ban gay marriage
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BY RON GROSSMAN
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO - (KRT) - When President Bush last week
pronounced marriage "the most fundamental
institution of civilization," he was in good company -
at least rhetorically. That link has been proclaimed
every time marriage has gone through changes, as it
has frequently done throughout history.The Roman statesman Cicero held that "the primary bond
of society is marriage," suggesting an immutable
institution. In fact, it has always been shaped by
social currents, sometimes progressive, but often not.Through the ages, the institution of marriage has been
unfair to women, has banned the union of people of
different races or religions, and has typically been
far more concerned with property rights than romantic
love - a very modern notion.Now, as gay marriage has ballooned into a major issue
of the presidential campaign, historians and voters
alike are reflecting on an institution that truly is a
foundation stone of society - for better and for
worse."Since the 19th century, people have treated family
and marriage as the litmus test of society," said
Michael Grossberg, an Indiana University professor who
submitted a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of
several historians to the Massachusetts Supreme
Judicial Court, whose ruling in favor of gay marriage
triggered the national debate."Those who fear social change see any change in
marriage and the family as a disaster," Grossberg
said.Ironically, the most enduring aspects of marriage tend
to be the very opposite of those qualities its most
vocal defenders associate with it. Romance,
companionship, the warmth of family life, were rarely
connected with marriage until recent times. In the
beginning, it was chiefly an economic institution.An engagement party in ancient Greece was a commercial
transaction, said Marilyn Yalom in "A History of the
Wife." "It was essentially an oral contract, made
between the man who gave the woman in marriage -
usually her father - and the bridegroom," Yalom wrote.
"The bride was not present."In this country, the conception of marriage as a
transaction between father-in-law and son-in-law meant
a woman went from being economically dependent on her
father to the same status vis-a- vis her husband.
Under a legal theory called "coverture," the married
pair became one - the husband.American wives couldn't own property - even that which
they inherited from their parents - until various
states gave them the right between 1839 and 1887.
Before then, even the wages a working wife earned
belonged not to her but her husband.Husbands could physically discipline their wives, as
long as they used what was euphemistically called
"moderate correction." If that, or anything else,
prompted women to leave home, their husbands would
advertise the fact in newspapers, right alongside the
ads Southern plantation owners placed for the return
of runaway slaves.---
The U.S. Supreme Court was loath to tamper with that
tradition of the man as lord and master of the
household as late as 1911, when it rejected the idea
that a wife could sue an abusive husband. The justices
called the very thought "revolutionary," "radical and
far reaching."Little wonder then, that the 19th century abolitionist
and feminist leader Lucy Stone said, "Marriage is to
woman a state of slavery."And although clerics and statesmen praised marriage's
civilizing virtues, the institution wasn't always
available to all Americans.Black Americans couldn't be legally married in the
antebellum South. The idea was seen as threatening to
slavery, upon which the region's economy depended.
Even long after the Civil War, blacks and whites
couldn't marry each other in many states. In the
Western states, where anti-immigrant fever was high,
Asians and whites were barred from marrying each
other.In 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court finally voided
those "anti-miscegenation" statutes, as they were
called, 16 states still had them on their books. Even
then, South Carolina didn't remove its statute until
1999.America's marriage laws and traditions had a long
prehistory by the time they came to this country,
observed Harvard historian Nancy Cott, author of
"Public Vows," a study of marriage and public policy
in American history. Ultimately, they trace to
Christian roots.When the Roman Empire became Christian in the 4th
century, the church took charge of marriage. Chief
among the rules it set for the institution was that
marriage had to be for life - though earlier cultures
had provisions for divorce - and monogamous.Curiously, that later rule finds no sanction in the
Old Testament, a text from which Christianity derives
its moral code. The Jewish patriarchs and kings were
polygamous - Solomon alone is said to have had 700
wives. Sephardic Jews, who lived in Arabic countries,
continued to practice polygamy until well into the
Middle Ages. Eventually the "ketubah," Judaism's
wedding contract, held a groom to taking an oath that:
"he shall not marry another while he is married to the
present bride."Christianity's victory also put homosexuality beyond
the moral pale.The Greeks, the ultimate founders of our civilization,
didn't have the same qualms about same- sex
relationships, though historians are divided over the
extent of homosexuality in ancient Greece.Richard Saller, a University of Chicago historian,
observes that in the ancient Greek city of Thebes,
homosexual unions were considered not a danger to the
state, but its last line of defense. The elite force
of the Thebean army was the Sacred Band, a battalion
of 150 gay couples, never beaten until it fought to
the last man against the Macedonians. After the
battle, King Philip of Macedon came to where their
bodies lay, reported the ancient writer Plutarch."Perish any man who suspects that these men either did
or suffered anything that was base," Philip said.The Roman Empire flourished for hundreds of years
after a notable pair of high-society same-sex
marriages. The Emperor Nero fell madly in love with a
boy named Sporus."He married him with all the usual ceremonies,
including a dowry and a bridal veil, took him to his
house attended by a great throng, and treated him as
his wife," noted the ancient biographer Suetonius, who
also reported that Nero tied the knot a second time
with a male marriage partner.Christianity's marriage rules passed into English
common law and from that into the legal systems of the
early United States. Thus, Christian doctrine was
embedded into American law, despite the constitutional
provision for separation of church and state, Cott
observed.The leading 19th century treatise on the U.S. law of
marriage defined it as: "the civil status of one man
and one woman united in law for life."Cott noted that in the 19th century, Western
colonialists and missionaries went around the world
imposing monogamy on cultures where it was not native.
The U.S. did the same, forcing Native Americans to
give up their traditions of multiple marriage. Fear of
Mormon polygamy held up the admission of Utah to the
union.---
Since the era of World War II, Americans' conception
of marriage has been rapidly changing, said Princeton
University historian Hendrik Hartog. Women entered the
workforce, making them less dependent on men. Birth
control made it practical to separate sex and marriage
from procreation. Romantic love, a theme that had been
acquiring emotional power for a century, became more
the norm."Marriage became identified with individual human
happiness," said Hartog, author of "Man and Wife in
America." "Social conservatives haven't been happy
with that shift, but they've lost at every stage of
the game."Among those stages, he said, were divorce-law reforms
that made it possible for couples to end unhappy
marriages and, should the parties wish, try again for
happiness with another partner.Hartog thinks the gay community's push for same-sex
marriage is a logical extension of the idea of
marriage as a vehicle for self-fulfillment. Yet he
wouldn't hazard a guess on the outcome of the current
battle.One thing seems sure, though: People will always
wonder and worry about the well-being of marriage.The pioneering sociologist Edward Westermarck, who
wrote the first serious study of marriage roughly a
century ago, had an ornithologist colleague who,
reflecting on divorce and adultery, concluded that
humans are morally inferior to winged species that
mate permanently."He is so filled with admiration for their exemplary
family life," Westermarck said, "that he
enthusiastically declares that `real marriage can only
be found among birds.' "