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A Simple Question:

Jill

Has marriage been defined by history, culture and tradition since the dawn of Western civilization, or is it an evolving social institution that should change with the times?

Consider:
-Property rights for married women
-Credit rights for married women
-Interracial marriage
-The decline of child marriage
-States — not just religions — offering marriage rights
-Marriage for love instead of simple economic stability
-Choosing your own partner in marriage
-Wider acceptance of pre-marital sex
-Child-free-by-choice marriages
-Divorce

Now, would we say that marriage has evolved, or that it’s remained a stagnant, steady institution since the dawn of Western civilization?

The highest court in New York is reviewing this very question. I think anyone who is intellectually honest — or anyone who has any sense of history — will come down on the side of marriage as an evolving institution.

The arguments that the attorneys are making against same-sex marriage are incredibly weak:

Peter H. Schiff, senior counsel to the state attorney general, said there was no urgent need to change the law, and pointed out that same-sex couples accounted for only 1.3 percent of all households in New York State, a “very small” number.

“I don’t think anybody 100 years ago was thinking about this issue,” Mr. Schiff said. “It wasn’t on the radar screen.”

But the “it only applies to a few people” argument isn’t a good justification for denying basic rights to a group. Try again.

In yesterday’s hearing, the New York City plaintiffs were joined by three other groups of plaintiffs from across the state. New York City’s lawyer, Leonard Koerner, said yesterday that even in its own case law, the Court of Appeals had affirmed the reason for marriage as “the begetting of offspring,” not, as the plaintiffs argued, as the sanctioning of a loving and committed union between two people.

Except that we let infertile people get married, and the right of married people to prevent conception was affirmed in a Supreme Court case. How, then, can we say that the very purpose of marriage is to have children?

And even if we do agree that the marital unit is the best place to have and raise children, what about all those same-sex couples who are parents?

Let’s hope that the New York court comes down on the side of equal rights.

16 thoughts on A Simple Question:

  1. The gay haters will tell you that at least an infertile man and a woman LOOK like a couple that could have children.

    It makes my head explode.

    Anyway, did marriage collapse when we decided to abandon polygamy? What about the fact that we don’t have castes or clans, and, consequently, have no related taboos regarding inter-marriages between those different groups.

    The idea that marriage has always meant one thing and has always been for the same purpose is just completely absurd to anybody who has done even the smallest amount of research.

    And the idea that we should only look to “Western civilisation” to solve these problems is pretty offensive, considering that our country is made up of numerous people from Eastern and New World civilisations. And whatever you call African and Australian and Pacific Island civilisations.

    Boy I hate the gay marriage debate. The bad guys are perhaps even more obviously wrong then Intelligent Design supporters, and yet we’re supposed to pretend that each side has valid points. The baddies use the same damn arguments that racists did against interracial marriage, and yet we’re supposed to pretend we haven’t already heard these arguments coming out of the mouths of some of the worst scum society has to offer. We’re supposed to forget that we already defeated these arguments 40 years ago.

    It’s really frustrating.

  2. The state attorney’s argument is extremely weak.

    Wouldn’t we then have to apply his thinking to all minority groups?

    How fucking stupid.

    If the purpose of marriage is procreation, I know a lot of married couples who need to have their licenses revoked.

  3. What most people have to get their heads around is that marriage creates two distinct relationships:

    1) A social bond between two people that presumably reflects their love for each other, and declares formally how they wish to be treated by the greater body of society.

    2) A civil and legal contract between two individuals and the government. Legally, those people become a “single entity” (hence the existence of divorce law, even though lots of religions don’t recognize the notion)

    For the most part the SGM opponents keep focusing on the first and forgetting the second.

