On marriage
Mar. 19th, 2004 04:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gaudiorThanks to Phoenix for telling me to go ahead and post this, even though there's a link in her-and-Ghost's journal that says the first major point of it. Becuase I appear to have rather more points than that article did. So.
Right. I think I have, with the help of many people, come to an understanding of What, Precisely, Is People’s Problem With Same-Sex Marriage.
Now, there really is a great deal of both “homosexuality is just ICKY!” and “The Bible says it’s wrong.” I can understand either of these as reasons why people think gay marriage is an abomination, and shouldn’t be allowed. However, I think that any rational person would see that, in a country with strong separation of church and state, which values individual rights and frowns on discrimination, they’re not a good basis for laws. Marriage does indeed have a religious component, but that can be separated from the civil/legal one-- as seen by the existence of marriage by judges, or the fact that some religions already perform same-sex marriages.
The more serious argument is that same-sex marriage will ‘damage traditional marriage.’ This is a statement which, on the surface, makes NO DAMN SENSE WHATSOEVER, and so has been widely parodied. After all-- the gays didn’t follow Britney around and say, “You! You’ve been married about four days-- that’s enough! Quit it!” But I think I’ve got hold of what it actually means, and it’s not that gay marriage destroys straight marriage-- it’s that gay marriage is a _symptom_ of what they see as the crumbling of the institution of marriage. And I think they’re actually right.
See, for almost all of human history, sex has led to children, who must be cared for in order for society to continue. This meant that there had to be some way to make sure there would be someone to support any sexually active woman, as someone with a small child or several large ones has a very hard time taking care of herself. Some cultures dealt with this by having an extended family around that provided for all its members. Ours dealt with it by setting up marriage-- a man and woman could only have sex if they were in a committed relationship to each other, in which they would support and take care of each other and any children who the woman gave birth to. This meant that most children and full-time parents were supported most of the time, most people had constant access to a sexual partner. Just as significantly in our patriarchal culture, it also meant that there was an orderly dispersion of property and titles. Of course, it wasn’t a perfect system: many, perhaps most, humans are not naturally monogamous, and so lots and lots of people had sex outside of marriage. Some cultures set up provisions for the children produced... for the most part, American society didn’t. Instead, people were taught that monogamy was natural and desirable. Since the Judeo-Christian texts were written after marriage had developed as a system, these texts helpfully emphasized that marriage was the only place where sex was permissable, and Americans historically took that to heart. While calling it ‘sin’ wasn’t enough to stop people from having sex outside of marriage, it did mean that those who did were limited only to those who _had_ to, because lust, poverty or coercion was too great not to-- a much smaller number than would have liked to, given the option. An entire culture grew up with sex as sin-- barely permissable within marriage for the purpose of production of children, and still unspeakable-- as a central tenet.
This was all necessary because, before birth control, sex automatically led to children, and it was crucial for the continuation of society that children be cared for and educated. And marriage is, indeed, the simplest system for assuring that that happens-- it brings together the smallest number of people possible for cooperation. Considering how complicated people are, two is a lot to manage.
However, as soon as birth control became practical, it was no longer crucial to rigidly control sex. That meant that the primary historical justification for monogamous marriage no longer exists. As long as one takes reasonable precautions, it’s possible to have as much sex as one wants without producing children who need to be taken care of.
The other reason that monogamous marriage is no longer strictly necessary is the rise of literacy and litigacy; the rise of lawyers. In earlier times, when few people wrote wills, it was necessary to have a clear way of determining heirs: a man had to know that his son was truly his, in order for it to be clear to everyone that that son should inherit his property. Nowadays, we have blood-tests, and nearly everyone writes wills. A man can know damn well his son is his son, if genes are what matter to him. Whether they do or not, a man can also decide how his property will be transmitted, and leave a legal, indisputable testament to that decision. A man-- or a woman-- can leave his/her property to children, other relatives, the ASPCA... it’s now a made and witnessed decision, not a social convention.
