sex and love are available easily without marriage, and women have learned quickly that they can’t trust men or society to look after their interests. Marriage is about taxes, insurance, visitation rights, disposal of property, and of course, children. None of those factors require the participants to be of different gender.
I remember reading a science fiction novel once (I believe it might have been a Heinlein) where not only marriages, but families themselves were contracts between aquaintances, negotiated for mutual benefit, and under no emotional or religious sanction, although genuine attachments, sexual and otherwise, often evolved.
In a society where government (or business)has taken over (usually poorly) most of the social and cultural functions of family, it is to be expected that people will get married for reasons other than looooooove.
Today, what’s to stop two straight, perfectly conventional and heterosexual individuals, of same or different sex, from getting married for tax and insurance or other business reasons, and then living apart with their boy or girl friends.
And how about other, even more creative, combinations?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Aej9wmoQ7M&feature=kp