Why You Can't Marry a Pig
By AtheistDad
of AtheistParents.org
"I'm going to marry this pig, I don't care what you say." Ralph had the pig tucked under his left arm and wagged his bony right index finger for emphasis. The pig's owner had named her Lucinda, and Ralph had begun courting Lucinda when she was very young. Even now, she weighed only about 25 pounds and would grow to be much larger.
"Honey, you don't know what you're talking about." His mama was not pleased with the arrangement. She was plump as a pig herself and had curly brown hair. Ralph looked like his daddy.
"Leave the boy be," Ralph's daddy said. "My mama let me marry a pig, and the one I got wasn't near as smart as old Lucinda. Or as pretty." He cackled.
It was true that Lucinda was a beautiful pig. Her hair was the color of dried tobacco. If you tamp a cigarette on the table and spill out some of the tobacco, you'll be looking at the color of her hair. She had a few white patches on her body. Some pigs' eyes are too squinty and empty to be considered beautiful. Let's not say that Lucinda had beautiful eyes, but there was something vaguely human about them. She was prim and proper and never let sweat collect around her nostrils the way some pigs did. Ralph did not like pigs who let sweat make their nostril areas shiny. Lucinda had the cutest wrinkles running along the top of her snout, even when she was young.
"I love Lucinda, and I aim to marry her." Ralph was insistent. "Her daddy gave her to me." This too was true. Farmer Brown had given Ralph the pig and said that she'd make a nice side of bacon one day. Ralph had been indignant. He would allow no such thing, he assured Farmer Brown. Farmer Brown had told Ralph he could do whatever he wanted with the pig. "It ain't no skin off my nose," he had said.
Farmer Brown's first name was actually Farmer. It was a cruel joke his daddy had played on him. It was a coincidence that he was a farmer. His daddy had been an accountant. Farmer was used to the jokes by now. He had heard of a girl named Ima Pigg and figured he could have been worse off.
Ralph and his parents were Farmer's neighbors. That's how Ralph had met Lucinda. He was 18 years old and big enough to help out on the farm. It was a pig farm. He would feed the pigs twice a day, pouring into their aluminum feeders something that looked like very fine pine sawdust. Farmer's farm was a nursery. Every few months, he would get in a new shipment of piglets between 5 and 10 pounds. When they had grown to between 35 and 45 pounds, he would ship them back out to another farmer, who would take them through the next stage of their lives. Lucinda had stood out at once to both Farmer and Ralph, and when he had found Ralph doting on the piglet, he had named her and decided to make a gift of her. He was only paying Ralph $4.25 an hour, after all, and that was under the table.
"Mama, I am going to ask you to make a wedding dress for Lucinda. If you won't make it, I'll have to make other arrangements. But we'd both be honored if you would help us."
"I didn't even have a special wedding dress, boy. You think I'm going to make one for a pig?"
"Look at it this way," Ralph's daddy said, "you're not losing a son; you're gaining a daughter."
Ralph went to see Reverend Brother about his dilemma.
"Reverend Brother, I have a problem."
"Yes, my son?" Reverend Brother's dark hair was combed over the top of his head and pasted down in dark lines. He was always saying "my son" or "my child," but never "my daughter." He didn't have any real children that anybody knew of.
"I aim to get married."
"Oh, what a delightful occasion."
"I love Lucinda very much."
The Reverend couldn't think of a Lucinda in his congregation. "Is she from around here?" he asked.
"No sir. She was born elsewhere but moved here when she was young."
"I know your parents must be overjoyed." Ralph was not the smartest boy in town, or the best looking. In fact, he was hands-down the worst of both, the Reverend thought. "That's the problem, Reverend."
The Reverend leaned forward a little, tilting his head across the hand-carved mahogany desk he had commissioned for his office at the church. He lowered his voice. "Is she — in trouble?"
"Oh, no sir, she's never in any trouble. She's better behaved than most girls." He clearly didn't know what the Reverend was getting at.
"What I mean, Ralph, is —" The Reverend paused and leaned a little further over the desk. "Is she — with child? Is that why your parents are unhappy with the union?"