Also, women’s liberation has in many ways removed the necessity for marriage in order for them and their children to be supported. Women can hold jobs, can control their own property. This means two things. First, it means that property no longer moves in strictly patriarchal lines, which puts greater weight to the matter of wills versus social convention. Secondly, and probably more importantly, it means that women can operate as independent entities, without needing to be supported by father or husband. It is now more possible than ever before for a woman to raise her children without a husband to support her. It is also possible, and more socially acceptable than ever before, for a woman to live single for as long as she likes, doing precisely as she pleases. A woman’s sexuality is no longer her sole resource for gaining posessions and a livelihood.
So, the situation has changed fundamentally, becuase the things marriage was originally designed for-- to make sure that children are not produced who will not be cared for, and that property will move in an orderly fashion-- can be achieved in other ways. The control of the results of human sexuality was a monumental task, and monogamous marriage was, more or less, a good stop-gap solution. However, it also had several serious problems. The most serious of these is that humans are not naturally monogamous-- if we were, ‘adultery’ wouldn’t even be a concept, let alone something which, according to Peggy Vaughn’s book “The Monogamy Myth,” about 60% of married men and 40% of married women will at some point do. We’re not biologically programmed to be monogamous-- it’s not in our evolutionary interests. The fact that we’ve managed to believe we should be attests to the impressive power of culture, religion and common sense in overcoming biology.
And with the coming of birth control, which meant that common sense no longer fought against obeying our biological instincts (we didn’t have to think about getting pregnant as an automatic consequence of sex), culture shifted rapidly to allow people to do what we had, at heart, wanted to do for a long time: get laid. A lot. Right _now_, when our bodies demanded, not in however long it took for all the rites and rituals to be fulfilled. We had lost one of the major reasons to fight our instincts, and the result was a great confusion.
The cultural shift was also, I believe, the reason that homosexuality became so much more socially acceptable. There always have been and always will be (barring complex genetic engineering) people with homosexual inclinations, in every time and culture. I’m not sure why-- it may be simply a mutation like nearsightedness or genetic diseases, which doesn’t interfere with reproduction enough to prevent it being passed on. Or it might, on the other hand, be a survival enhancer-- I’ve heard it argued that homosexuals, evolutionarily, helped their siblings to reproduce by being another adult around to take care of the siblings’ children instead of having their own. In either case, though, people who are purely homosexual are a very small part of the population. It was necessary to teach 95% to 98% of the population that “Sex outside of marriage is sin,” in order to keep them from having sex that would lead to uncared-for children -- if you’re going to try to control the major driving instinct of humanity, you need to be consistent, and have a HUGE weight of persuasion on your side. It wouldn’t have been worthwhile to try to teach the more complex message “Sex which may lead to uncared-for children is a bad idea.” With the coming of birth control, as sex outside of marriage ceased to be taboo, the choice of sexual partner also became less of an issue.
The major difficulty, as I see it, is that the culture which has built up over the centuries of marriage has not yet shifted completely. The culture of marriage, the attempt to control sex, used a lot of teachings-- marriage is holy, sex outside of it is sin, is meaningless, is perversion, is cheap, is not fulfilling the true function of sex. These beliefs deriving from the defense of marriage have gone bone-deep, archetype-deep. We are confused about their origin. For example, take virginity. Virginity is no longer a requisite for a woman to marry-- both because it’s possible for her to have sex without risking conception, and because medical technology allows us to track a pregnancy and know exactly whose child she carries. A man who marries a non-virgin does not, therefore, have to worry that he will be saddled with raising another man’s child unknowing. However, virginity has an entire set of emotional baggage accompanying it. We are told that virginity is a ‘gift’ from one newlywed to another, that waiting until marriage will make sex ‘special’-- where any sexually experienced person will tell you that the first time is awkward and unskilled, no matter _how_ you feel about the other person. Still, the mythos of virginity remains. Virgin means pure, unspoiled, without sin-- Mary is the Blessed what? Similarly, religion, based on several-thousand year old written texts, cannot change with the cultural shifts-- unless it claims that the text is of its time, and in some ways, no longer applicable. But ino order to see God as unchanging, many people must assume that God meant us to go on as we did before technology changed, and so live by a religious stricture that applies, logically, to people having birth control no more than the stricture to till the fields in a certain way applies to people who do not farm.
