Traditional Marriage- Back to Concubines

Same Sex Marriage (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Marriage has always been a bad deal.

Okay that is not what I really want to say. It’s just that marriage is only as good as people and people are always flawed. This is why people that protest homosexual marriage as an attack on traditional marriage is so wrong. Traditional marriage is probably stronger now than ever.

First, however, I want to find out how gay people living together and bringing up children and living as a couple is any worse or better than them getting married. They are striving for and cherishing an institution that many heterosexual do not.  The only people that can destroy a marriage is the people in it.

Traditional marriage gives the children from it a better chance for a good life than children not from one. But is this the institution or the people in that marriage.

Do we want to go back to the tradition of marriage the way it was in the 50s? Many do and many marriages were good. However, as an institution it sucked. Women were not given a lot of say and had fewer rights and opportunities. An abused spouse had little options other than be a punching bag.  Today there are many strong, loving interracial marriages. Not in the 50s. People died because the social norms inhibited them from getting a divorce.

Maybe we should go back to the 1800s. See the further back you go, the younger people got married and if you married someone bad you were stuck with them. The further back you go, the less women were treated like humans and more like property. Many supporters of traditional marriage get a secret thrill from this thought.

I’m sure there were good, loving marriages during Jesus’s time. However, there were many bad things. Arranged marriages and daughters traded away for a dowry.  They had no say in who they married. They were valued so little that a man might have several wives. To me it sounds like the wives were just above the concubines.

Those that look to the Bible to preserve the idea of a traditional marriage are ignoring how much marriage has already changed from when the Bible was written. Changed for the better.  Somehow they believe that the Bible was written in the 1950’s America.