Just what is traditional marriage???

It's good to know the history of marriage....

A Harvard professor made a historian's case for same-sex marriage in federal court today, saying defenders of California's Proposition 8 are using the same rationale that was offered against interracial unions and equal rights for wives - that the survival of marriage itself was at stake.

Those who supported prohibitions on weddings across racial lines, bans dating from colonial days that the Supreme Court abolished only in 1967, often argued that "the institution would be degraded, their own marriages would be devalued" if such unions were allowed, Nancy Cott testified in San Francisco on the second day of the trial of a suit challenging Prop. 8.

Similarly, she said, 19th century laws in most states that required women to surrender their property, earnings and legal status to their husbands were viewed by their supporters as "absolutely essential to what marriage was." It took a series of Supreme Court rulings in the 1970s, Cott said, to stamp out the last remnants of sex discrimination in marriage laws.