Greg Laden's Blog

But all this aside, consider the issue of legally required gay non-marriage.

Marriage is a global phenomenon ... all cultures have marriage. But it varies a lot from culture to culture. So let's focus on western marriage. Western marriage is a tradition that started thousands of years ago. We have glimpses of this tradition in writings of the Babylonians, Sumerian's, and in the Old Testament, for instance. (Let us ignore those crazy Egyptians for the time being.) It is abundantly clear that the main purpose of marriage is to protect collateral interests. Marriage is a social and legal mechanism to protect everybody else from the "happy couple." In other words, when two people get unofficially married, this has a number of effects on others ... in relation to property, probate, and business interests. The institution of marriage was clearly (and I am not making this up) developed primarily to protect those individuals (the government and its tax agencies, members of immediate and extended family, and the business community) from the kinds of shenanigans that can result when this little thing called love goes awry.

The ancients clearly understood that hell hath no fury like a man or woman scorned in the universe of love. Rationality is damned. Sensibility is not secured. And thus, the earliest prohibitions and regulations regarding marriage had to do with probate and community property, and indirectly, taxes.

I don't know how or when gay people did this. But somehow they have tricked the conservative establishment to be "against" them. Imagine finding a way to take all the people that you probably wouldn't like if you met them and make them want to stay away from you? On top of this, and this is the most important point, gay people have tricked the conservative establishment, somehow (...and this could only have happened if either gay people are extra smart or conservative people are extra dumb, or both...) to insist that gay couples could NOT be married. And thus, gay people are exempt from the laws that protect all people, gay and straight and in between, from the effects of love gone bad.

This is like all the people who like to fish convincing the establishment that "all fisher-people do not deserve to pay for permits or licenses." Do you see what I am saying?

The simple truth is that a ban on gay marriage is exactly what gay people were hoping for. It is time to unban gay marriage.

Jimmy James Bettencourt is a political commentator who has been in hiding since a minor tiff with an unnamed federal security agency about 20 years ago. This is his first column since that time. Bettencourt lives in an undisclosed location and communicates with the outside world exclusively with the use of a squadron of well trained homing pigeons.