Marriage
So, this post started out, initially, as a comment on a friend's post. That post was specifically in regard to Proposition 8, and I agreed with much of what was said, there, but wanted to elaborate and offer some of my own particular thoughts on the matter.
First and foremost: I despise the so-called "traditional marriage" movement. Passionately. It is ignorant, and hypocritical to almost an absurd level. Let's start just by looking to their name, and what they claim to support. Traditional marriage. What they mean by this, of course, is a marriage between one man and one woman, period. No ifs, ands, or buts. However, this is preposterous, and ignores the true fact of what traditional marriages were.
Historically, marriage was a socio-economic institution designed for dealing with property transfer. A marriage established a zone of sexual control over a woman, by which a man was assured that any offspring were products of his procreation, and not another man's, and thus were entitled to an inheritance. Historically, marriages were not entered into because of love, but because of necessity (romantic love didn't even develop far as a concept until about the time of the troubadours and tales of Tristan and Isolde). Often they were negotiated by the families of the involved parties, and not by the individuals themselves, a tradition which in some parts of the world persists to this day! Historically, marriages were not a union of equals, but an unbalanced relationship that afforded considerably more privileges to the male. Historically, marriages were not necessarily confined to be monogamous.
This of course, is focusing mostly on the Western tradition, particularly the Christian West, and is coloured by how I've come to understand it through readings and coursework. Of course there are differences depending on the specific tradition in question (Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Indian, Japanese, etc.), and there were even different types of marriages (e.g. common law marriage, formal marriage). Further, while doing a cursory sweep of the web to refresh myself on a few of these points, I stumbled across a very interesting and very informative essay documenting a few of the more interesting facts of the actual history of marriage, which I will reproduce in part for you below 1, though this is admittedly focused a lot more directly on the issue of homosexual marriage (in particular documented social traditions of homosexual marriage/unions) rather than my general disdain for the "traditional marriage" movement and my thoughts on the institution of marriage as a whole, but it's good reading all the same.
What further irks me, though, is that much of the backing for so-called "traditional marriage" movements comes from Christians who do not always seem to fully grasp what their own holy book teaches. For example, these movements are for a strict "one man, one woman" definition, which flies in the face of multiple instances of Old Testament textual evidence to polygamy, even at times in a positive note. Jacob married two wives (Genesis 29), and is the celebrated patriarch of the entire Israelite line, alongside Abraham and Isaac. King Solomon was another example, having hundreds of wives, and while this was mentioned as a bad thing it was only because they were foreign women, and turned his heart away from the Lord and to foreign gods (1 Kings 11). The New Testament doesn't mention polygamy much that I remember, but that's mostly because it seems to take a rather dim view of marriage in general, saying in multiple places that it is best not to marry at all, and that marriage is rather the lesser of the two evils when compared with unfettered sexual activity (Matthew 19 & 1 Corinthians 7). So of course, if no wife is better than wife, it would make sense to assume that one wife is better than many wives. (A funny parallel exists here to the notion that if one god is better than many gods, why isn't no god better than one god, but here I digress entirely.)
Where was I? Oh yes, the general extended tradition of marriage. It wasn't even until relatively recently (as far as the scope of history is concerned) that marriage became predominantly the regime of religion, sometime around the turn of the first millennium as far as I can tell 2. As I mentioned before, marriage was originally, and is still primarily a socio-economic device. While we no longer really need it as a guarantee for paternity's sake (having discovery the science of genetics and subsequently invented technology that can do that for us), there are still many important civil benefits that are conferred with married status, including taxation (though I've been told by some that this may be somewhat of a double-edged sword at times), next-of-kin benefits, decisions in cases of medical emergencies, and many others. The current drive to explicitly define marriage is, as I see it, one driven by religion, focused on defining it specifically to be what religion has co-opted it to become: to conflate the sacrament of matrimony with the civil union of marriage, a task made all the easier for them by the unfortunate fact that they share a term in common and in many cases have similar requirements. By redefining things thus, however, and relying on a specific subset of one religion's interpretation of the matter, when they then subsequently legally forbid marriage for certain parties, not only is civil injustice being perpetrated, but religious injustice as well. I've heard accounts of pastors, ministers, etc. who do not view homosexual marriage as a sin, and would love to be able to marry them, and perhaps in some places there are those that actually can and do do so. But if the "traditional marriage" movement is ultimately successful in first eliminating the distinction between the civil and religious aspects of marriage, and then in banning marriage for certain subsets of the population, then these preachers would be unable to practice their religion by marrying (in a religious sense) a couple who could not be legally married.