"I don't know her in that way, Reverend." Ralph didn't think he wanted to have any children.
"Well, she sounds perfectly delightful to me, my son. What is her last name?"
"She doesn't have a last name."
"I don't understand. What is her father's last name?"
"We don't know who her real daddy is."
"Oh, that's unfortunate. What about her mother?"
"We don't know who she is either."
"This is most perplexing."
"She is a pig. I guess Farmer Brown adopted her and is her daddy."
"…"
"She is the prettiest pig I ever saw."
"…"
"Reverend Brother?"
"Ralph, you can't marry a pig. The Bible says you can't marry a pig."
"Doesn't the Bible say I can't eat a pig?"
"This is different. Eating pigs is natural. Marrying pigs is not. It is an abomination. God says that we should go forth and multiply, and man and pig cannot multiply."
"I don't want children anyway, Reverend. My daddy says I'd better just save myself the trouble of raising a quarter-wit. A half-wit is hard enough, he says."
"Marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman." It was true. The Bible said so.
"I'm awful disappointed, Reverend. I thought you would help me at least."
"I'm sorry, Ralph. Marrying a pig is against the law. You just can't do it."
Ralph went to the high school one day after school. He had dropped out. Mr. Grack was the history teacher. Ralph worked as a janitor at the school at night sometimes. He had sat through Mr. Grack's civics class when he had first started high school. Mr. Grack was nice to him. Mr. Grack's roommate was nice too. Ralph didn't know his name.
"Mr. Grack, is it illegal to marry a pig?" Ralph had brought Lucinda along with him on this visit. Maybe if Reverend Brother had met Lucinda, he would have reacted differently.
"Yes, I'm afraid it is." Mr. Grack was very short and very thin. His hair came down to his shoulders. He wasn't married.
"Why?"
"Do you remember learning about contracts, Ralph?"
"Yes sir."
"Marriage is a contract between two people. Pigs can't sign contracts."
"Why not?"
"Well, first off, they don't know how to write." There was a delicate smile hiding beneath the surface of Mr. Grack's straight face. "And second off, they don't understand contracts. Pigs don't think the same way people do."
"Can't I marry somebody just because I love her?"
"There's a difference between getting married and entering into a legal contract."
"I don't understand."
"Well, where do most people go to get married?"
"Church."
"And why do you think that is?"
"Because marriage is something you do in God's eyes."
"Does Lucinda believe in God, Ralph?"
"I don't know exactly." He rubbed the wrinkles on her nose and she grunted. They were still working out their communication problems.
"What about people who don't believe in God? Mr. and Mrs. Murray don't believe in God, but they got married. If they didn't believe in God, do you think they got married in His eyes?"
"I guess not." Ralph knew that if you didn't believe in Santa Claus, he wouldn't come at Christmas. Santa hadn't been to his house for several years. One year, he brought a bag of switches. Ralph's daddy had thought that was mighty funny.
"But the Murrays are still married."
"Why?"
"Well, the biggest reason is probably that they love each other. The other big reason is that when you get married, you get certain privileges."
"Do you mean that you can make babies?"
"That's not exactly what I mean, but it's close enough. You can adopt children together when you're married, and you can own property together. There are other benefits as well."
"Why aren't you married, Mr. Grack?"
"The government won't allow me to marry the person I love."
"Do you love a pig too?" What a coincidence that would be, Ralph thought.
"No."
"Then why can't you get married?" Maybe Mr. Grack loved a cow, or a sheep. Ralph had heard jokes about people who loved sheep.
"Well, I don't need to get into it too much." Even though Ralph was no longer a student of his, Mr. Grack thought it would be irresponsible to preach too much of his own philosophy to the boy. It would have been perfectly valid to suggest that the reason he couldn't get married was that the government picked and chose which of the Old Testament laws to use against its citizens. It would have been fair for him to explain that the government proscribed certain types of union but didn't proscribe the consumption of pork, though both were addressed in the same parts of the Bible. And he could have pointed out that the particulars of a given religion weren't supposed to influence government in the first place. But the job of teaching didn't include provoking original thought or exposing children to new ideas. Most likely, Ralph wouldn't understand the subtleties of the argument in the first place. "Let's just say that the government and I disagree on this matter."
