Reading.

I have been reading The Know-it-all, a non-fiction sort of journal by an entertainment writer reading through the Encylopedia Britannica. And in his entry regarding Soloman, he uses the word "concubine," as in, Soloman had 700 wives and 300 concubines.

I must admit here that I have a fatal flaw. I tend to use words just based on their context clues. LOVE CONTEXT CLUES! but it sometimes means I have no idea what the true meaning of something is, and Tim will correct me. Tim who reads nothing but guitar magazines and Miles Davis biographies. He also creamed me in GRE vocab.

Regardless, concubine is defined by Wikipedia.org as:

the state of a woman or youth in an ongoing, quasi-matrimonial relationship with a man of higher social status. Typically, the man has an official wife and, in addition, one or more concubines. Concubines have limited rights of support from the man, and their offspring are publicly acknowledged as the man's children, albeit of lower status than children born by the official wife or wives; these legal rights distinguish a concubine from a mistress.

Which made me think...perhaps we should just ditch the whole marriage vs. civil unions debacle, remove gender and social class from the definition, and just start referring to the queers' partners as each other's concubines. Hey Steve, let me introduce you to this friend of mine, Adam. I think he'd make quite the concubine.

It's really what anti-same sex marriage activists think gay marriage is anyway. Just one step up from a mistress and NOT MARRIAGE. Oh, and hipsters would probably rate gay parents just as cool as multi-ethnic parents. Yay for concubines!