Marriage in this Country is Run by a Bunch of Misogynistic Tools

I promise that this will be the only remotely political post on this blog for the wedding (scroll down to the other parts of my personal blog for plenty of that stuff). I think the title of this post says it all: the people running marriage in this country are a bunch of misogynisitic jerks.

We were going to use our marriage to make a statement about the egalitarian role that we think that it has in our lives. In order to show this to all the people we know, we are going to attempt to both hyphenate our names. Doing so will signify the equality that we hope to share in marriage, the coming together of our two families, and the creation of our new identities as a married couple.

Unfortunately, the state doesn’t like men changing their names. Up until earlier this week, we were just going to walk into the courthouse, fill out our marriage certificate, and get both of our names changed there. However, thanks to the notice of one of our good friends who had gotten married before, it is not anywhere near that easy to get a name change. While all Diana has to do is go down to the courthouse and change her name, I have to fill out a bunch of forms, pay upwards of hundreds of dollars, and go in front of a judge (who can deny my request to change my name), in order to get it done.

I find this entire ordeal unfair. It is next to impossible to begin our marriage in an egalitarian manner. I feel that it also represents a mysognistic worldview in which women only are to undergo any type of change in marriage. There are currently only seven states in the union that allow a man to change his name as easily as a woman’s through marriage. If I had more time before the wedding, I would take this up with the ACLU. As it stands now, we might travel to the closest state (Georigia) that allows such a marriage and see if it is legal to do it there. Regardless of what one feels about same-sex marriage, one of the nice things about it is that it is breaking down the barriers of old, patriarchal church control of the institution and changing it to what it should be in the secular arena – the legal union of two people. I enjoy the religious aspect of marriage that we have chosen, but the civic control of the institution is ridiculous.