Married? MARRIED!*

Marryourduaghters.org is a site that allows you to sign up your daughter to be married off- for the right price. It's just a listing service. They don't make any negotiations or guarantees. That's up to the families and individuals involved. Though there are no guarantees, there is a hope. It's the same hope that pays the tuition at many small Christian liberal arts colleges: the hope that daughters will stay virgins a little bit longer or be married before girls have to be seen as adults. (I'd have said "women" there, but I don't know if that would suggest the human agency I mean for that term to have.)

Marryourduaghters.org is funny because it could be real. If it was real, it would be tragic. It would be tragic in the same way a lot of the actual attitudes Christians have about women, gender, marriage, and sex are tragic. In this case, instead of being tragic, it's funny- funny in a way that might cause someone to examine their attitudes about women, gender, marriage, and sex, so the real tragedies can be minimized. Isn't that clever?

(In case you're still not sure- Marry Our Daughters is a joke. Though I wouldn't say it's not real.)

I often hope that Jesse Duplantis and the Gold Chair channel will reveal themselves to be hoaxes or some type of performance art with a purpose parallel to Marry Our Daughters: a critique. But in this case, they are a critique of our attitudes about what the church, worship, religious language, and God might be about. I hope my hope is not in vain.

*The title of this post is a quote from Sixteen Candles, so you have to read it that way. I also think I've used it before... So lazy.