"Ridiculous!"
19 June, 2008
I found myself in an argument with a relative
once about whether or not a landlord had the right to know whether a
couple renting a house from him were legally married or simply shacking
up. At one point I used the phrase, "Well, times change."
To which she shot back: "Sin doesn't change! The difference between
right and wrong doesn't change!"
Except the definition of sin does change. For centuries, charging
interest of any kind on a loan was considered a deadly sin by Jews and
Christians alike, which many modern people find incomprehensible. Three
hundred years ago, most churches were solidly in agreement that the
institution of slavery was not a sin. By two hundred years ago there
was a growing belief in the other direction, but it hadn't reached a
majority even then. Not nearly that long ago, beating one's wife wasn't
considered a sin by most churches (and was quite often sanctioned by
the law). Now the vast majority of churchgoers agree that wife-beating
is a most reprehensible sin. Much more recently, almost all churches
agreed that it was a sin for a wife to withhold sex from her
husband--and it is worth noting that it wasn't until the 1970s that a
U.S. federal court finally recognized a wife's legal right to withhold
her physical affections.
Which is why I laugh when opponents of marriage equality are shown on
TV earnestly insisting that the institution of marriage has been
unchanged since the beginning of civilization. They couldn't be more
wrong.
At many points in history a man having more than one wife (or a man
having a wife plus one or more concubines) was not considered sinful.
Anyone who suggested it was wrong would have been thought insane.
For most of recorded history, women had little or no say in who they
married. Quite often, the groom didn't either, with everything being
arranged by parents or family elders. Once the marriage was sealed, the
woman was treated as property. Not just by bad husbands--the full force
of the law backed up the notion. It didn't always say it in so many
words, but that was the proposition underlying all sorts of legal
principles, including that one I mentioned above about a wife not
having a legal right to withhold her physical affections until the
1970s.
As Blackstone's Commentaries on the
Laws of England put it: "By
marriage the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very
being of legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage
or at least incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband:
under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything." Which
hardly sounds like the modern notion of a loving convenant between two
souls for the betterment of both, does it?
I should point out it wasn't all one-sided. In nineteenth century
England, if a woman committed a crime, her husband had to share the
legal punishment, because it was assumed she could not possibly be
acting except under his supervision.
It wasn't until the fourth century that a Roman Emporer felt it
necessary to outlaw marriage between persons of the same gender. It
wasn't until the twelfth century that the Catholic Church required
marriages to be officiated by a priest before they were considered
valid. It wasn't until the sixteenth century that any government began
requiring marriages to be registered to be considered valid. It wasn't
until the late twentieth century that people of different races were
guaranteed a right to marry throughout the U.S.
Since the nineteenth century it has been possible in most western
countries for people to obtain the legal rights of marriage without the
official sanction of a church. Before such laws were passed, if you
happened to belong to a church other than the official state church,
belonged to opposing churches, subscribed to a religion that was
otherwise on the outs with the majority, or didn't belong to a church,
you couldn't legally marry. Even the most fervent defenders of
"traditional marriage" seem to agree that those were not valid reasons
to disallow a marriage.
There are good reasons for the law to take marriage into account. Legal
recognition of marriage creates an orderly process for dealing with
property rights and responsibilities, for child care responsibilities,
and for dealing with medical decisions when a person is incapacitated.
The passage of laws allowing marriage without church sanction did not
require churches to perform marriages of couples that didn't meet that
particular religion's requirements. They didn't require any church to
recognize marriages performed by other churches or the civil
authorities. They only applied to the legal rights and responsibilities
of the couples in question.
Over a thousand legal rights under federal law are granted when one
becomes married. Most of those rights are not available in any other
way. Even the ones which are available otherwise require the
expenditure of vastly larger amounts of time and money than what the
states require for obtaining a marriage license. If you believe that
everyone should be equal before the law, you can't justify that
exclusion. If you expect government to remain neutral between
religions (including different denominations and sects within a single
religion), you can't at the same time insist that it obey the dictates
of some or even most of those religions.
We look at some of those notions of the past and wonder what people
were thinking. Send a man to prison because his wife committed a crime
he knew nothing about? Forbid people who were not members of the
state-sanctioned church from marrying? Force a woman who has been
beaten repeatedly by her husband to live with him, and threaten her
with jail time if she continues to disobey him? Ridiculous notions
which should never be tolerated and which we are now rightly
embarrassed to know were practiced by our ancestors.
And no less ridiculous than the notion that the institution of marriage
needs to be protected from couples who happen to be the same gender.
--Angie Paccione
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