Monday, May 4, 2009

Shah

This article revealing the legitimacy and illegitimacy of marriage, fitting within a Christian norm, reminded me of a conversation I recently had with a friend of mine, as well as previous conversations with my parents. It was a larger discussion about the definition and privileges of marriage. My friend and I were discussing rape within marriage--when it was so hard to define, before the laws changed, when women could not technically sue their own husbands for raping them because they were, in fact, married. How does one separate sex from rape (that's right--when a person says no, but apparently deciding this wasn't so easy) within a "legalized" situation?

I haven't given a lot of thought to bigamy or polygamy besides when I first learned those terms, but reading over this article gave me some intuition about how I truly felt about the matter, why it is outlawed, and why people and cultures are fighting against those laws. Though I do see the merit in a mostly streamlined system, it gave me thought about what laws are slowly destroying cultures that have settled within America. Or does America need to make these laws to create a culture of its own? We are the cultureless country--or are we the opposite? We have an abundance of culture. Only, we are all so different, we cannot make a whole. Regional differences, religious differences, tribal and cultural and linguistic differences. All here. Our history is mainly Christian, in that, our Constitution and our "country" was fought for and "settled" (I use this term loosely) by Christian men. But. Did that mean the lasting ideas, our lasting laws, our lasting ideals, were necessarily that? I would like to think there would be more flexibility, something more grounding than that, and perhaps more open. I'm not sure if I have said this all like I would like to, so I'm looking forward to discussing it in class.

JZ

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