Monday, August 27, 2007

The More Things Change...

Hats off to an old high school classmate, Allan Tulchin, whose relatively arcane academic article on the history of Medieval "marriage-like" legal arrangements has ridden a wave of Perfect Storm proportions into a blog feeding frenzy and full-scale national media phenomenon.

I'm always skeptical of bringing difficult-to-interpret historical evidence to bear in any contemporary public policy debate. That said, the idea that the marriage arrangement as we know it today has survived unchanged through the ages has always struck me as being ripe for debunking. And articles like Allan's help popularize the ways in which marriage and its related arrangements have evolved over time.

The answer to the current debate, on the other hand, has always struck me as relatively simple. (If you believe in the separation of church and state, that is.) Eliminate marriage altogether as a legal category, and make civil unions the legal standard for everybody. Anyone who wants the church wedding can feel free to do so. But the state has no business sanctioning a religious ceremony to the detriment of a civil one.

Posted by Judah in:  Human Rights   

Comments (1)

e-mail  |  del.icio.us  |  digg