To Love and Honor, American Style...
The next time some bobbleheadded bonehead like Dr. James Dobson starts yammering about how marriage will got to hell in a handbasket if the priviledge is granted to gays and lesbians, hand him a copy of this editorial by Stephanie Coonts titled The Heterosexual Revolution in the NYTimes, and remind him that it started going to hell way back in the days of Jefferson and Washington.
Now, I've been asserting for quite some time that the nasty reality of heterosexual marriage is that it is a social contract devoid of all the romance we project onto it in our modern days, and Coontz (author of Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage) provides a a wonderful explanation of just how we got to thinking that marriage was all about love and less about duty and obligation.
Alot of the changes in marriage have to do with the Enlightenment (think about that fancy notion of the "pursuit of happiness"), with contraception and assisted reproduction, and the dismantling of laws that condified the notion of a man as the "head and master" of his famiy--the last of those laws repealed as late as the 1970's.
If said yammering bobblehead then raises a protest about overblown notion of romance in marriage, question hoe he (or she, you never know) views his/her spouse and their respective marriage. Ask these few either/or questions: Is it a marriage based on love, or on a commandment derived from the word of God? Does the wife have the right to refuse her husband's affections, and does he then have the right to force his affections on her? And, if she had not produced a sufficient number of children, would he have divorced her, rather than consider her his life-partner and grow old with her?
The more un-romantic aspects of heterosexual marriage, alluded to in the above questions, are rarely considered by the opponents of homosexual marriage. I'm sure that if they were, and if they were hammered home under the glaring lights of a secular pre-marriage classroom, more people would run shrieking from the room and never marry. At all. Ever.
Just the notions of the woman losing rights to hold property, losing the right to refuse her husband's advances, losing the right to determine when and how many children she might have, and losing the right to "an independent legal existence," at this point it time, I'm sure, would be unappealing not just to women, but also to men. It's been quite awhile since men were the sole heads of households, and alot of them don't even know how to take total charge of things like the finances or the yard and housework. Men are now very comfy sharing the burdens of family life with their wives, and I don't think too many of them, if they really thought about it, would want that level of home responsibility along with their job responsibilities that being the historic Head of Household implies.
And with the way our world is now, if they want it, they are free to have it. Nothing's stopping them from constructing an old-fashioned marriage.
So, if nothing's stopping a straight couple from fashioning an old-fashioned male headded household among the newfangled co-operative romantic-based households that have been in some form or another in some social class or another since the Days of the War for Independence, why should those old-fashionistas be so darned concerned about homosexual marriage?
They've got their freedom, so why stop some other folks' pursuit of happiness?
And if the they are still so darned concerned about God frowning on homosexual marriage, I'd point them in the direction of the
United Church of Christ's position on homosexual marriage, and leaving the final decision to perform those marriages up to individual congregations....not to mention reminding them that it was the UCC, all those many years ago, that was instrumental in promoting those horrifically society-changing practices as "the abolition of slavery and the fight against racial segregation."
I don't know why so many straights are so insecure about the sanctity of marriage and why they have to raise the specter of God's Laws, when throughout the history of this country, God's Laws regarding marriage have been slowly altered by Americans without God's permission and don't seem to have earned God's wrath...heck, we won WWII didn't we? These alterations were made in part because of the evolving roles of both men and women within the society. So, when you diffuse hot-button religious thinking and look at marriage from a pragmatic historical and evolving legal perspective, marriage's sancitity was breeched way before anybody even knew about gays and lesbians.
And maybe that sanctity was breached because nobody, even stodgy guys like Jefferson and Washington, were all that happy with the old-fashioned un-romantic notions of marriage anyway.
If it was all that perfect way back when, it never would have needed to be changed.
Now, I've been asserting for quite some time that the nasty reality of heterosexual marriage is that it is a social contract devoid of all the romance we project onto it in our modern days, and Coontz (author of Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage) provides a a wonderful explanation of just how we got to thinking that marriage was all about love and less about duty and obligation.
