Sic Transit

W

ell, it looks like the Supreme Court has ruled that “The Fourteenth Amendment requires a State to license a marriage between two people of the same sex and to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-State.” It’s about time. I never could see what business the state has telling any two unmarried adults whether they could get married or not. The only plausible reason ever advanced was eugenic—the prohibition on close relatives marrying was supposed to minimize the occurrence of unsound offspring—and with that concept having fallen into disrepute the whole point seems moot.

People can yammer all they like about marriage being redefined, but that ship sailed centuries ago. Parents may still arrange marriages in the backwoods parts of the world, wives may be legally required to obey their husbands in societies mired in the mud of medieval superstitions, marriage may be a very unequal partnership in the tribes of tradition, but not here in the United States. Marriage was redefined out of its traditional existence a long time ago. And frankly, that marriage was nothing more than a form of legalized slavery, a kind of forced prostitution, and there is nothing to mourn in its passing.