Now lets step back for a minute from marriage, and think about civil unions. Whenever the issue of civil unions is brought up, someone invariably seems to bring up the whole "seperate by equal is not equal" chant, and things degenerate quickly. Now, I'm a scientist, and a logical person, and I like to think that if a = b, and c = b, then transitively a and c actually are equal, regardless of the names we've applied to them. Names only have as much meaning as we allow them to have, and if they were well and truly equal, it wouldn't matter what they were called. If that were the case, I'd see no issue in "giving up", and saying to the religious fanatics "Okay, you win. If the name means that much to you, you can keep it. You can have your 'marriage', we'll be over here, happy with our civil unions." However, this brings us to the next point, which is that, substantively, the proposed civil unions and marriages have not been equal in terms of facts and benefits, regardless of possessing a seperate name. (This is much like how in the segregation days there were substantive differences between the seperate yet so-called "equal" establishments. I maintain that if they actually were equal a lot of the force behind the arguement would have been lost, but that's, again, a whole different issue.)
Furthermore, and finally, I don't think that in this day and age it's entirely necessary to bundle all of these rights, responsibilities, and privileges into a package deal. If a couple want to enjoy the medical benefits that a married couple can have, but don't necessarily want or need all of the other things that come along with it, why are they unable to easily get something of that nature? A sort of marriage a la carte, where you pick and choose exactly what sort of civil benefits you and your domestic partner are interested in, as well as what sort of obligations are expected of each other: to allow people to make the "marriage" that's right for them, rather than the current one-size-fits-no-one 3 package deal that currently offered. While I guess it certainly wouldn't be as romantic to say "Will you draft a combination of legal and social benefits for our prolonged domestic partnership", as it would be to say "Will you marry me?", I honestly think things might on the whole work out better that way.
1: 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. First I recommend you read John Boswell's fine book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (University of Chicago Press, 1980), in which he documents legally recognized homosexual marriage in ancient Rome extending into the Christian period, and his Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (Villard Books, 1994), in which he discusses Church-blessed same-sex unions and even an ancient Christian same-sex nuptial liturgy. Then check out my Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan (University of California Press, 1995) in which I describe the "brotherhood-bonds" between samurai males, involving written contracts and sometimes severe punishments for infidelity, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Check out the literature on the Azande of the southern Sudan, where for centuries warriors bonded, in all legitimacy, with "boy-wives." Or read Marjorie Topley's study of lesbian marriages in Guangdong, China into the early twentieth century. Check out Yale law professor William Eskridge's The Case for Same-Sex Marriage (1996), and other of this scholar's works, replete with many historical examples.
What the study of world history will really tell you, Governor, is that pretty much any kind of sexual behavior can become institutionalized somewhere, sometime. You know that polygamy remains normal and legal in many nations, as it was among your Mormon forebears in Utah. In Tibet, polyandry has a long history, and modern Chinese law seems powerless to prevent marriages between one women and two or three men. Getting back to same-sex issues, the Sambia of New Guinea have traditionally believed that for an adolescent boy to grow into a man, he absolutely must fellate an adult male and chug the semen down. I'm not making this up; see Gilbert H. Herdt, Guardians of the Flutes (Columbia University Press, 1981). Now you and I would see that as a kind of child abuse, but to the Sambians, it's just common sense. It's been that way for well over 3,000 years of their history. (You might want to ask yourself: does that 3,000 year record make it right?) Some ancient Greek tribes had a similar notion of the necessary reception of semen to make a boy a man, only with them it was an anal-routed process. (See works by Jan Bremmer, for starters, on this practice as an "initiation rite" among various Indo-European peoples.)
2: See the following interesting reference, or this much briefer one.
