The Christian Science Monitor explains why the recent Proposition 8 ruling is wrong:
As a species, we need to protect female sexuality in order to assure ourselves of a future.
Marriage is a necessary defense of a woman’s sexuality and her human liberty from determined assault by men who would turn her into a slave, a concubine – something less than fully human. Human communities need to give women some additional degree of protection – through law, custom, religious decree, or sacrament…snip…
Heterosexual relationships need marriage because of inferiority: the physical inferiority of sexual defenders to sexual attackers and the moral inferiority of male sexual attackers.
Marriage is not about couples or lovers – it’s about the physical and moral integrity of women. When a woman’s sexuality is involved, human communities must deal with a malign force that an individual woman and her family cannot control or protect.
Modern marriage is only the least worst version of marriage that has emerged from all this – but it is still necessary for women. What protects women, ultimately, is that marriage laws and customs confer upon her independence something extra – dignity, protection, sacredness – that others must respect. And if this quality can be bestowed upon anyone, even those not in intersexual relationships – it reduces, even dissolves its force.
–read the whole thing here
I’m not sure if he’s saying that women need to be married in order to be protected from renegade “male sexual attackers” or that marriage to a physically inferior “sexual defender” will prevent men from perpetrating violence. Or both. In any case, it’s an awful way to think about gender differences.
Alternatively, the author’s thesis taken to its natural conclusion could lead to a rash of women desiring sacred union with pepper spray1 or puppies2 .3
Wonder what the Christian Science Monitor would make of that?