  4. And here’s Gary Leupp’s perspective on marriage since the dawn of civilization 😉

    He is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion

    quote… But this is just not true, Governor. You invoke “History” as though it’s some source of authority, but you really don’t know much about it, do you? “No investigation, no right to speak,” I always say, and if you want to talk about homosexual unions in recorded history you should do some study first. ….end quote

    http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp12132003.html

    (Link was found on this website: http://www.beginningwithi.com/oped/gay_marriage.htm)

  5. Almost 25 years ago, my widowed mother remarried, to a man who, they had discovered, was her second cousin. She was in her late 40’s at the time, and he was older than that. They were allowed to marry, but the state required that they prove that at least one of them was infertile (my mother had had a tubal ligation years before) but that they promise in writing not to have children. So I guess marriage is not just for procreation. 🙂

  6. Firstly, there’s some evidence that the early Christian church practiced homosexual marriage, and there’s certainly evidence that one of the emperors of Rome married a man (the man in question resembled the emperor’s deceased wife, so it wasn’t exactly a healthy relationship). During the course of Western civilization, a man has variously had the right to kill any member of his family including his wife, and has had the freedom to take on additional sex partners both male and female. Where does this monogamous conception of marriage come from? Previously marriage could not end in divorce, either.

    What concerns me about the use of childfree couples to bolster marriage rights for homosexuals is the sneaking feeling the Dominionists have already launched a pre-emptive strike in attacking the legitimacy of contraceptives at all. Will they try to parley their distaste for homosexual marriages as further support in ther anti-contraceptive movement? A sort of “look, we can’t argue against homosexuality while boinking for pleasure?”

  7. The question itself is really kinda silly, when you read it closely. “History”, “culture”, and even “tradition” are themselves not static entities. Never have been.

  8. Factoid from the bar exam: in New York, it’s legal to marry your first cousin.

    The arguments against SSM are usually weak. And now that we have the examples of Canada and Massachusetts, it can be safely said that SSM does not lead to the downfall of civilization or the ruination of marriage as an institution.

  9. Lets not leave out that the early Catholic church thought marriage was only a hair less sinful then fucking around. The church didn’t even start encouraging or performing marriages until around the 500’s if I have the dates right in my head… celebacy was the only way to go and everyone else just sucked.

  10. same-sex couples accounted for only 1.3 percent of all households in New York State, a “very small” number.

    1.3% sounds like a small number, but it’s not really. There are about 19 million people in NY state. If we assume that the average household size is 2, then there are about 9.5 million households. That means that there are about 120,000 same sex couples in NY state. That’s not a negligible number of people, even if the argument that it’s ok to oppress minority groups as long as they are small enough minority groups had any validity.

  11. Oi. Society is mostly unaccepting of same sex marriages. This is going to be a long hard fight. Mainly because most peoples arguments with it is “BECAUSE IT’S NOT RIGHT!” and then they plug their ears and start going “LLALALALALAALAALALA”

    Society is really really weird right now. We accept people can love the same sex but can’t marry them because it’s not right. It’s a very schizophrenic way of thinking to me.

  12. Brandy,

    The Religious Reich _does_not_ accept sexual variance at all. Trust me, if they thought they could get away with it, they’d round up every sexual minority they could find and eject them from their fantasy Republic of Gilead.

  13. Gold star to Grog for separating out those two aspects of the marriage relationship. A civil service ought not have anything to do with religion. My marriage service was religion-free and conducted by a friend (he had a one-day licence to marry us). Still, the certificate from the state had “holy matrimony” printed on it. I prefer my matrimony to be unholy, thankyouverymuch.

    This question/discussion reminds me of a page I was looking at yesterday. It’s text of a U.S. statute regulating marriage of Native American people to non-Native people.

    I tried to write a better comment but I’m hung over and my brain is behaving like the pudding that it is.

  14. Who cares if 1.9% is a small number or not (as Dianne points out it really isn’t – especially from this side of the statistics). Whatever happened to equal protection? At least I would have thought New York arrogance would have put us out in front on homomarriage, but as our Pataki-appointed judges (a good example of why it’s NOT healthy for a Democratic-majority state to have a gov from the other side) are demonstrating, we just aren’t that different from Ohio after all…

  15. In addition to the fact that couples are not accounting for less and less of the population. There’s a whole assortment of family types which we now accept which weren’t really around years ago: blended families, single women living alone, homosexual couples, roommates, etc. What the “right” is pining for, the nuclear family, is actually a relatively recent phenomena, which arose after America began to move to the cities and then to the suburbs. The point is, there is no such thing as “traditional marriage” because marriage is an evolving institution. Just ask Henry VIII.

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