Gay Marriage: Not the right name

Family and Marriage: What are they?

         Families are defined by the societies they dwell in.  In some places family consists of blood relatives who love and care for each other, in other places one’s entire village is considered one’s family, and in some other places family is not even a part of their vocabulary.
         Families should consist of, note I said should, people who love and care for one another and keep each other safe.  Family is about love too.  This is an overused word, love.  The love of a family though, is not like the supposed love between married couples; the love of the family is sacred and should be handled carefully.  This is because there is no one else who will be there for you as much as your family should be.  Do not treat it as everlasting.
         In the United States, the supposed family consists of just a nuclear family, or at least that is precisely what all of the politicians refer to as the ideal family.  The nuclear family consists of one’s parents and siblings.  That is all good when said, but what is done is entirely different.  The American family is incredibly complex simply because there is no one definition of it.  There are single mother families, children who live with their grandparents, foster families, adopted families; the list just goes on and on.  There are some families that do fit the description of a nuclear family in the United States.  But the problem is that even if you include all of the different kinds of family inside the US this still doesn’t not include the descriptions of families elsewhere. 
I am not advocating that we should include them in our definition of family, but we should recognize that they consider themselves family and respect that.  For example, if some people of the Nyimba tribe were to come to the United States they would think our customs are as weird as we think theirs are.  The Nyimba are fraternal polyandrous—in other words women marry multiple men that are brothers.  The woman decides the paternity of the children she bears.  If this “family” were to come to the United States, people would be horrified.  This family would be disowned by what ever place they came to reside inside of our borders.  This country would also not recognize them as being married.
According to the Christian bible, marriage is between a man and a woman, “to have and to hold,” “to take care of,” till death parts them.  This is all a bunch of baloney. Marriage in this country is a joke.  Divorce rates are steadily increasing with no sign of slowing down.  In fact most news agencies have recently reported that the divorce rate is above 1 in 2 marriages.  This of course makes one ponder why we say wedding vows?  We allow 2 people who wind up hating each other to marry, and yet there are thousands of gay couples who are not given the same rights.  I am for legalizing gay marriage, but I do think we need to also create a different kind of system with which people can have all the same legal rights as a married couple but not need to be “married.”  I say that we also legalize gay marriage but do not force priests or the Christian Church to perform them.  I say this because it is an American right for a private institution to reserve the right to choose whom they accept into there group.  If one were to force the Christian church it would be a serious violation of the bill of rights.
Marriage is a binding contract between a “man” and his wife and what it does is give the couple quite a few legal rights with one another: health benefits, pensions, inheritance, ECT.  However, marriage should not be the deciding factor on whether or not a couple receives these rights.  Making marriage the only way to receive such rights severely violates a certain amendment in our constitution having to do with the separation of state and religion.  There are many places in this vast world of our where people are not married.  There are even places where the supposed “husband” and “wife” do not live with one another.  The man’s only time spent with the woman is while using his “organ of generation” to help create another beautiful human on this earth.  For example in the Nuer tribe, the husband and the wife live separately.  They are not formally married.  The boys move out of the mother’s home at age seven.  This is another culture that would not be able to survive in our giant tossed salad of a country.
Marriage should not be the deciding factor on whether or not a couple, I use this term loosely, receive benefits and what not.  Marriage is not a non-religious term.  I am not saying abandon this word completely but I am saying give the population of this country a right to choose whether or not they want to be “religiously married.”  There are many gay couples in Massachusetts who have stated quite clearly that there is no way they are going to get married.  That to do that would be assimilating to a straight way of doing things.  The definition of family needs to be loosely defined as those who care deeply for one another, but it should also include that we as a country will tolerate other cultures way of living and reproducing only because they feel that their way of doing things is right.  Now, I am not saying that we need to tolerate everything other cultures do.  For example, there is no such as statutory rape in a lot of other countries.  This is one thing that would not be acceptable.  We do not need to change our laws to accept other cultures but we do need to take a moment and look at their customs from their point of view.