Temper Tantrum Tuesday: The victims of Gay Marriage

In California the courts are debating allowing same sex marriage, under the rules of the court the opponents of it need to show who will be harmed if gays are allowed to be married. So far they have been unable to do so. Being the nice person I am I will help them out.

Traditional Marriage, the type that is written about in the Old Testament is between one man and several women. The principals of this type of marriage are shown here.

Basically this type of marriage turned the wife into a type of property. Through the Dark Ages this worked as the amount of work maintaining a house needed well-defined roles.

When we entered the industrial age the roles changed and wives could actually have a little free time to do something other than keep the house from falling down. This meant that a few wives combined could have more economic power than their husband, that would not do as it would mean the marriage of a man and a few woman would survive after the man’s death and there would be a separation between individual assets and marital assets. If these marital assets could survive the death of an individual they would continue to grow and families would have more power against authority.

So marriage became a partnership between one man and one woman, except in powerful families. This kept the commoners from slowly gathering power as marital assets dissolved after the death of an individual.

After World War II an individual wife could maintain a house and still have time to work and the economic roles within a marriage drifted towards equality. Slowly the role of breadwinner wasn’t necessarily the man’s role. It could be the wife or shared equally. Marriages still dissolved after the death of an individual because of social inertia and laws governing marriage that reflected the pre-WWII society.

With marriages modeled socially and legally around the pre-WWII economics these marriages failed spectacularly. At the end of the 60s half of all marriages ended in divorce.

As people started to realize that the social model of marriage with the man as the breadwinner and the wife as homemaker didn’t fit the times the social role of marriage changed and with it divorce rates went down to the current one in three and are continuing to decline.

The current marriage laws are still based on the pre-WWII economic models and marital assets are combined with the surviving individual and this preserves the mortality of a marriage giving the State and large corporations the upper hand in society as they are immortal.

With same sex marriages the pretense of unequal partners in marriage will be even harder to maintain and laws to limit the existence of marital assets as opposed to individual assets will look sillier and sillier.

As marriage is now a partnership between equal partners it is no longer economically necessary for them to be of roughly the same age and the marital assets could be transferred (through death) multiple times if the partners are 20 and 30 years apart in age.

This would give marriage as an economic entity a power that has been reserved for the State and Large Corporations: Immortality.

This would decentralize economic power and move it to individual families strengthening them. With families retaining economic power indefinitely Large Corporations would lose their ability to exploit the “Small People” as BP called them.

So for the opponents of same sex marriage I have found you a victim, any Large Corporation that wants to take advantage of families by having any small amount of wealth they have created over their lifetimes destroyed with an individual’s death.

Greed and misery are the only victims of marriage equality, so you can now argue in favor of that.


By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts