marriage is for white people
I was pretty surprised to see a Washington Post article with this title. Seems provocative, but really it's not such a big deal. From the article:
Traditional notions of family, especially the extended family network, endure. But working mothers, unmarried couples living together, out-of-wedlock births, birth control, divorce and remarriage have transformed the social landscape. And no one seems to feel this more than African American women. One told me that with today's changing mores, it's hard to know "what normal looks like" when it comes to courtship, marriage and parenthood. Sex, love and childbearing have become a la carte choices rather than a package deal that comes with marriage. Moreover, in an era of brothers on the "down low," the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and the decline of the stable blue-collar jobs that black men used to hold, linking one's fate to a man makes marriage a risky business for a black woman.
It's interesting to think about this just for black society, but it's also interesting because I think this is a larger trend in society. As all the religeons of the world begin to intermingle (a process that clearly sometimes involves deadly struggle), it becomes harder and harder for a culture to remain in the kind of isolation that makes one way of living seem like the uncontestable "right way".
People are experimenting with new ways of being a functioning society. Fundamentalists of all flavors would have you believe that this is somehow both the cause and result of a profound moral decline. In my mind, the world is just changing, finally mixing up, people bumping up against each other, and this is the process of people trying to work it out as a world community, for better or worse.
To me, the consolidation of world power and the incredible impoverishment and poisoning of the third world is of far more concern than the "defense of marraige". To me that's the least of our troubles. Who can stand up and say, "My way of life is the best because it causes the least suffering and is clearly God's way"? I don't think anyone has the corner on that market.
Granted, if you get married you have a lot of models for lifetime behavior. But some of them are like, the fucking lockhorns . Is that really so great?