The Changing Institution of Marriage (Book Notes: Gay Marriage)

Opponents of gay marriage try to portray themselves as "defenders" of "traditional" marriage and act as through extending the right to gays to marry each other would alter an institution that has endured unchanged for millennia. Reality is very different, though.

In Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, Jonathan Rauch describes some of the ways that marriage has changed:

Just an off-the-cuff list of fundamental changes to marriage would include not only divorce and property reform but also the abolition of polygamy, the fading of dowries, the abolition of childhood betrothals, the elimination of parents’ right to choose mates for their children or to veto their children’s choices, the legalization of interracial marriage, the legalization of contraception, the criminalization of marital rape (an offense that wasn’t even recognized until recently), and of course the very concept of civil marriage.

Surely it is unfair to say that marriage may be reformed for the sake of anyone and everyone except homosexuals, who must respect the dictates of tradition.

It is worth noting just how many of the reforms Rauch lists directly benefited women. For a long time, marriage was not in any way a real “partnership” between men and women. Men were in control and women were often little more than property. It’s only very, very recently that people in the West began to treat marriage as a partnership between equals where both men and women had the same basic status in the relationship — and there continue to be many in America who object to even this idea.

Rauch’s final point is very important: why was it acceptable to make so many reforms in the nature of marriage that ultimately benefitted heterosexuals but not acceptable to make another reform that benefits homosexuals? Is there any reason to think that all of these other reforms were somehow more “minor” or “superficial” than legalizing gay marriage? Not that I can determine — making women equal in marriage rather than property, eliminating polygamy, and allowing people to marry for love are all at least as significant as allowing same-sex couples to marry, especially given the fact that same-sex marriage are not unheard-of in human cultural history.

 

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