Marriage as an institution is essentially a regulatory framework for society, solely based upon the cultural formation of a particular people. The implication here is that marriage has a specialized place in society, which identifies with a particular people as opposed to cutting across cultural barriers. The aim of marriage is therefore misconstrued to mean the actual enjoining of opposing fundamental beliefs from different personal backgrounds when it actual aims at promoting the beliefs of a single partner. “Moreover, they argue, marriage, as an institution regulates both citizenship and kinship relations, functions as a means of excluding the alien, the other, the foreigner and as a mechanism for normalizing family within traditional structures” (Secomb, 2007). In order to emphasize this aspect, picture a scenario where an American man married a Japanese woman. Considering that America is predominantly a male driven society in which male decisions influence virtually all components of the socialization process, the Japanese woman will naturally be expected to conform to the husband’s cultural setting. In this type of arrangement, we can vividly decipher the fact that in as much as the woman is married in such a setting her cultural values will not be practiced in comparison to the man’s culture.
Marriage is an institution whose fundamentals aim at limiting the virtue of sexual freedom through the promotion of traditional family arrangements. This portrays the manner in which marriage potential eliminates the relevance played by the virtue of sexual freedom among desirable couples in the contemporary society. In essence, “...marriage represents a restriction of sexual freedom and a conditional acceptance under sufferance by a hypothetical society” (Secomb, 2007). Moreover, it discourages the formation of other alternative sexual bonds because of the preference given to the contemporary heterosexual formations. From the depths of history, marriage is reserved as a heterosexual institution hence it relegates homosexual couples as meaningless due to repression of their conspicuous and distinct identity (Sather, 2007). This therefore implies that marriage as an institution serves to discriminate certain sexual traits from the society since in the initial formulation there was no consideration given to promote them in the old society setting. The issue of promoting traditional family units in which children are seen as a visible sign of the existence of a formal bond further serves to expound the manner in which the heterosexual existence enjoys society’s approval.
In the same breadth, “The financial advantages offered to married couples are not to encourage marriage for its own sake but encourage the creation of traditional family units. Child support payments and tax relief on mortgages serve the same purpose – to encourage the creation of stable family homes. It is this that the society seeks to encourage, not sexual unions per se” (Sather, 2007). Traditionally, the basic definition of a stable family home is the existence of a complete family unit that can benefit from the governmental plans set aside for the members. Child support, for instance, fundamentally aims at affirming the importance given to the placement of children in the contemporary society. This in addition to other support mechanisms aims at encouraging heterosexual couples to form families that can accrue these benefits. The major concern here is not to preserve the nuptial agreement but to promote the existence of traditional family units. This view therefore serves to discredit the major approval given the formation of lasting nuptial bonds among heterosexual couples since no major emphasis is actually given to the actual emancipation of sexual oriented goals in line with companionship. Marriage therefore appears to be a major setback with regard to promoting meaningful sexual relationships as it only appears as a regulatory framework.
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