Same sex marriage actually a win for traditionalists

Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic:

Gay marriage has been successful in the courts precisely because, given both the actual behavior of married Americans and the prevailing legal logic of many decades, it was impossible to maintain the fiction that civil marriage remained an inherently procreative institution, even if sacramental marriage in some faiths remains so. It took the arrival of gay marriage to wake some traditionalists up to the fact that that religious and secular notions of what marriage is had long since parted ways. But the logic of same-sex marriage requires no leaps beyond what heterosexuals had already made. It fits within the Enlightenment model of civil marriage as a contract. For traditionalists, its logic is such that nothing new is lost....

Why? Because if civil unions/domestic partnerships had been the norm, straights would have wanted access to them too, precisely because they weren't marriage. That's what happened in France, for example.

Instead, a culturally influential minority is now included in marriage, so it remains the default way that couples join; religious people are as free as ever to marry in a fully traditional sense; and secular straights retain more traditional aspects and attitudes than they would if they'd switched over to a new paradigm of coupledom.

"Traditional marriage" is not one man one woman

From Religion Dispatches, an overview of marriages in the Bible and in history.  You know, polygyny, slavery, commercial transactions, property mergers, arranged unions, and let's not forget the stallwart Marriage Defender Mitt Romney's polygamous great grandpa.

Traditional marriage is one man with multiple wives, multiple concubines, wives conquered in war and wives acquired in levirate marriage, possibly including girls under the age of ten, but definitely not including anyone of a different ethnic group, in an arranged marriage with disposition of property as its purpose. That seems very different from “one man, one woman,” does it not? 

Of course, it’s easy to say that marriage as an institution evolves—but then, if we admit that, we have to admit that sanctioning loving, same-sex unions is just another step in that evolution. Perhaps this is why the Tony Perkinses of the world simply ignore the Bible when it doesn’t suit their purposes, instead preferring to make pseudo-scientific (and wholly unsupported) claims about what’s best for children and society. The Bible’s truths are just too inconvenient.

3,000 years of marriage history: not!

Are you tired of the pro-H8 people telling us that we are daring to challenge 2000 or 3000 years of tradition? Me too. So I was delighted to find this Letter on Marriage with a History of Marriage written during the Massachusetts marriage debate by Stephen Schloesser, Professor of History Boston College (and a Jesuit priest), to a politician. It's worth reading the whole thing, especially the details about Catholicism. But here are a few highlights:

Maybe the most frustrating thing I have heard in the recent debate is this claim that has become a mantra: that we are in the processing of changing some allegedly unchanging 3,000-year-old institution called "marriage." Of course, the decision to grant marriage licenses would be a "change" in marriage practice‹ but "marriage," whatever that is, is always in the process of being changed. To pretend that its alteration is somehow a rupture in what is otherwise a three-thousand year continuity is just silly.

It seems helpful to me to recall what traditional marriage is: it is a community's legal arrangement in order to pass on property. In it, a male acquires (in the sense of owning and having sovereignty over) a female for the sake of reproducing other males who will then inherit property.

Not surprisingly, there has been a long tradition of thinking about slavery and marriage as companion institutions....

In any case, the idea of marriage as "one man and one woman" is a true rupture and innovation in the tradition. The tradition in nearly every major ancient culture --at least, for those players who had power and thus for those whose marriages we have written records of -- has been polygyny: one male who owns several (or many) females.....

For the New Testament /Christian period....I do think there are very valuable things worth noting. The first is that early Christianity was really not into marriage, and it takes quite a leap of the imagination to spin biblical Christianity as somehow being the party of "family values." St. Paul thought the world was ending the day after tomorrow; understandably, since there were perhaps only weeks, days, hours or minutes to live, he counseled his followers: "It is better not to marry." ...

....When Christianity was transformed overnight from being an outlaw sect to being the Empire's religion, several shifts took place: one was that Christians went from being anti-imperialist pacifists to serving as infantrymen and officers in the Christian Emperor's military; another was St. Augustine's many ways of transforming Christianity into a religion that no longer looked for the rapture but had rather faced the fact that they were in the world for the long haul.

... In general, during the early medieval Church, all sex is a problem, and all sex is equally a problem. In the sixth-century penitentials, the penalties imposed on monks for having sex with a man and a woman are equal: three years of penitential activities...

Marriage, both in the Roman and the early medieval periods, was the moment that marked the passing of the rights over a woman from her father to her jusband; not just rights over her property, but her mund (protection / brideprice), that is, both the obligations to protect her and, if something bad happened, rights to any fines that accrued from her death or injury. In other words, she wasn't a person under the law: instead, she was first her father in law, and then her husband. Thus, when a man and a woman committed adultery, the woman was executed (for committing a sin) and the man paid a fine to the husband for violating his property rights.. ...

In the twelfth century, the idea of marriage as a "sacrament"--i.e., as something fundamentally regulated by the Church--was established along with priestly celibacy and primogeniture. The simultaneous appearance of these practices shows the way in which the preservation of property suddenly became an issue of great anxiety: celibacy prevented church property from passing on to priests' wives and children; primogeniture insured that property remain intact as it passed on to only the eldest son; and Church surveillance of marriages made sure that an authority larger than, say, the most powerful warrior / aristocratic families on the block, was overseeing the passing on of dowries...

