Opponents of marriage equality often rely on “time immemorial” type excuses for their anti-gay bias, saying that marriage has been defined as a relationship between one man and one woman for so many thousands of years. How many thousands of years, however, has never been agreed upon. For this reason we’re accustomed to hearing contradictory numbers ranging anywhere from 2,000 years to 6,000 years. What we’re not accustomed to hearing is anti-equality individuals contradicting their own stated certainties.
Back in 2007 during a stump speech, Mitt Romeny declared that 3,000 years was the magic number:
I agree with 3,000 years of recorded history. I disagree with the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Marriage is an institution between a man and a woman.
He doubled that to 6,000 years last night at a campaign stop in New Hampshire, saying:
That’s why as a society we say we’re going to call marriage what it has been called for 6,000 years or longer — a relationship between one man and one woman.
If Mitt Romney can change his mind so radically about the age of something so reputedly important to him as the definition of marriage, one wonders what other “certainties” a President Romney would rethink in a relativistic fashion.
Cross-posted at Pam’s House Blend.
…that a marriage has been presumed to be a union of equal partners with mutual love as the prime motivation. Between polygamy, property and dynastic implications, interracial bans, etc. this whole idea that society has never reworked the definition of marriage is utter nonsense.
Wasn’t there something with polygamy and Mormonism in the 19th century?
Specifically, his great grandfather had 5 wives.