As Tuesday draws near Andy Towle has put out an Urgent Call to help get out the vote against Prop 8 in California:
The “No on Prop 8” campaign urgently needs 10,000 volunteers on the ground to staff the final “No on Prop 8” push. They’ve been signing many up but they need more.
If you can help, please SIGN UP HERE. Clickthrough for more information & links. The California vote is too close to call, but trending against the proposition. The Advocate has a look Inside the Belly of No on 8 campaign.
And Stephanie Coontz, who wrote the book on marriage, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, explains that marriage as we know it is a recent invention. She has a piece up at religious dispatches, “Traditional” Marriage or a Break with Tradition?
A snippet:
Not until the 16th century—and not until 1754 in England—did states require couples to obtain a license to marry. And even after governments began requiring couples to register to marry, they did not initially enforce this. In America, authorities traditionally “inferred” marriage from a couple’s behavior rather than demanding a public ceremony or a license. Until the latter half of the 19th century, American courts routinely ruled that cohabitation was sufficient evidence of a valid marriage. When one woman in New York laid claim to her brother’s estate because his “widow” had not had a registered wedding, the judge indignantly declared that “society would not be safe for a moment…if an open and public cohabitation as man and wife for ten years…could be overturned.”
Her conclusion:
Today, the American government is much more insistent than it traditionally was that couples who want the rights and protections of a committed relationship must first get a marriage license and be formally married by a judge or member of the clergy. But the state is much more willing than in the past to guarantee that all individuals—except gays and lesbians—have access to these legal formalities. These two innovations—channeling more benefits through marriage than in the past while also repealing the denial of individual choice to most groups—have given gays and lesbians a strong socioeconomic incentive to demand access to marriage and a strong moral argument to press their case on the basis of equal justice. And contrary to “Conventional Wisdom,” their case is also supported by the Western legal and religious tradition, which has never made ability to procreate a precondition for marriage and which traditionally accorded legal rights to many unions that religious leaders considered illicit or immoral.
Via Feministing’s Weekly Feminist Reader which also points to Obama going on the record against Prop 8 and notes that every single guest on the Sunday political talk shows is a man.