It was a normal, decent Friday morning until a few minutes ago when I saw the news about the Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage equality, and suddenly I am having urges to go hug people and celebrate.
I have a FB friend who is saddened by this ruling, and to people who feel this way I just want to say —– I understand that marriage has traditionally been a religious institution, but if you still feel that marriage in 2015 (or 2005, or 1995) is based in religion then you are not paying any attention. What you want to do with your religious beliefs is your decision, but for you to be saddened because all of your fellow Americans can now receive all of the benefits that go with marriage is just, well, silly. If your job had been to make sure that marriage remained a religious institution, you failed several decades ago. So please stop being saddened that the majority of Americans are overjoyed this day because we are finally allowing equal marriage rights for all of our citizens.
I wanted to share this —The final two paragraphs of the Court’s opinion:
“No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed.
It is so ordered.”
No Promises This Time 
The only way I could see that gay marriage would be a threat to straight marriage would be if, when people were required to treat all married couples the same, they just stopped offering benefits to married couples, so that they wouldn’t have to offer those benefits to gays. I haven’t heard of this happening.
What seems to be a much greater threat to marriage is the increasingly popular idea that, as soon as something goes wrong in a marriage, separation and divorce should be the immediate go-to solutions, rather than first making any major efforts to try to fix the relationship. This is reinforced by the defining down of what constitutes serious abuse to include even the kinds of petty transgressions that very commonly will happen in intimate relationships, so that pretty much everyone has an excuse to dump their partner, and the commitment is no longer viewed as morally binding. More and more, people lack the fortitude and determination to get through the tough spots in a relationship and find ways to make love last for life anymore; and there’s no longer any shame in giving up easily. In fact, breaking up the relationship, even when there are kids involved, is viewed as the smart and self-respecting thing to do, as soon as the marriage falls short of fairy-tale expectations of uninterrupted perfect harmony and bliss.
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Pretty much totally agree. If you get married, you should realize that you’re vowing to spend the rest of your life with the other person, and I think people take that too lightly these days. Granted, there are some very real and good reasons to get divorced, but I think they frequently stem from rushing into marriage instead of getting to know the person first. I mean, it takes a while to get to know and love someone well enough that you can actually promise to spend the rest of your lives together. And there’s something to be said for the type of love that develops in a marriage after you’re able to pull through rough spots (not that I know or am the marriage expert, but I’m just believing the personal accounts that I’ve heard).
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