Defense of Truth

Quote from Facebook friend: Although marriage has now become something based on romantic love and friendship, compatibility, etc., a legal criterion for valid marriage is still penis-vagina sex (e.g. you can annul a marriage if it's not consummated). If we really followed what we think marriage is now (friend, lover, companion, possible parenting partner) then it wouldn't matter at all what the sex/gender of the couple is. Duh. Duh? There's two movements of logical sleight-of-hand going on for this kind of statement to appear coherent as an argument. 1. We = state. Talk of legal criterion has to do with the state, but the "we" here is in reference to society at large. The two are not really equal. Society has a different stake in marriages and the relationship they solemnify than does the state. The state's interest is to define its tax-paying and benefits-receiving units, and to identify its citizens, who all derive from familial roots. Society's in...

It's been enlightening for me reflect upon some of the different types of marital relationships that I observed in such a multicultural tapestry as the Côte d'Ivoire. I say multicultural because there are over 60 different languages spoken by the different peoples within the nation's borders, and though many of their traditions are similar if not analogous, there are also competing varieties of modern European and Eastern traditional types of marital arrangements there also. There was an amazing complexity compared with what I had always assumed was the almost binary choice of cohabitating couples in Western cultures (marry, or live together, with few other socially sanctioned arrangements possible), and yet there seemed to be no confusion. If there was any confusion, it didn't come from the culture, but rather from recent successive changes in the state's legal definition of marriage. As with many African nations there existed a long history of traditional marriage...