Oh, don't get all upset. First of all, this isn't a rant against gay marriage. Also, nothing I'm about to say is a serious move to make anything a law. I'm just trying to make what seem to me a few common sense observations.

A long time ago, marriages had roles. Husbands worked at a job and brought home money. Wives stayed at home and made the house. That had a certain usefulness to it because it meant everyone had certain expectations and they were compatible expectations.

In the modern world, we've kind of thrown all that out of the window. And, actually, gay marriage is not so much the problem. They almost have it easier. If you're marrying someone of the same sex, it's natural to ask “What's my role? What's your role?” It's actually when you're marrying someone of the opposite sex that you're less prone to ask because it's easier to assume it goes without saying. But I don't know that it any more does.

We tend to think of the terms “husband” and “wife” as terms with gender. But must we? I kind of like them as unisex terms (if anyone still uses that term any more; maybe they say “gender blind” or “gender neutral” instead).

It seems to me that marriages don't work well if both people expect to go to work and bring home money, with no one wanting to do the laundry. Nor do they work well if both people want to do laundry but no one wants to work. (Probably double income works better than no income, of course, and perhaps at least in that case one can afford a maid.)

We could, I say only half seriously, require that all marriage licenses should require parties getting married to agree to who's going to be the husband and who the wife, just as a test that the couple has discussed this in advance and has come to an agreement. Probably that's excessive. It's enough just to note the issue. And anyway, it's actually just one of many things that people who are contemplating marrying need to talk about in advance, so it wouldn't be enough to really protect people from themselves.

But if we just said that the “husband” was someone who brings home the money, but we didn't say if that was the guy, and if we said that the “wife” was the one who takes care of the house, but we didn't say if that was the woman, then we'd have some nice role words that would mostly be compatible with the old-style usage, and yet would work well in modern society, too.

Best of all, it would be good because it would mean that even heterosexual marriages could sometimes have two husbands, while gay marriages might have a husband and a wife in many cases. Then little kids would learn these terms as a matter of role, and the great thing would be that there would need be no awkwardness for Republicans when they explained to kids why these terms were used, since the term would no longer emphasize the private aspects of the parent's genitals, which is really an irrelevance most of the time in polite company anyway; it would emphasize instead their public role in a useful way that the kids could relate to.

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For more of my writing on marriage,
see my article A Real Act in Defense of Marriage.