The sum of all of this, is, of course, that marriage no longer means what it used to mean. It might, in fact, be worthwhile to do away with the institution completely. However, I don’t propose to do this-- I, in fact, propose to marry next year. At this point, we as a culture don’t hang onto marriage for the reasons we started it-- we hang onto it because we want to. I believe that many of the meanings we’ve added over the centures to make it more appealing than just the control of sex have created something which I think quite worth entering into.
Right now, in my view, marriage is something two people do because, as mature adults, they have determined that they are ready to make a long-term commitment to making a family together. They are no longer drawn together just by sex, or by societal pressure, or by the need to carry on their family title and property-- they come together as a union of two individuals who want to be more than two individuals. It’s a choice made freely to better pursue happiness by choosing a partner in life, who will help one achieve one’s goals (which goals often include children, and I do think that marriage remains the best way of raising them. Single parenthood is certainly more practicable than earlier, but is not, in my opinion, ideal. Even two people are outnumbered by a three-year-old-- the more parents, the better.) and lead a fulfilling life.
Now, the above, I realize, sounds very shallow compared to the goals of “obeying God’s will” and “continuing the human race.” For the latter, though, I think our genes betray us. There are, I think 10 billion people on the earth, far more than are necessary to continue the species-- possibly more than the earth can easily support. Our genes may program us to reproduce as much as we possibly can, but it’s a mistake to do so. Yet any reason we give for having children besides “our bodies tell us to” is ultimately about personal satsifaction. Similarly, “obeying God’s will” is an iffy reason when there is so much disagreement about what God wants and whether there is, actually, a God. If a couple believes that the reason to get married is that it’s what God wants... well, more power to them, but I don’t think it’s the main reason that most people marry today. "Obeying God" is no longer necessary to prevent society's collapse-- in the area of marriage, birth control does the same thing. At heart, if we are religious, we obey God because it makes us happier to obey God-- it puts us in a world that makes sense, where we have purpose and know what is the right thing to do.
In fact, I think that the problem with marriage touches on one of the major problems of the 20th/21st century-- humanity has to come up with reasons for living besides survival. Americans, for the most part, can achieve food, water, and shelter and still have most of their time and energy available to do Something Else. For the tens of thousands of years of human evolution, that wasn’t the case. Now that it is, we find that the other things we try don’t have the same visceral urgency as survival of ourselves and our offspring. Pursuing our happiness is what we have left as a goal, and marriage, at this point, is designed to help us achieve it.
However, it takes a long time for thinking patterns to change, and change is often painful. The “defenders of traditional marriage,” in my view, are defending not the legal definition of marriage, but the whole way the human race views its purpose. Living for personal satisfaction, in prior times, like when the Bible was written, meant living at someone else’s expense. It still does to a certain extent-- there can be no denying that Americans live off the resources of weaker countries, adn the misery of the people therein-- but technology has now advanced to the point where we can, in fact, provide for the survival needs of everyone on earth. That means that the worthwhiile things we can do in this life are either try to achieve our own happiness, or try to change the world to achieve the happiness of other people. Satisfaction, our own or other's, is no longer a matter of selfishness-- it’s the only thing we can strive for in order to give our lives meaning at all. That’s a major change, and not one that most people have realized, I think. It strikes me that the protestors of same-sex marriage look at the world and say, “This is fundamentally different than I have been taught it is-- either my teachings or the world is wrong.” And changing what you believe is very painful, and very difficult. No wonder they’d rather fight bitterly against the people who represent that change than accept it, and completely alter their worldview.
So... I feel for them. But that doesn’t mean I’m not marrying my girlfriend next June.
--R
Right. I think I have, with the help of many people, come to an understanding of What, Precisely, Is People’s Problem With Same-Sex Marriage.