3: I say this in view of the massive evidence given by staggering divorce rates. It's meant hyperbolically, and not absolutely, as there certainly are some couples that can be and are satisfied with the current system.
First and foremost: I despise the so-called "traditional marriage" movement. Passionately. It is ignorant, and hypocritical to almost an absurd level. Let's start just by looking to their name, and what they claim to support. Traditional marriage. What they mean by this, of course, is a marriage between one man and one woman, period. No ifs, ands, or buts. However, this is preposterous, and ignores the true fact of what traditional marriages were.
Historically, marriage was a socio-economic institution designed for dealing with property transfer. A marriage established a zone of sexual control over a woman, by which a man was assured that any offspring were products of his procreation, and not another man's, and thus were entitled to an inheritance. Historically, marriages were not entered into because of love, but because of necessity (romantic love didn't even develop far as a concept until about the time of the troubadours and tales of Tristan and Isolde). Often they were negotiated by the families of the involved parties, and not by the individuals themselves, a tradition which in some parts of the world persists to this day! Historically, marriages were not a union of equals, but an unbalanced relationship that afforded considerably more privileges to the male. Historically, marriages were not necessarily confined to be monogamous.
This of course, is focusing mostly on the Western tradition, particularly the Christian West, and is coloured by how I've come to understand it through readings and coursework. Of course there are differences depending on the specific tradition in question (Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Indian, Japanese, etc.), and there were even different types of marriages (e.g. common law marriage, formal marriage). Further, while doing a cursory sweep of the web to refresh myself on a few of these points, I stumbled across a very interesting and very informative essay documenting a few of the more interesting facts of the actual history of marriage, which I will reproduce in part for you below 1, though this is admittedly focused a lot more directly on the issue of homosexual marriage (in particular documented social traditions of homosexual marriage/unions) rather than my general disdain for the "traditional marriage" movement and my thoughts on the institution of marriage as a whole, but it's good reading all the same.
What further irks me, though, is that much of the backing for so-called "traditional marriage" movements comes from Christians who do not always seem to fully grasp what their own holy book teaches. For example, these movements are for a strict "one man, one woman" definition, which flies in the face of multiple instances of Old Testament textual evidence to polygamy, even at times in a positive note. Jacob married two wives (Genesis 29), and is the celebrated patriarch of the entire Israelite line, alongside Abraham and Isaac. King Solomon was another example, having hundreds of wives, and while this was mentioned as a bad thing it was only because they were foreign women, and turned his heart away from the Lord and to foreign gods (1 Kings 11). The New Testament doesn't mention polygamy much that I remember, but that's mostly because it seems to take a rather dim view of marriage in general, saying in multiple places that it is best not to marry at all, and that marriage is rather the lesser of the two evils when compared with unfettered sexual activity (Matthew 19 & 1 Corinthians 7). So of course, if no wife is better than wife, it would make sense to assume that one wife is better than many wives. (A funny parallel exists here to the notion that if one god is better than many gods, why isn't no god better than one god, but here I digress entirely.)
Where was I? Oh yes, the general extended tradition of marriage. It wasn't even until relatively recently (as far as the scope of history is concerned) that marriage became predominantly the regime of religion, sometime around the turn of the first millennium as far as I can tell 2. As I mentioned before, marriage was originally, and is still primarily a socio-economic device. While we no longer really need it as a guarantee for paternity's sake (having discovery the science of genetics and subsequently invented technology that can do that for us), there are still many important civil benefits that are conferred with married status, including taxation (though I've been told by some that this may be somewhat of a double-edged sword at times), next-of-kin benefits, decisions in cases of medical emergencies, and many others. The current drive to explicitly define marriage is, as I see it, one driven by religion, focused on defining it specifically to be what religion has co-opted it to become: to conflate the sacrament of matrimony with the civil union of marriage, a task made all the easier for them by the unfortunate fact that they share a term in common and in many cases have similar requirements. By redefining things thus, however, and relying on a specific subset of one religion's interpretation of the matter, when they then subsequently legally forbid marriage for certain parties, not only is civil injustice being perpetrated, but religious injustice as well. I've heard accounts of pastors, ministers, etc. who do not view homosexual marriage as a sin, and would love to be able to marry them, and perhaps in some places there are those that actually can and do do so. But if the "traditional marriage" movement is ultimately successful in first eliminating the distinction between the civil and religious aspects of marriage, and then in banning marriage for certain subsets of the population, then these preachers would be unable to practice their religion by marrying (in a religious sense) a couple who could not be legally married.
