"Sacred marriage" and "evil abortion"

[ck4829]

You often hear conservatives calling marriage "sacred", but what does that really mean?

Marriage is said to be thousands of years old, and that is the reason why it needs to be defended. But what happened through those thousands of years?

Marriage, in the cradle of civilization that was Mesopotamia, was about paying a bride price so that men could have exclusive sexual access to the woman. Sort of turned a woman into a VIP club and marriage was the pass to getting in.

And the concept of a "best man"? Well, that was later, but what would happen is that a man would kidnap a woman and then have his best bud stall the woman's family and act as the negotiator to set a bride price. If that's sacred, then I don't want to know what's evil.

Obviously, marriage today is nothing like how it was back then... in most places (There are still recorded instances of bridenapping in central Asia to this day). But what about something that conservatives don't like?

Abortion is also thousands of years old. It's strange, however, that you don't hear conservatives using this as a reason as to keep it around.

Abortion was one of the first medical procedures, I wonder how many advancements in medicine we would never have had if people didn't keep records of what plants and chemicals induced abortions.

And that's why we should ban words like "sacred" and "evil" from the lexicons of our political leaders.

[GreenPartyVoter]

1. Very well said!

[The_Commonist]

2. Here's something I found interesting...

...along similar lines.

I was doing a little casual research into the Celts.
I'm of Irish and English (as well as many other things) ancestry, as are many white Americans.
In fact, I think that most of the teabaggers probably have Celtic blood running through their veins.
I found this paragraphs to be fascinating:

"According to Aristotle, most "belligerent nations" were strongly influenced by their women, but the Celts were unusual because of openly preferred male lovers (Politics II 1269b).<67> H. D. Rankin in Celts and the Classical World notes that "Athenaeus echoes this comment (603a) and so does Ammianus (30.9). It seems to be the general opinion of antiquity."<68> In book VIII of his Deipnosophists, the Roman Greek rhetorician and grammarian Athenaeus, repeating assertions made by Diodorus Siculus in the 1st century BC, wrote that Celtic women were beautiful but that the men preferred to sleep together and "the young men will offer themselves to strangers and are insulted if the offer is refused" (Diod 5:32). Rankin argues that the ultimate source of these assertions is likely to be Poseidonius and speculates that these authors may be recording male "bonding rituals".<69><70><71><72>"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celts

I wonder what they would make of that?