How Dare You Have The Wedding You Want?!

The story itself was nothing remarkable. A young woman describes her non-traditional wedding, and how she did not have her father give her away. It was a rather dull blurb devoid of any drama that would never have attracted any attention at all were it not for the 700+ comments that followed, most of them crucifying her for not having her father walk her down the aisle.

For the story and 30+ pages of comments, here is the link.

When I read through these comments, I was blown away by the judgemental, bitter, and angry tone in a lot of them. After all, if we are going to take the article at face value, and we must, for we have no other information, this woman’s father was fine with the idea of not walking his daughter down the aisle. This tradition did not fit in with her values or her husband’s, and it was their wedding, which they rightly planned around what was important to them. What is the point of a traditional wedding if one does not attach meaning to those traditions? Would these critics have preferred that this couple faced the most important day of their lives as hypocrites?

The word feminist has many negative connotations, which is unfortunate, because even the average feminist shies from the use of that word for fear of conjuring the image of an unshaven, man hating bra burner. However, even though I chose to have my father give me away at my very secular, non traditional wedding, I do understand that this tradition is outdated and harkens back to a time when women were little more than livestock. I do not criticize those that choose it as I chose to have my father walk me down the aisle, but neither can I criticize the logic behind abandoning the whole idea.

That hundreds of people that this woman doesn’t know feel that they have the right to say the things that they did to her in the comment section, as though her choices were a personal insult, says a lot about religious intolerance and misogyny that exists in modern America. It was an eye opener for me. The comments went beyond outrage at this woman not having her father give her away. They attacked anyone that did not conform to their Christian traditions in all aspects of the wedding ceremony, some going as far as saying that a wedding doesn’t count and that the marriage is doomed to fail unless it’s a traditional Christian ceremony with all the pomp.

You could almost taste the ignorance and it was easy to imagine that many of these people had family trees with very few branches.

Bottom line, it was her wedding. This was not a case of a raging Bridezilla being petulant, but rather, the case of a couple doing things in a way that was personally meaningful to them. The backlash against her was well out of line, stupid, and in its own way, frightening.