ABSTRACT

Personal power is the ability to choose who we are and how to live our lives as who we are, rather than allowing someone else to define through tyranny our identity or the parameters of our existence for us. To most cultures in most times, marriage has been a socially mandated method of controlling women, mainly by confiscating their property, limiting their earning power, and confining them to the parameters of their reproductive functions. Western culture’s heterocentric parameters for couples have inadvertently left us with the notion that any combination of persons besides one woman and one man are somehow suspect, dysfunctional, and inferior. We assess one another according to race, ethnicity, religion, class, sex, sexual orientation, weight, height, personality, and physical and mental ability. The fact that Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual love relationships are not legally sanctioned is an affront to our individual liberty and an insult to our humanity.