Status Updates From What Is Marriage For?: The ...

Making lesbians and gay men more legally visible will neither solve nor complicate anyone else’s daily commitments. And yet it will insist on something that is quite unnerving to acknowledge: that we must each pay rigorous attention to-and believe in-each individual spirit.

Restricting marriage to husband/wife pairs is an essential symbol of male supremacy-just as restricting marriage to one race was an essential symbol of white supremacy.

But if an affectionate father helps, and a nasty or distant father hurts, then researchers still haven’t discovered something essentially male that a child needs: they’ve simply discovered that children do better with closeness and reliability than with ridicule and rejection.

In 1930, Pope Pius XI issued his encyclical Casti Conubii (Of Chaste Marriage), which endorsed the old refraining/reproducing ideal by intoning that contraception “violates the law of God and nature,” and grew out of women’s “false liberty and unnatural equality” - a clear recognition that contraception and female emancipation went hand in hand.

This book is dated, and Graff isn't a great writer, but it does contain a lot of interesting information - I can definitely picture a lot of it being persuasive to people who opposed gay marriage.

I really don't like that Graff implicitly equates pedophiles with bisexual people, when she says that pedophiles generally don't show a gender preference in their sexual activity. Maybe the data says that (or said it in 1999), but Graff hasn't directly addressed bisexuality once, and she really needs to.

Graff doesn't always use rich people as her default, but she does usually establish a default (whether rich people or poor people) and then explain other groups as exceptions, which is just a confusing way to go about giving us this information.

At times, this book gets dangerously close to saying, "Gay marriage should be allowed because it makes gay people more productive members of capitalism." Still, this is a very good takedown of how arbitrary marriage and the ideas surrounding it are.

Graff's attempts to be funny are a bit cringe-worthy, but the information here is very interesting. This isn't comprehensive, exactly, but it doesn't aim to be - I definitely feel like I'm getting the important parts of the history of marriage.

This book gets less interesting the further I get into it.

Interesting argument re: why slippery slope argument of gay marriage --> polygamy etc, is invalid. Incomplete, however.