Tuesday of Gay Pride Week

Well, it's Day 2 for an event-filled week, and readers should note that here in California, the anti-same-sex marriage protests are pounding out screeds of endearment (not) and carrying misspelled placards extolling Leviticus, Romans, and Ann Coulter. These are people who believe in not the institution of marriage, but the asylum of marriage. And, worse yet, they believe the one-man-one-woman-in-love institution lasted for at least 3000 years! Yet the idea of marrying for love and for raising a family is a hell of a lot younger than 3000 years. It isn't even 300 years old. Not 150 years.

"King Solomon loved, in addition to the daughter of Pharaoh, many foreign women, Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian and Hittite women, from the nations concerning which the Lord had warned the Israelites. "You must not cohabit with them, nor they with you, for they will certainly turn your hearts to their gods". Solomon held fast to them in love. He had 700 official wives and 300 concubines...." (1 Kings 11:1-3).

And how about the Middle Ages? Women were almost always treated as bartered goods. Marriage wasn't much of a sacred institution to them!

Spanish chastity belt

Moonlight and Magnolias? In the antebellum South: before marriage, Southern women had to pretend to be empty-headed waifs - after marriage, they were expected to run a plantation of 100 slaves or more while the menfolk went hunting.

Marriage - Sacred - Time-honored - Institution.

Some people spit into the wind of history.

They really haven't been together all that long.