Alot of the changes in marriage have to do with the Enlightenment (think about that fancy notion of the "pursuit of happiness"), with contraception and assisted reproduction, and the dismantling of laws that condified the notion of a man as the "head and master" of his famiy--the last of those laws repealed as late as the 1970's.
If said yammering bobblehead then raises a protest about overblown notion of romance in marriage, question hoe he (or she, you never know) views his/her spouse and their respective marriage. Ask these few either/or questions: Is it a marriage based on love, or on a commandment derived from the word of God? Does the wife have the right to refuse her husband's affections, and does he then have the right to force his affections on her? And, if she had not produced a sufficient number of children, would he have divorced her, rather than consider her his life-partner and grow old with her?
The more un-romantic aspects of heterosexual marriage, alluded to in the above questions, are rarely considered by the opponents of homosexual marriage. I'm sure that if they were, and if they were hammered home under the glaring lights of a secular pre-marriage classroom, more people would run shrieking from the room and never marry. At all. Ever.
Just the notions of the woman losing rights to hold property, losing the right to refuse her husband's advances, losing the right to determine when and how many children she might have, and losing the right to "an independent legal existence," at this point it time, I'm sure, would be unappealing not just to women, but also to men. It's been quite awhile since men were the sole heads of households, and alot of them don't even know how to take total charge of things like the finances or the yard and housework. Men are now very comfy sharing the burdens of family life with their wives, and I don't think too many of them, if they really thought about it, would want that level of home responsibility along with their job responsibilities that being the historic Head of Household implies.
And with the way our world is now, if they want it, they are free to have it. Nothing's stopping them from constructing an old-fashioned marriage.
So, if nothing's stopping a straight couple from fashioning an old-fashioned male headded household among the newfangled co-operative romantic-based households that have been in some form or another in some social class or another since the Days of the War for Independence, why should those old-fashionistas be so darned concerned about homosexual marriage?
They've got their freedom, so why stop some other folks' pursuit of happiness?
And if the they are still so darned concerned about God frowning on homosexual marriage, I'd point them in the direction of the
United Church of Christ's position on homosexual marriage, and leaving the final decision to perform those marriages up to individual congregations....not to mention reminding them that it was the UCC, all those many years ago, that was instrumental in promoting those horrifically society-changing practices as "the abolition of slavery and the fight against racial segregation."
I don't know why so many straights are so insecure about the sanctity of marriage and why they have to raise the specter of God's Laws, when throughout the history of this country, God's Laws regarding marriage have been slowly altered by Americans without God's permission and don't seem to have earned God's wrath...heck, we won WWII didn't we? These alterations were made in part because of the evolving roles of both men and women within the society. So, when you diffuse hot-button religious thinking and look at marriage from a pragmatic historical and evolving legal perspective, marriage's sancitity was breeched way before anybody even knew about gays and lesbians.
And maybe that sanctity was breached because nobody, even stodgy guys like Jefferson and Washington, were all that happy with the old-fashioned un-romantic notions of marriage anyway.
If it was all that perfect way back when, it never would have needed to be changed.
posted by Tish Grier at 11:41 PM
2 Comments:
Love the last line. It was never perfect even though a lot of people try to convince us these days that there was some point in the past when it was, and that we should be returning to that. Great post! I love Coontz's writing, I've read a couple of her books.
I was on the website for Edith Wharton's estate, The Mount (in Lenox, Mass) today...and when I read about how Edith was raised, that her life was all about being paired up with the right man, and that she ended up with a bounder like Teddy Wharton, all I could think of was that she, and so many others, are the reason *why* the institution of marriage had to change.
She was, in a strange way, lucky to be blessed with an immense writing talent, and to be able to channel her dissappointment and frustration with married life into incredible novels. Yet the majority of women of that time were not so lucky.
I think, to some degree, the way she was raised and the mores at the time were a backlash to small gains that were made prior to the Civil War, and the gains that women were making in outposts in the West (where some states had decided all on their own to give women the right to vote).
There's always a backlash to progress. I think some of that's going on now. But there are alot more good, reasoned voice like Conntz's out there, so the backlash won't be as severe as it was in Wharton's time.
I hope.
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