Now, there really is a great deal of both “homosexuality is just ICKY!” and “The Bible says it’s wrong.” I can understand either of these as reasons why people think gay marriage is an abomination, and shouldn’t be allowed. However, I think that any rational person would see that, in a country with strong separation of church and state, which values individual rights and frowns on discrimination, they’re not a good basis for laws. Marriage does indeed have a religious component, but that can be separated from the civil/legal one-- as seen by the existence of marriage by judges, or the fact that some religions already perform same-sex marriages.
The more serious argument is that same-sex marriage will ‘damage traditional marriage.’ This is a statement which, on the surface, makes NO DAMN SENSE WHATSOEVER, and so has been widely parodied. After all-- the gays didn’t follow Britney around and say, “You! You’ve been married about four days-- that’s enough! Quit it!” But I think I’ve got hold of what it actually means, and it’s not that gay marriage destroys straight marriage-- it’s that gay marriage is a _symptom_ of what they see as the crumbling of the institution of marriage. And I think they’re actually right.
See, for almost all of human history, sex has led to children, who must be cared for in order for society to continue. This meant that there had to be some way to make sure there would be someone to support any sexually active woman, as someone with a small child or several large ones has a very hard time taking care of herself. Some cultures dealt with this by having an extended family around that provided for all its members. Ours dealt with it by setting up marriage-- a man and woman could only have sex if they were in a committed relationship to each other, in which they would support and take care of each other and any children who the woman gave birth to. This meant that most children and full-time parents were supported most of the time, most people had constant access to a sexual partner. Just as significantly in our patriarchal culture, it also meant that there was an orderly dispersion of property and titles. Of course, it wasn’t a perfect system: many, perhaps most, humans are not naturally monogamous, and so lots and lots of people had sex outside of marriage. Some cultures set up provisions for the children produced... for the most part, American society didn’t. Instead, people were taught that monogamy was natural and desirable. Since the Judeo-Christian texts were written after marriage had developed as a system, these texts helpfully emphasized that marriage was the only place where sex was permissable, and Americans historically took that to heart. While calling it ‘sin’ wasn’t enough to stop people from having sex outside of marriage, it did mean that those who did were limited only to those who _had_ to, because lust, poverty or coercion was too great not to-- a much smaller number than would have liked to, given the option. An entire culture grew up with sex as sin-- barely permissable within marriage for the purpose of production of children, and still unspeakable-- as a central tenet.
This was all necessary because, before birth control, sex automatically led to children, and it was crucial for the continuation of society that children be cared for and educated. And marriage is, indeed, the simplest system for assuring that that happens-- it brings together the smallest number of people possible for cooperation. Considering how complicated people are, two is a lot to manage.
However, as soon as birth control became practical, it was no longer crucial to rigidly control sex. That meant that the primary historical justification for monogamous marriage no longer exists. As long as one takes reasonable precautions, it’s possible to have as much sex as one wants without producing children who need to be taken care of.
The other reason that monogamous marriage is no longer strictly necessary is the rise of literacy and litigacy; the rise of lawyers. In earlier times, when few people wrote wills, it was necessary to have a clear way of determining heirs: a man had to know that his son was truly his, in order for it to be clear to everyone that that son should inherit his property. Nowadays, we have blood-tests, and nearly everyone writes wills. A man can know damn well his son is his son, if genes are what matter to him. Whether they do or not, a man can also decide how his property will be transmitted, and leave a legal, indisputable testament to that decision. A man-- or a woman-- can leave his/her property to children, other relatives, the ASPCA... it’s now a made and witnessed decision, not a social convention.
Also, women’s liberation has in many ways removed the necessity for marriage in order for them and their children to be supported. Women can hold jobs, can control their own property. This means two things. First, it means that property no longer moves in strictly patriarchal lines, which puts greater weight to the matter of wills versus social convention. Secondly, and probably more importantly, it means that women can operate as independent entities, without needing to be supported by father or husband. It is now more possible than ever before for a woman to raise her children without a husband to support her. It is also possible, and more socially acceptable than ever before, for a woman to live single for as long as she likes, doing precisely as she pleases. A woman’s sexuality is no longer her sole resource for gaining posessions and a livelihood.