"Reverend Brother says that I can't marry Lucinda because we can't have children."
"Does that sound like a good reason to you?"
Ralph thought for a minute, rubbing Lucinda's hair in the direction it lay. "Mr. and Mrs. Murray don't have children, and they're old now."
Mr. Grack was a little surprised that Ralph had come to that conclusion so easily. He had to remind himself that it wasn't fair to make sweeping assumptions about people. "That's exactly right. It's not a good reason at all."
"So you mean I can marry Lucinda?"
What a strange box Mr. Grack had gotten himself into. He had broken down the logical barriers between Ralph and Lucinda's matrimonial harmony. "Well, it's more complex than that."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, I'll bet you love collards, don't you?"
Ralph made an ugly face. "Yuck," he said. Lucinda grunted too. Ralph had squeezed her a little in his enthusiasm.
"Okay, okay, how about cornbread?" Mr. Grack couldn't help smiling.
"That's more like it." He could almost taste the crumbly sweetness.
"But you don't want to marry cornbread, do you?"
"Cornbread's not alive. It's different. Lucinda eats and breathes." He squeezed her softly and she wheezed a little. "See?"
"The thing about marriage, or about a legal contract, is that it is mutual. There has to be common ground between the people getting married."
"We'll live on the same land."
"No, what I mean is that both of you have to want to get married. Both of you have to say 'I do' because it's something you voluntarily consent to do."
"I could give her a little squeeze and she'd grunt at the altar. Wouldn't that work?" He was holding her like a set of bagpipes.
"Do you really think Lucinda is interested in getting married?"
"…"
"Or do you think she's more interested in eating and rolling in mud?"
"I guess I'm the one who really wants to get married."
"And how would you like it if all you wanted to do was feed pigs all day and a cow you couldn't even talk to or understand came along and made you marry her?"
"…"
"It's the same thing, basically."
Ralph didn't blink when he was thinking hard. He looked down at Lucinda. She was the prettiest pig he had ever seen. She would make at least as good a pet as a wife. "I understand," he said.
And he did understand, Mr. Grack thought. Better than most.
By AtheistDad
of AtheistParents.org
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"Honey, you don't know what you're talking about." His mama was not pleased with the arrangement. She was plump as a pig herself and had curly brown hair. Ralph looked like his daddy.
"Leave the boy be," Ralph's daddy said. "My mama let me marry a pig, and the one I got wasn't near as smart as old Lucinda. Or as pretty." He cackled.
It was true that Lucinda was a beautiful pig. Her hair was the color of dried tobacco. If you tamp a cigarette on the table and spill out some of the tobacco, you'll be looking at the color of her hair. She had a few white patches on her body. Some pigs' eyes are too squinty and empty to be considered beautiful. Let's not say that Lucinda had beautiful eyes, but there was something vaguely human about them. She was prim and proper and never let sweat collect around her nostrils the way some pigs did. Ralph did not like pigs who let sweat make their nostril areas shiny. Lucinda had the cutest wrinkles running along the top of her snout, even when she was young.
"I love Lucinda, and I aim to marry her." Ralph was insistent. "Her daddy gave her to me." This too was true. Farmer Brown had given Ralph the pig and said that she'd make a nice side of bacon one day. Ralph had been indignant. He would allow no such thing, he assured Farmer Brown. Farmer Brown had told Ralph he could do whatever he wanted with the pig. "It ain't no skin off my nose," he had said.
Farmer Brown's first name was actually Farmer. It was a cruel joke his daddy had played on him. It was a coincidence that he was a farmer. His daddy had been an accountant. Farmer was used to the jokes by now. He had heard of a girl named Ima Pigg and figured he could have been worse off.
