Category: Marriage/Family

“Being in a mixed-orientation marriage is like going to Disneyland and having some people tell you you’d be better off at Six Flags,” Sorensen’s post read. “Six Flags may have more rollercoasters, but it’ll never beat the happiest place on earth.”

The departing chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission has said the polarising debate around transgender rights will be damaging to the country if it continues.

In his final interview, David Isaac, who left his position on Saturday after more than four years in post, urged supporters and opponents of gender self-identification to recognise that they had much in common.

A bitter argument has developed between some women’s groups and trans rights supporters over proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act that would allow trans people to change their birth certificate and have their identity legally recognised without the need for a medical diagnosis.

Supporters of the reforms say the current process is anachronistic, expensive and intrusive. But some women’s groups have voiced concerns about what self-identification could mean for areas such as single-sex spaces.

Ancient Mesopotamians were among the first peoples in recorded history to join in what modern man would recognize as marriage. At least 2,300 years before the birth of Christ, Mesopotamians were entering into unions broadly consonant with the committed, dyadic, heterosexual framework that has defined the institution for nearly four and a half millennia.
To be sure, there were differences between Mesopotamian marriages and modern ones. Coercion was often involved, as women were frequently given into marriage by their father; polygamy, while exceptional, was tolerated in Sumerian society. The historian Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat nevertheless insists that most Sumerian spouses “fell deeply in love” with each other and that love served a profound social function within the context of marriage. The late Near Eastern scholar Jean Bottéro described how, in Sumerian culture, marriage “channeled” the “amorous impulses” of the Mesopotamian people toward the “aim of ensuring the security of what was held to be the very nucleus of the social body — the family — and thus to provide for its continuity.”