Hello friends.
I've just traded my seven year old daughter for a goat.
You see, I've been living, as we all do, in accordance with traditional marriage rules
dating back thousands of years.
That's why I've been girding my loins to stone any bride who isn't a virgin, going on dates
with ghosts, and why I was fired for kissing my wife in public.
Just as it's been for thousands of years.
But wait, what WAS marriage traditionally?
What is the REAL definition of traditional marriage?
Well!
I'm glad you asked.
Let's go back 4,000 years to Mesopotamia, where the laws around marriage were close
to the laws around slavery.
As with slavery, Hammurabi's Code specified how wives should be paid for, who owned the
kids, and even the terms for getting a refund.
So, that's a nice tradition.
But then the Bible had to come along and redefine everything.
Traditional marriage in the Bible is pretty polygamous: Abraham had three wives, or at
least two wives plus a slave he had sex with.
Caleb had 5, David 18, Moses just two, and King Solomon had a thousand wives -- although,
to be fair, 300 were concubines.
The Bible's rules about marriage are very clear.
Rape victims must marry their rapist.
If a woman's husband dies, she must marry his brother, even if he's already married.
Interracial marriage is strictly forbidden, and if you marry a woman who turns out not
to be a virgin, you have to stone her to death.
Really the whole Old Testament makes marriage seem like more trouble than it's worth, which
probably explains the advice in 1 Corinthians 7:28, which is essentially, dude just never
get married.
In ancient Rome, it was considered gross for husbands and wives to be in love.
According to the Stoic Seneca: "nothing is more impure than to love one's wife as if
she were a mistress."
And Plutarch called it "disgraceful" when a senator was caught kissing his wife in public.
So that's what traditional marriage looked like.
Except maybe not, because it kept changing.
Early Church officials were pretty opposed to marriage.
Saint Jerome wrote around the year 400, "we must never be in the bondage of wedlock, for
as often as I render my wife her due, I cannot pray."
Jerome surrounded himself with a circle of women who had taken a vow of virginity, and
wrote letters to them about what they should wear.
Around 500 Emperor Justinian redefined marriage again with the Corpus Juris.
Under those rules, fathers could give away their daughters when they turned seven.
Christians couldn't marry Jews.
And a husband was allowed to beat his wife -- but if he did, he had to pay her afterwards.
So THAT was traditional marriage, for a while, until it changed again.
Around the 13th century the Catholic Church decided to get into the wedding business,
and made marriage a sacrament.
Pope Alexander redefined marriage to be an agreement between the spouses, rather than
their parents.
But it still wasn't a great for women.
In the 15th century, Bernard of Siena told parishioners to cool it with the wife-beating,
and that they should treat their wives with as much mercy as they would a chicken or a
pig.
And Martin Luther wrote that he gave his wife a box on the ear whenever she was "saucy."
Okay, so traditional marriage was basically treating women like a punching bag.
Actually no, it's even worse.
In 1736, Jurist Sir Matthew Hale wrote in The History of the Pleas of the Crown that
a husband cannot be guilty of raping his wife, since a wife "hath given up herself in this
kind to her husband, which she cannot retract."
By the 1700s, marriage had been redefined over and over and over.
But the one thing it had almost never been was something you do with a person you love.
The advice in the 1700s was to marry someone you could learn to tolerate, thereby anticipating
the Kramdens by several centuries.
"Bang, zoom!"
If you wanted to get married in colonial America, all you had to do is say you were married.
As long as you were white.
Slaves needed to get permission from their owners.
And as for women: "The very being and legal existence of the woman is suspended during
the marriage," said William Blackstone.
The very being!
Blackstone literally thought women cease to be when they marry.
Tradition!
Former slaves were finally able to marry after the Civil War, and in the late 1800s South
Carolina became the first state to rule that men were no longer allowed to beat their wives.
It wasn't until 1920 -- less than a hundred years ago -- that wife beating was outlawed
nationwide.
These changes were radical redefinitions of traditional marriage, and they were redefinitions
for the better.
As a society improves -- and the people in the society improve -- those people improve
marriage.
It was in the 1920s that people started marrying more for love than for property -- the term
for it at the time was "Love Marriage" and people were fascinated by this new idea that
you could be in love with the person you marry, and that you might not be allowed to beat
them up.
This all coincided with suffrage and improved economic mobility and a stronger society,
so of course marriage grew stronger as well.
And yet still there was resistance.
Conservatives at the time said that this new definition would completely destroy marriage
by the end of the 20th century.
And there were still more changes coming.
It wasn't until 1967 that the Supreme Court overturned bans on interracial marriage in
Loving v. Virginia.
At the time, states defended their interracial marriage bans by claiming that they were -- you
guessed it -- traditional.
They also claimed that the Bible justified the bans, and that interracial marriage was
an attack on religious freedom.
One judge even wrote "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and
red, and he placed them on separate continents.
And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages.
The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."
In 1971, the Supreme Court overturned laws dictating that when a husband and wife have
a legal dispute, "males must be preferred to females."
The young attorney who argued that case, by the way, was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who may
understand better than anyone else on the Supreme Court why it's OK and sometimes necessary
for marriage to change.
It wasn't until 1979 that states got rid of "head and master" laws, which said a husband
could do whatever he wanted with his wife's property.
And until 1993 -- 1993!
-- it was legal for a man to rape his wife in some states.
If you want to be technical, outlawing spousal rape was a radical redefinition of marriage
going back thousands of years.
Because remember: traditional marriage is one man and one woman, enslaved, not in love,
polygamous, married to a rapist or your brother in law, or never married, with a seven year
old girl, beaten as you would a chicken or a pig whenever she's saucy, barely tolerated,
with no being or legal existence, and definitely not a different ethnicity.
And we didn't even talk about traditions in non-western cultures, where marriage has developed
in even more directions.
That's because as Americans, we generally forget that those cultures even exist.
Look, marriage has been a lot of things.
But when you get down to it, it's always been an agreement between people.
And as people strive to improve themselves, to become a more fair and just society, the
marriages that they form improve with them.
So today you might have only one spouse, you might even be in love, and you might be a
union of equals.
These are new experimental changes to the traditions of marriage.
It wasn't that long ago that women were treated like property, that people of color weren't
considered human.
As society learned from those mistakes, people updated the rules of marriage.
Even more recently, LGBTs were thought of as dangerous perverts, unable to form real
relationships.
And now marriage is updating again as we realize that the fundamentals of same-sex relationships
are the same as straight relationships.
Letting same-sex couples marry is actually completely traditional.
It's part of the tradition of constantly improv ing the institution
of marriage.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get these tin cans ready for my new wife.