Ralph and his parents were Farmer's neighbors. That's how Ralph had met Lucinda. He was 18 years old and big enough to help out on the farm. It was a pig farm. He would feed the pigs twice a day, pouring into their aluminum feeders something that looked like very fine pine sawdust. Farmer's farm was a nursery. Every few months, he would get in a new shipment of piglets between 5 and 10 pounds. When they had grown to between 35 and 45 pounds, he would ship them back out to another farmer, who would take them through the next stage of their lives. Lucinda had stood out at once to both Farmer and Ralph, and when he had found Ralph doting on the piglet, he had named her and decided to make a gift of her. He was only paying Ralph $4.25 an hour, after all, and that was under the table.
"Mama, I am going to ask you to make a wedding dress for Lucinda. If you won't make it, I'll have to make other arrangements. But we'd both be honored if you would help us."
"I didn't even have a special wedding dress, boy. You think I'm going to make one for a pig?"
"Look at it this way," Ralph's daddy said, "you're not losing a son; you're gaining a daughter."
Ralph went to see Reverend Brother about his dilemma.
"Reverend Brother, I have a problem."
"Yes, my son?" Reverend Brother's dark hair was combed over the top of his head and pasted down in dark lines. He was always saying "my son" or "my child," but never "my daughter." He didn't have any real children that anybody knew of.
"I aim to get married."
"Oh, what a delightful occasion."
"I love Lucinda very much."
The Reverend couldn't think of a Lucinda in his congregation. "Is she from around here?" he asked.
"No sir. She was born elsewhere but moved here when she was young."
"I know your parents must be overjoyed." Ralph was not the smartest boy in town, or the best looking. In fact, he was hands-down the worst of both, the Reverend thought. "That's the problem, Reverend."
The Reverend leaned forward a little, tilting his head across the hand-carved mahogany desk he had commissioned for his office at the church. He lowered his voice. "Is she — in trouble?"
"Oh, no sir, she's never in any trouble. She's better behaved than most girls." He clearly didn't know what the Reverend was getting at.
"What I mean, Ralph, is —" The Reverend paused and leaned a little further over the desk. "Is she — with child? Is that why your parents are unhappy with the union?"
"I don't know her in that way, Reverend." Ralph didn't think he wanted to have any children.
"Well, she sounds perfectly delightful to me, my son. What is her last name?"
"She doesn't have a last name."
"I don't understand. What is her father's last name?"
"We don't know who her real daddy is."
"Oh, that's unfortunate. What about her mother?"
"We don't know who she is either."
"This is most perplexing."
"She is a pig. I guess Farmer Brown adopted her and is her daddy."
"…"
"She is the prettiest pig I ever saw."
"…"
"Reverend Brother?"
"Ralph, you can't marry a pig. The Bible says you can't marry a pig."
"Doesn't the Bible say I can't eat a pig?"
"This is different. Eating pigs is natural. Marrying pigs is not. It is an abomination. God says that we should go forth and multiply, and man and pig cannot multiply."
"I don't want children anyway, Reverend. My daddy says I'd better just save myself the trouble of raising a quarter-wit. A half-wit is hard enough, he says."
"Marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman." It was true. The Bible said so.
"I'm awful disappointed, Reverend. I thought you would help me at least."
"I'm sorry, Ralph. Marrying a pig is against the law. You just can't do it."
Ralph went to the high school one day after school. He had dropped out. Mr. Grack was the history teacher. Ralph worked as a janitor at the school at night sometimes. He had sat through Mr. Grack's civics class when he had first started high school. Mr. Grack was nice to him. Mr. Grack's roommate was nice too. Ralph didn't know his name.
"Mr. Grack, is it illegal to marry a pig?" Ralph had brought Lucinda along with him on this visit. Maybe if Reverend Brother had met Lucinda, he would have reacted differently.
"Yes, I'm afraid it is." Mr. Grack was very short and very thin. His hair came down to his shoulders. He wasn't married.
"Why?"
"Do you remember learning about contracts, Ralph?"
"Yes sir."
"Marriage is a contract between two people. Pigs can't sign contracts."
"Why not?"
"Well, first off, they don't know how to write." There was a delicate smile hiding beneath the surface of Mr. Grack's straight face. "And second off, they don't understand contracts. Pigs don't think the same way people do."
"Can't I marry somebody just because I love her?"
"There's a difference between getting married and entering into a legal contract."
