Bridegroom was a snake

Herald Sun, 12 July 2006

While Prime Minister Howard and Attorney General Philip Ruddock  may have saved ACT citizens from the perils of gay marriage, the   scene has  moved on in sparkling diversity:  

*   A group of women in Vancouver, doing better than mere polygamy, are moving
into  unexplored realms of narcissism and marrying themselves. One said, “You
can't commit to anyone else unless you're in touch with yourself.”  The seven women, ages 24 to 50, have announced they will gather on a local  beach, dressed in wedding gowns, and undergo a marriage ceremony.   Melanie Talkington told the Province newspaper she wants “to embrace her femininity” with the  ceremony.

   Marrying oneself  gives new meaning to "Till death do us part". 

*  In June it in Bhubaneswar, India, a woman who fell in love with a snake has married the reptile at a traditional Hindu wedding celebrated by 2,000 guests.

The bride, Bimbala Das, wore a silk sari for the ceremony. Priests chanted mantras to seal
the union, but the cobra failed to come out of a nearby ant hill where it lives. A brass replica snake stood in for the hesitant groom.

"Though snakes cannot speak nor understand, we communicate in a peculiar way," Das, 30, said. "Whenever I put milk near the ant hill where the cobra lives, it always comes out to drink... It has never harmed me."  No domestic violence  in this marriage. 

 "I am happy," said her mother Dyuti Bhoi, who has two other daughters and two sons to marry off.

   I don't know how many snakes there are in the ACT, but there are heaps of  feminists who mourn the era Before Patriarchy (BP) when Goddesses roamed  the earth.  Some of them  may be interested in marrying themselves.   

*  On a Web site for gay South Asians, 27-year-old Syed Mansoor  has uploaded the following message:

"Hi, I am looking for a lesbian girl for marriage. I am gay but I would like to get married
because of pressure from parents and society. I would like this marriage to be a 'normal'
marriage except for the sex part, please don't expect any sexual relationship from me.

"Being an Muslim  gay person, I believe it is worth it to give up sex and have a nice
otherwise normal family:  We can be good friends    - I get married to a lesbian, we sleep in different rooms and remain friends. Meanwhile, I can  have a boyfriend."

   Many other gay Muslims have started to  pursue marriages of convenience--or MOC, as they are known-- in which gay Muslims seek  out lesbian Muslims, for appearances' sake.

*   In Germany, a  boy-girl relationship seems  passe.  When Arnim Meiwes
killed, cooked, and ate the boyfriend he met in the Gay Cannibals chat room five years ago (with said boyfriend's permission,  natürlich), he understood full well he was applying "a person-centered ethic based on the imperatives of love"  - this was  the
defense he offered at his trial.

   Anticipating the objections of a "thou shalt not kill" morality, Meiwes had even made a videotape of the occasion to demonstrate that consummation and  consumption   were consensual. The jury,  not   emancipated from the thou-shalt-not  kill morality, found Meiwes guilty.

*  And  then there's Helen Reddy who in a chapter  of her book  "Royalty and Reincarnation," writes that Wallis  Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, was the reincarnation of  Richard III,  and provides a chart of the dramatis personae surrounding the abdication of Edward  VIII to demonstrate that it all goes back to the Wars of the Roses. Wallis (or Richard), had a  mission to atone for the murders of the little princes in the tower and to see  that the crown was returned to its rightful heirs.  Obvious once you think about it.

  In protesting "I Am Woman," does Ms. Reddy roar  too much? If the Duchess
Windsor was  a MAN earlier on, is destiny biology? Is marriage safe? Howard and Ruddock, this Plantagenet appeasement has to stop .....

babette@endeavourforum.org.au