So, the situation has changed fundamentally, becuase the things marriage was originally designed for-- to make sure that children are not produced who will not be cared for, and that property will move in an orderly fashion-- can be achieved in other ways. The control of the results of human sexuality was a monumental task, and monogamous marriage was, more or less, a good stop-gap solution. However, it also had several serious problems. The most serious of these is that humans are not naturally monogamous-- if we were, ‘adultery’ wouldn’t even be a concept, let alone something which, according to Peggy Vaughn’s book “The Monogamy Myth,” about 60% of married men and 40% of married women will at some point do. We’re not biologically programmed to be monogamous-- it’s not in our evolutionary interests. The fact that we’ve managed to believe we should be attests to the impressive power of culture, religion and common sense in overcoming biology.
And with the coming of birth control, which meant that common sense no longer fought against obeying our biological instincts (we didn’t have to think about getting pregnant as an automatic consequence of sex), culture shifted rapidly to allow people to do what we had, at heart, wanted to do for a long time: get laid. A lot. Right _now_, when our bodies demanded, not in however long it took for all the rites and rituals to be fulfilled. We had lost one of the major reasons to fight our instincts, and the result was a great confusion.
The cultural shift was also, I believe, the reason that homosexuality became so much more socially acceptable. There always have been and always will be (barring complex genetic engineering) people with homosexual inclinations, in every time and culture. I’m not sure why-- it may be simply a mutation like nearsightedness or genetic diseases, which doesn’t interfere with reproduction enough to prevent it being passed on. Or it might, on the other hand, be a survival enhancer-- I’ve heard it argued that homosexuals, evolutionarily, helped their siblings to reproduce by being another adult around to take care of the siblings’ children instead of having their own. In either case, though, people who are purely homosexual are a very small part of the population. It was necessary to teach 95% to 98% of the population that “Sex outside of marriage is sin,” in order to keep them from having sex that would lead to uncared-for children -- if you’re going to try to control the major driving instinct of humanity, you need to be consistent, and have a HUGE weight of persuasion on your side. It wouldn’t have been worthwhile to try to teach the more complex message “Sex which may lead to uncared-for children is a bad idea.” With the coming of birth control, as sex outside of marriage ceased to be taboo, the choice of sexual partner also became less of an issue.
The major difficulty, as I see it, is that the culture which has built up over the centuries of marriage has not yet shifted completely. The culture of marriage, the attempt to control sex, used a lot of teachings-- marriage is holy, sex outside of it is sin, is meaningless, is perversion, is cheap, is not fulfilling the true function of sex. These beliefs deriving from the defense of marriage have gone bone-deep, archetype-deep. We are confused about their origin. For example, take virginity. Virginity is no longer a requisite for a woman to marry-- both because it’s possible for her to have sex without risking conception, and because medical technology allows us to track a pregnancy and know exactly whose child she carries. A man who marries a non-virgin does not, therefore, have to worry that he will be saddled with raising another man’s child unknowing. However, virginity has an entire set of emotional baggage accompanying it. We are told that virginity is a ‘gift’ from one newlywed to another, that waiting until marriage will make sex ‘special’-- where any sexually experienced person will tell you that the first time is awkward and unskilled, no matter _how_ you feel about the other person. Still, the mythos of virginity remains. Virgin means pure, unspoiled, without sin-- Mary is the Blessed what? Similarly, religion, based on several-thousand year old written texts, cannot change with the cultural shifts-- unless it claims that the text is of its time, and in some ways, no longer applicable. But ino order to see God as unchanging, many people must assume that God meant us to go on as we did before technology changed, and so live by a religious stricture that applies, logically, to people having birth control no more than the stricture to till the fields in a certain way applies to people who do not farm.
The sum of all of this, is, of course, that marriage no longer means what it used to mean. It might, in fact, be worthwhile to do away with the institution completely. However, I don’t propose to do this-- I, in fact, propose to marry next year. At this point, we as a culture don’t hang onto marriage for the reasons we started it-- we hang onto it because we want to. I believe that many of the meanings we’ve added over the centures to make it more appealing than just the control of sex have created something which I think quite worth entering into.