Now lets step back for a minute from marriage, and think about civil unions. Whenever the issue of civil unions is brought up, someone invariably seems to bring up the whole "seperate by equal is not equal" chant, and things degenerate quickly. Now, I'm a scientist, and a logical person, and I like to think that if a = b, and c = b, then transitively a and c actually are equal, regardless of the names we've applied to them. Names only have as much meaning as we allow them to have, and if they were well and truly equal, it wouldn't matter what they were called. If that were the case, I'd see no issue in "giving up", and saying to the religious fanatics "Okay, you win. If the name means that much to you, you can keep it. You can have your 'marriage', we'll be over here, happy with our civil unions." However, this brings us to the next point, which is that, substantively, the proposed civil unions and marriages have not been equal in terms of facts and benefits, regardless of possessing a seperate name. (This is much like how in the segregation days there were substantive differences between the seperate yet so-called "equal" establishments. I maintain that if they actually were equal a lot of the force behind the arguement would have been lost, but that's, again, a whole different issue.)
Furthermore, and finally, I don't think that in this day and age it's entirely necessary to bundle all of these rights, responsibilities, and privileges into a package deal. If a couple want to enjoy the medical benefits that a married couple can have, but don't necessarily want or need all of the other things that come along with it, why are they unable to easily get something of that nature? A sort of marriage a la carte, where you pick and choose exactly what sort of civil benefits you and your domestic partner are interested in, as well as what sort of obligations are expected of each other: to allow people to make the "marriage" that's right for them, rather than the current one-size-fits-no-one 3 package deal that currently offered. While I guess it certainly wouldn't be as romantic to say "Will you draft a combination of legal and social benefits for our prolonged domestic partnership", as it would be to say "Will you marry me?", I honestly think things might on the whole work out better that way.
1: 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. First I recommend you read John Boswell's fine book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (University of Chicago Press, 1980), in which he documents legally recognized homosexual marriage in ancient Rome extending into the Christian period, and his Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (Villard Books, 1994), in which he discusses Church-blessed same-sex unions and even an ancient Christian same-sex nuptial liturgy. Then check out my Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan (University of California Press, 1995) in which I describe the "brotherhood-bonds" between samurai males, involving written contracts and sometimes severe punishments for infidelity, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Check out the literature on the Azande of the southern Sudan, where for centuries warriors bonded, in all legitimacy, with "boy-wives." Or read Marjorie Topley's study of lesbian marriages in Guangdong, China into the early twentieth century. Check out Yale law professor William Eskridge's The Case for Same-Sex Marriage (1996), and other of this scholar's works, replete with many historical examples.
What the study of world history will really tell you, Governor, is that pretty much any kind of sexual behavior can become institutionalized somewhere, sometime. You know that polygamy remains normal and legal in many nations, as it was among your Mormon forebears in Utah. In Tibet, polyandry has a long history, and modern Chinese law seems powerless to prevent marriages between one women and two or three men. Getting back to same-sex issues, the Sambia of New Guinea have traditionally believed that for an adolescent boy to grow into a man, he absolutely must fellate an adult male and chug the semen down. I'm not making this up; see Gilbert H. Herdt, Guardians of the Flutes (Columbia University Press, 1981). Now you and I would see that as a kind of child abuse, but to the Sambians, it's just common sense. It's been that way for well over 3,000 years of their history. (You might want to ask yourself: does that 3,000 year record make it right?) Some ancient Greek tribes had a similar notion of the necessary reception of semen to make a boy a man, only with them it was an anal-routed process. (See works by Jan Bremmer, for starters, on this practice as an "initiation rite" among various Indo-European peoples.)
2: See the following interesting reference, or this much briefer one.
3: I say this in view of the massive evidence given by staggering divorce rates. It's meant hyperbolically, and not absolutely, as there certainly are some couples that can be and are satisfied with the current system.