Marriage as an "emotional unit" as opposed to an "economic unit" was largely an invention of the early nineteenth century ... for the males, prostitution is seen as an integral part of the new arrangement of marriage. .... Since the end-game must be the safe transfer of bourgeois property on to a new generation, the state takes over the task of regulation....Divorce, finally legalized again in France in the 1880s, emancipated men but perhaps not women unless they had reserved some independent means...

It is hardly coincidental: this is also the period during which the idea of "homosexuality"‹ and then, later, "heterosexuality"‹ was invented. It is also the moment in which bestiality appears to decline. ....

In fact, it seems more correct to say that the idea of a "civil marriage"--between anyone whomsoever‹was the genuine modern innovation in marriage practice, and that its transformation from a Christian sacrament (or at least a church ceremony, since many Protestants recognize only Baptism and Eucharist as "sacraments") to a civil union has been incomplete, messy, and perhaps incoherent....

In short: this mantra of "3,000 years of unchanging history" can and ought to be summarily dismissed.

My own discussion of this was here.

The Traditional marriage question: what tradition?

There have been a lot of claims that the marriage equality movement somehow threatens "traditional" marriage.

Exactly what is the tradition? Upon closer look, we find that our concepts of marriage have changed enormously over time. Marriage as we currently know it, based on the free association and choice of the couple, is really quite modern, maybe 150 years old. And the traditions aren't really what the anti-equality want to admire. Let's review some "traditions".

1. Polygamy Although in Western cultures, we haven't practiced polygamy in some time (except, ironically, for the Mormons), there is a strong tradition of polygamy in many cultures even today. It's quite common in many parts of the world. In fact, if you go back to Biblical times, polygamy is clearly Biblically countenanced. However, it is also associated with inequities (both to women, of course, and the unpartnered men) and is socially destabilizing. And it's clear no one (on either side) is arguing for the return of polygamy!
   
   
2. Then there's the issue of partner choice. Even today, marriage is really a legal contract. Traditionally, that contract was between families. Women were essentially property, to be sold with a bride price or a dowry to form alliances and bring benefits. And, arranged marriages are still very common in many countries today. It wasn't until the 1800's that the concept of marriage between romantic partners really became accepted, that marriage for love was the ideal.
   
   
3. What about the tradition that marriage is for children? That one left us in the 1960s, when sex and marriage became totally decoupled by the "sexual liberation" movement. In fact, around 40% of births in the US are to unwed mothers. Moreover, many couples choose not to have children at all; there's no requirement for fecundity. Since we let the infertile and the elderly marry, we've agreed that marriage ≠ childbearing. So, procreation is no longer the reason for marriage. Another tradition already gone.
   
   
4. Traditionally, marriage is between people of the same race. That tradition was Biblically justified by conservatives. However, in 1948, in Perez v. Sharp, the SCoCal found that
   

   "the essence of the right to marry is the right to join in marriage with the person of one's choice."

   while in 1967, when SCOTUS finally caught up to California, they averred that Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," and

   To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. .....Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

   
   
5. Of course, a huge change to "traditional marriage" comes through women's rights. It really isn't until recently, well within the last century, that women gained rights to property and consideration in their own right. It used to be that a woman had to have her husband's permission to apply for a credit card or to obtain contraception. She had no right to independent property. She could be beaten, or raped, by her husband and this was perfectly legal. In fact, it wasn't until 1993 that the last US state recognized the concept of marital rape. I don't know about you, but I don't find much to celebrate in that kind of tradition.
   
   
6. Lastly, there's the availability of divorce. In our modern society in the US, most states now allow "no-fault" divorce, where blame or fault need not be assigned one partner. Rates of divorce are high, leading to the estimate that approximately 50% of marriages will be dissolved. It's important to remember that this dissolution is a legal event, not done by the church that might have married the couple. However, biblical strictures against divorce abound, far more common than any mention of same-sex relationships. The Roman Catholic church prohibits remarriage following divorce but most other denominations are more (dare I say) liberal. In fact, there is a distinct irony that those protesting most strongly against marriage equality are often those who countenance divorce, or even have themselves divorced (rates are particular high for evangelicals). "Traditional" marriage being "for life" is therefore no longer the case. There is an implicit recognition that with our lengthened lifespans, not every couple will grow in the same way, and there is no longer an expectation that people must remain in unhappy partnership.

So, what we can see is that our modern concept of marriage is constantly evolving. From rejecting polygamy, to allowing the partners to choose one another, to separating marriage from child-bearing, to allowing people to marry across racial lines, to recognizing women as equal partners, and recognizing that marriages may not last a lifetime we've seen an enormous amount of change, and much of it is quite modern (within the last 150 or even the last 25 years). Pro-equality supporters do not want to change anything in our modern understanding of marriage, except a pronoun.

Importantly, we don't want to change one of the most important aspects of marriage: that of fidelity. Let's just look at marital fidelity. Seems the loudest exponents of "traditional marriage" have the hardest time with its most important tradition. Yes, I'm thinking of David Vitter, Larry Craig, John Ensign, and Mark Sanborn, and their ilk. And I'm comparing them to people like Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon and other GLBT couples who have really been together through thick and thin despite every obstacle. Truly, who is a better exponent of "traditional marriage"?

Half of the people in this country already have the right to marry a woman of their choice. Why shouldn't everyone?