On marriage and gender

A law against spousal rape. A law against spousal murder. A paycheck of her own. And egalitarian marriage. Once women got political power, they insisted on being protected by the ordinary privileges of citizens of a modern democratic society rather than a husband fenced in by the medieval kind of marriage to which Douthat and Schulman would return. Uppity women changed marriage a lot. If they hadn’t, why would any gay or lesbian person want a share in it?

That’s the last paragraph of Linda Hirshman’s Slate piece, The Damsels Demur. In it, she applies the smack down to conservative columnists Ross Douthat and Sam Schulman and their limp defenses of heterosexual marriage.