"I don't understand."
"Well, where do most people go to get married?"
"Church."
"And why do you think that is?"
"Because marriage is something you do in God's eyes."
"Does Lucinda believe in God, Ralph?"
"I don't know exactly." He rubbed the wrinkles on her nose and she grunted. They were still working out their communication problems.
"What about people who don't believe in God? Mr. and Mrs. Murray don't believe in God, but they got married. If they didn't believe in God, do you think they got married in His eyes?"
"I guess not." Ralph knew that if you didn't believe in Santa Claus, he wouldn't come at Christmas. Santa hadn't been to his house for several years. One year, he brought a bag of switches. Ralph's daddy had thought that was mighty funny.
"But the Murrays are still married."
"Why?"
"Well, the biggest reason is probably that they love each other. The other big reason is that when you get married, you get certain privileges."
"Do you mean that you can make babies?"
"That's not exactly what I mean, but it's close enough. You can adopt children together when you're married, and you can own property together. There are other benefits as well."
"Why aren't you married, Mr. Grack?"
"The government won't allow me to marry the person I love."
"Do you love a pig too?" What a coincidence that would be, Ralph thought.
"No."
"Then why can't you get married?" Maybe Mr. Grack loved a cow, or a sheep. Ralph had heard jokes about people who loved sheep.
"Well, I don't need to get into it too much." Even though Ralph was no longer a student of his, Mr. Grack thought it would be irresponsible to preach too much of his own philosophy to the boy. It would have been perfectly valid to suggest that the reason he couldn't get married was that the government picked and chose which of the Old Testament laws to use against its citizens. It would have been fair for him to explain that the government proscribed certain types of union but didn't proscribe the consumption of pork, though both were addressed in the same parts of the Bible. And he could have pointed out that the particulars of a given religion weren't supposed to influence government in the first place. But the job of teaching didn't include provoking original thought or exposing children to new ideas. Most likely, Ralph wouldn't understand the subtleties of the argument in the first place. "Let's just say that the government and I disagree on this matter."
"Reverend Brother says that I can't marry Lucinda because we can't have children."
"Does that sound like a good reason to you?"
Ralph thought for a minute, rubbing Lucinda's hair in the direction it lay. "Mr. and Mrs. Murray don't have children, and they're old now."
Mr. Grack was a little surprised that Ralph had come to that conclusion so easily. He had to remind himself that it wasn't fair to make sweeping assumptions about people. "That's exactly right. It's not a good reason at all."
"So you mean I can marry Lucinda?"
What a strange box Mr. Grack had gotten himself into. He had broken down the logical barriers between Ralph and Lucinda's matrimonial harmony. "Well, it's more complex than that."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, I'll bet you love collards, don't you?"
Ralph made an ugly face. "Yuck," he said. Lucinda grunted too. Ralph had squeezed her a little in his enthusiasm.
"Okay, okay, how about cornbread?" Mr. Grack couldn't help smiling.
"That's more like it." He could almost taste the crumbly sweetness.
"But you don't want to marry cornbread, do you?"
"Cornbread's not alive. It's different. Lucinda eats and breathes." He squeezed her softly and she wheezed a little. "See?"
"The thing about marriage, or about a legal contract, is that it is mutual. There has to be common ground between the people getting married."
"We'll live on the same land."
"No, what I mean is that both of you have to want to get married. Both of you have to say 'I do' because it's something you voluntarily consent to do."
"I could give her a little squeeze and she'd grunt at the altar. Wouldn't that work?" He was holding her like a set of bagpipes.
"Do you really think Lucinda is interested in getting married?"
"…"
"Or do you think she's more interested in eating and rolling in mud?"
"I guess I'm the one who really wants to get married."
"And how would you like it if all you wanted to do was feed pigs all day and a cow you couldn't even talk to or understand came along and made you marry her?"
"…"
"It's the same thing, basically."
Ralph didn't blink when he was thinking hard. He looked down at Lucinda. She was the prettiest pig he had ever seen. She would make at least as good a pet as a wife. "I understand," he said.
And he did understand, Mr. Grack thought. Better than most.
June 10, 2001