Everyone thinks they know what marriage is, but a lot of what they know just ain’t so.
When you look behind the “sacred union” aspects of “traditional” marriage you will find that, historically, the institution of marriage is primarily concerned with the disposition, use and ownership of women. It’s not something we like to talk about nowadays, but up until the 1920s, women in this country were considered the private property of their fathers. Hence, it was the marriage contract which transferred this ownership to her husband. It also specified certain inheritance rights, and the amount of her dowry settlement (which was a sum of money settled on the daughter in lieu of an inheritance). Daughters who had not received their dowry were entitled to part of the estate when their parents died, and if the couple died without children, the dowry was returned to the bride’s family.
If a woman died without sons, her husband had to refund the dowry but could deduct the value of the bride price; the dowry would normally have been the larger of the two sums. And since wealth is inherited through the paternal line, it is necessary for a man to know who the father of his children is. Therefore, any woman who is not a virgin at the time of marriage can not guarantee a legitimate heir, and so is considered damaged goods. Such women are considered tainted and “fallen” and were consigned to lives of prostitution, unless redeemed by a good man who is willing to overlook her transgression and lack of hymen.
Marriage confers the right to the fruits of the woman’s labor upon her husband, along with the sexual use of the woman herself, with or without her consent. (In many parts of the world it is still considered permissible for the husband to beat his wife for her refusal to have sex with him.) Any children born of the marital union becomes the property of the father, as does any fruit of the children’s labor. Women were forced to bear the children of their husband’s rape, and often resented the child as a constant reminder of their hated father; and they took revenge on the father by feminizing his sons or inciting enmities by playing favorites among siblings (something that was much more open in the past than in the modern world). (See, Philip Slater’s The Glory of Hera for an extended analysis of the dynamics of the ancient family as revealed in Greek myths.) So, before one goes imputing pathology to homosexual parents, one should take a close look at the pathologies produced by the traditional heterosexual family.
In societies in which women are chattel, all of the respectable females are somebody’s property; so having sex outside of marriage tends to become an unlawful infringement on another man’s property, and like any other transgression against private property, it is treated as a crime. Divorce in this context is out of the question because it constitutes an uncompensated loss of property—unless one of the parties is at fault in such a way as to disturb property arrangements—such as when a woman’s adultery casts a shadow over the legitimacy of her husband’s putative heirs, or she is unable to bear children due to infertility.
There is nothing in the traditional marriage vows that says anything about children or procreation. One would think that if the purpose of marriage was procreation there would be some mention of it in the wedding vows. But there is none—and no mention of child support either because children are chattel, and as chattel, the parents are not obligated to provide for their children. Rather, the children are obligated to provide for their parents. In fact, up until the Enlightenment, children were literally slaves to their parents. Hence, the emphasis on procreation in marriage has nothing to do with marriage itself. It has to do with making the family a paying proposition.
The idea that love and personal fulfillment have anything to do with marriage is a wholly modern invention. Up until the 1840s, most marriages were arranged by the parents with the acquisition and preservation of property and inherited rights and titles being the primary considerations. The Romantic movement, the industrial revolution and the relative freedom of American cities and the unsettled frontier provided opportunities for people to meet and marry for love. By the 1920s, this ethos was supplemented by a new psychological understanding of human motivations and needs. People married out of love because love represented personal fulfillment through a partnership between equals, and women were given the franchise in order to place them on an equal status with men. Divorce on the grounds of incompatibility became acceptable, as women no longer felt obligated to suppress their own legitimate needs for the sake of the marriage. The economic role of the family shifted from a unit of production to a unit of consumption.
Marriage has become something of an anachronism. People can now easily obtain sex outside of marriage, so marriage no longer defines the difference between lawful and unlawful sex. People can now divorce with ease, and do; so now marriage no longer confers longevity on a relationship. In this respect, modern marriages are exactly the same as domestic partnerships. The only thing that marriage confers on a relationship that a civil union does not is a sense of unqualified social legitimacy. And that is exactly why it is important to gays. Once gays have achieved the right to marry and serve openly in the military they will have achieved complete social acceptance in all ways that matter. They will no longer be legally second-class in these respects.
Why then do some people withhold their blessing of homosexual unions—and of homosexuals themselves? Part of it is ill-considered religious dogma, part of it is xenophobia, and part of it is the fear that if it were considered a legitimate and even desirable option they might be tempted. As I have explained at length elsewhere, normal male socialization inculcates attractions between males. But to discourage males from acting on these attractions sexually our society portrays men who are sexually receptive to other men as effeminate and unmanly. As a consequence, any positive portrayal of homosexuality, any loosening of social prohibition threatens to make such an image a live option.
The argument that homosexuality will somehow undermine the family, and hence the foundation of all civilization is way overblown. In ancient and modern Greece an estimated 60% of males were actively homosexual to some degree, yet overpopulation was a constant problem in the ancient world. Indeed, much of Western civilization is directly indebted to the Greek philosophers who invented philosophy, science and history, since cultivating the life of the mind was considered a legitimate reason for older men to attract young men. Our modern word “symposium” stems directly from the Greek wine party, at which philosophy and politics were discussed—and which has given the Western world much of its art, science and philosophy.
Those who would deny homosexuals the right to marry on religious grounds confuse marriage—which is a civil property institution—with the religious sacrament of matrimony. In traditional matrimony, the partners made their vows to God; so divorce amounted to breaking one’s sacred vow to God, and was accordingly taboo despite the misery of the union. By the way, the Catholic Church didn’t get around to making matrimony a sacrament until the Council of Trent in the 1500s; so the idea that marriage is a “sacred union” is of relatively recent coinage.
Nowadays people make their vows to each other (reinforced by a contract registered with the state); so “traditional” matrimony has already changed considerably since the 1920s. The idea that one is preserving some ancient holy traditional institution is pure, unadulterated historical revisionism. Divorce has been eroding the “sacred” nature of matrimony and marriage for decades, if not centuries.
So, all this fuss about traditional marriage is based on a collection of unexamined assumptions about some sanctified mythical golden age that never existed. Traditional marriage has fallen by the wayside for very good reasons: women are now considered the equals of men and not their property; people now marry for love rather than meekly accepting a property arrangement imposed on them by their parents; and because (mutual) personal happiness now takes precedence over any sacred vow. The idea that homosexuals pose some sort of threat to traditional marriage is entirely without foundation. Traditional marriage was abandoned long ago… and good riddance.
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