Write to marry

I was challenged to write a blog post about marriage for the Write to marry campaign. But I've already discussed my feelings about marriage, and I don't really have anything new to say.

I thought about all the Prop8 politicking and how toxic it has become to me, and then I thought there are a lot of better writers who have written things about marriage that I believe in and can agree with, things that are universal marriage-truths. What better way to celebrate the Write to Marry campaign than with real writers. And here are a few of them.

First, let's start with the political. This come from political philospher
Hannah Arendt:

The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which "the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one's skin or color or race" are minor indeed. Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs. [Dissent, Winter 1959]

Okay, now let's get a little more literary, but with the wry view of a modern American about marriage as a promise. From playwright Thornton Wilder:

I didn't marry you because you were perfect. I didn't even marry you because I loved you. I married you because you gave me a promise. That promise made up for your faults. And the promise I gave you made up for mine. Two imperfect people got married and it was the promise that made the marriage. And when our children were growing up, it wasn't a house thatprotected them; and it wasn't our love that protected them - it was that promise. The Skin of Our Teeth

And finally, for full blown Victorian sentimentality, from my favorite novelist George Eliot

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life - to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting. Adam Bede

I couldn't say it better myself. And fortunately, I don't need to.