A week or so ago, as I surfed around the web, I noticed something strange seemed to be happening with marriage around the world. There was an odd vortex of reports that made me question what was up in the world of marriage.
First we have this report from MSNBC where a California man was arrested for trying to sell his 14-year-old daughter into marriage in exchange for a large quantity of liquor and some cases of meat and Gatorade. Unbelievably the man called the police himself when the promised payment for his child was not delivered. (hmmm I wonder if Gatorade will use this bit of free publicity in a future commercial?)
Next in a report from CNN I read about how a major religious leader in Saudi Arabia reaffirms that it’s actually ok for parents to marry off girls as young as eight years old and that those who object are actually being unfair to the child in question. Now I realize that other cultures have different standards but I just can’t wrap my brain around the concept that turning a child into a piece of property is unfair to the child. The idea that to refuse these marriages would cause the child to “lose their sense of security and safety [and that] it destroys their feeling of being loved and nurtured. It causes them a lifetime of psychological problems and severe depression.” makes sense only if you’ve constructed a world view in which women are inherently fragile and men are inherently predatory and thus females cannot survive outside the enclosures constructed by men. If you study history at all it’s evident that this hypothesis is dead wrong.
And finally, to cap off this strange week I read an article from the Times of India where in order to prevent the spread of mysterious diseases two young girls were married to frogs. You read that right, in a full religious ceremony they were married to frogs. At least now I know where the fairytale of the frog prince probably originated.
Now, could somebody please explain to me how allowing two loving members of the same sex to marry is a threat to the sanctity of marriage?