Right now, in my view, marriage is something two people do because, as mature adults, they have determined that they are ready to make a long-term commitment to making a family together. They are no longer drawn together just by sex, or by societal pressure, or by the need to carry on their family title and property-- they come together as a union of two individuals who want to be more than two individuals. It’s a choice made freely to better pursue happiness by choosing a partner in life, who will help one achieve one’s goals (which goals often include children, and I do think that marriage remains the best way of raising them. Single parenthood is certainly more practicable than earlier, but is not, in my opinion, ideal. Even two people are outnumbered by a three-year-old-- the more parents, the better.) and lead a fulfilling life.
Now, the above, I realize, sounds very shallow compared to the goals of “obeying God’s will” and “continuing the human race.” For the latter, though, I think our genes betray us. There are, I think 10 billion people on the earth, far more than are necessary to continue the species-- possibly more than the earth can easily support. Our genes may program us to reproduce as much as we possibly can, but it’s a mistake to do so. Yet any reason we give for having children besides “our bodies tell us to” is ultimately about personal satsifaction. Similarly, “obeying God’s will” is an iffy reason when there is so much disagreement about what God wants and whether there is, actually, a God. If a couple believes that the reason to get married is that it’s what God wants... well, more power to them, but I don’t think it’s the main reason that most people marry today. "Obeying God" is no longer necessary to prevent society's collapse-- in the area of marriage, birth control does the same thing. At heart, if we are religious, we obey God because it makes us happier to obey God-- it puts us in a world that makes sense, where we have purpose and know what is the right thing to do.
In fact, I think that the problem with marriage touches on one of the major problems of the 20th/21st century-- humanity has to come up with reasons for living besides survival. Americans, for the most part, can achieve food, water, and shelter and still have most of their time and energy available to do Something Else. For the tens of thousands of years of human evolution, that wasn’t the case. Now that it is, we find that the other things we try don’t have the same visceral urgency as survival of ourselves and our offspring. Pursuing our happiness is what we have left as a goal, and marriage, at this point, is designed to help us achieve it.
However, it takes a long time for thinking patterns to change, and change is often painful. The “defenders of traditional marriage,” in my view, are defending not the legal definition of marriage, but the whole way the human race views its purpose. Living for personal satisfaction, in prior times, like when the Bible was written, meant living at someone else’s expense. It still does to a certain extent-- there can be no denying that Americans live off the resources of weaker countries, adn the misery of the people therein-- but technology has now advanced to the point where we can, in fact, provide for the survival needs of everyone on earth. That means that the worthwhiile things we can do in this life are either try to achieve our own happiness, or try to change the world to achieve the happiness of other people. Satisfaction, our own or other's, is no longer a matter of selfishness-- it’s the only thing we can strive for in order to give our lives meaning at all. That’s a major change, and not one that most people have realized, I think. It strikes me that the protestors of same-sex marriage look at the world and say, “This is fundamentally different than I have been taught it is-- either my teachings or the world is wrong.” And changing what you believe is very painful, and very difficult. No wonder they’d rather fight bitterly against the people who represent that change than accept it, and completely alter their worldview.
So... I feel for them. But that doesn’t mean I’m not marrying my girlfriend next June.
--R
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-19 01:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-19 03:31 pm (UTC)Will get back to you when I have had the chance to think about it more.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-19 07:38 pm (UTC)For example, I think it's a big, blowsy generalization to say that "humans aren't naturally monogamous" except for a few laggards. Just because people like having sex and committing adultery doesn't mean that they aren't naturally inclined to form pair-bonds. (Haven't seen the book you mention, but as is clear it would take some persuading me.) Our super-sexualized culture often equates urges with courses of action that are supposed to be "natural," but I'm not certain that's so.
And as for the business of virginity . . . it's painful, and definitely in flux, but I don't think it's a hilarious old shibboleth. It does mean something special to people in this culture, without nuns rapping their knuckles. (Check out the first-page article in the NYT Sunday two Sundays ago — I'm afraid it's too late for online — about how teenagers are no longer immediately obeying their hormones, without any church-group prodding.)