German Wedding Vows Words

Marriage? There's an app for that ... but it's tricky

As I watched all the happy people celebrating passage of New York’s same-sex marriage law, I couldn’t help but project to a time when Indiana adopts a similar statute. (It will happen, Hoosiers, even if we are the last state in the union to accept it.) What a lot of gay women and men may not know is, far out on the edges of the institution of getting married, away from formal wedding clothes, flower arrangements, ministers, vows and disk jockeys who program garter-removal music, there is the somewhat goofy process of applying for a marriage license at your local county courthouse. “No, we don’t,” she said. “But if they did, I can tell you, I would stop the process right there.” She added that if she were able to stop the process every time she smelled alcohol on someone’s breath — which she would dearly like to do — a lot of people would be sent home to return another day. (Apparently, the law does not give much real cop power to a marriage license clerk unless the prospective spouse is soused.)

Bill and I curbed any further attempts at license application humor after that, especially the desire to riff on question No. 2 about whether we are first cousins. We are first in-laws — Bill’s brother is married to my sister — but we thought it best not to muddy the waters with that. We busied ourselves instead with filling in the many information blanks about our education level, our “color or race,” our number of previous marriages and whether those marriages ended “by death, divorce or annulment.” Given our advanced age, we had only one living parent, my mother, for whom to furnish the required address. Bill’s folks and my dad were named but listed as deceased, as the form told us to “so state.” That item would have a creepy, almost offensive outcome when we received our Certified Marriage License in the mail a few weeks later: We thought we’d gone well-prepared for the license application process because we had checked the web to see if Indiana requires a blood test. It does not, only various pieces of identification, significant dates, Social Security numbers, proof that at least one of us is a resident of the county in which we planned to marry, and 18 bucks in cash for the license fee. For a while, because the web is full of outdated information that looks current, I thought that women under the age of 50 were required to bring along “a completed State of Indiana Premarital Examinate Certificate obtained from a health clinic.” That got me into feminist high dudgeon, of course, even though I am long past the age limit. I searched site after site, trying to determine why females had to have some sort of medical clearance and males did not. From what I could glean, the intention of the pre-2004 law was to prevent any offspring of a state-certified marriage from contracting rubella, or German measles. The “Examinate Certificate” would state that a woman either carried no risk of passing along rubella or that she was sterile. Women over 50 were presumed to be incapable of becoming pregnant, which is one of those common but erroneous presumptions that a lot of very surprised women over 50 with babies in their arms will tell you they also made. As it turns out, the only medical aspect of the marriage license application process that still exists in Indiana is the romantic little flier the county clerk’s office hands over to a prospective bride and groom along with the application form.

A Former Fundamentalist Decodes Michele Bachmann's Marriage Vow Pledge

 Upon MARRIAGE and FAMiLY ” – a misogynistic political policy document by THE FAMiLY LEADER, a  federally-funded  public advocacy organization associated with Focus On The Family.

In signing The Marriage Vow, Bachmann has pledged to promote the “Recognition that  robust childbearing and reproduction  is beneficial to U.S. demographic, economic, strategic and actuarial health and security.”

In other words:  More American babies equals political and economic domination for the U.S.

But what if “robust childbearing” impinges on an individual woman’s “economic, strategic and actuarial health and security”?  What if managing a passel of kids is detrimental to an individual woman’s psychological and/or physical well-being?  What if prolific reproduction threatens the lives of women?

Bachmann and THE FAMiLY LEADER offer one simple reply:   Woman, Get Over Yourself!

A quick visit to THE FAMiLY LEADER’s  website  reveals the self-abnegation ideal which is expected of American women according to their “FAMiLY values” paradigm.  Notice that in THE FAMiLY LEADER logo, in The Marriage Vow document, and throughout their website, the “I” in FAMiLY is never capitalized?

The first footnote to  The Marriage Vow  explains this consistent use of the little “i”:

“Sociological data squares with tradition to argue that self-centered adult egos and agendas in American families must be subordinated to the long-term interests of America’s children.”

Simply stated, women who are unwilling to subordinate and sacrifice themselves to populate America’s economic and political war machine are selfish with a capital “I” -  s.e.l.f.I.s.h .

Female self-abnegation is a core principle of the growing “ Quiverfull ” contingent of the Evangelical community’s “Biblical Family Values” movement which calls upon submissive wives to stay at home to conceive and birth large quantities of  ”foot soldiers for Jesus” to advance the Kingdom of God on earth.

The term “Quiverfull” comes from a reference in Psalm 127 which likens children to “arrows” in the hands of a mighty man, “blessed is the man who has his quiver full of them.”

The “Biblical Family” worldview thinks of children as ammunition for God’s Holy War.

Living together and Christian ethics

Vows in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East

Your Special Wedding Vows

JEGP, journal of English and Germanic philology

Becoming American, remaining Jewish, the story of Wilmington, Delaware's first Jewish community, 1879-1924