In Defense of Marriage(a sermon delivered at the Hamburg Unitarian Universalist Church on May 15, 2005.) Birds do it. Bees do it (although in a strange, kind of hippy-commune sort of way), and even gibbon apes, wolves, and some voles do it. We do it. We mate for life. But has it always been so? The short answer is, obviously, “No!” Just taking a look at recent divorce rates will show you that humankind’s natural state is not necessarily one of life-long monogamy. The divorce rate in America currently hovers around 0.4 percent. That sounds low until you realize that means that 4 out of every 1,000 people in America get divorced every year. That’s about a million divorces per year. It is currently estimated that somewhere near 50 percent of all marriages in the U.S. will end in divorce. And America, despite our reputation as being a fickle people, is actually not that abnormal. Certainly we’re near the top in this inauspicious list, but Guam, Russia, Cuba, and the Ukraine all hover near the 0.4 percent mark, while the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, and Finland are in the 0.3 percent range, with Canada, New Zealand, and Australia not far behind that. But like love and sex, marriage and divorce are nothing new. My good friend Herb Kauderer, a local poet of some renown, says that every generation likes to believe that they have invented sex. I think this is partly because we all like to think we are freer and more adventurous than our forebears, but I also think it stems from a total inability in the modern teenager to believe their parents have ever had sex (the obvious facts to the contrary not withstanding). But it only takes a cursory glance at the sexual practices of such ancient peoples as the Greeks and Egyptians (gloriously depicted in numerous pieces of ancient artwork) to realize there is nothing sexually new under the sun. Such is the same with marriage and divorce. Nobody knows if our earliest ancestors lived in marital bliss or not. The lack of proper housing suggests that communal living was probably the norm. But if you go back into the furthest reaches of recorded history – back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Babylonians – it is a documented fact that people not only got married…and divorced… for over 5,000 years (and probably longer), but that the prenup is as old as … well if not Adam, certainly Moses. In the world of Hammurabi, ruler of Babylon some 4,000 years ago, marriages were arranged between the suitor and the father of the bride. And, according to the Hammurabi code, a contract was necessary to make a marriage. Of course, at the time, the most important item negotiated in these contracts was the Bride Price. But this is not at all what you might think. It was indeed an amount of money, land, or property that the suitor paid to the father of the bride (or a brother if the father was gone). But this Bride Price was almost always, then, included with the dowry – given back to the husband so that he could keep his Bride (and her prospective offspring) in the custom to which she had become accustomed. You see, the contract…and the bride price…was actually a negotiated prenuptial agreement. The dowry, including the amount paid for the bride, were administered by the husband, but had to be kept separate, in case of death or divorce. The bride price was intended to support the wife and children for the rest of their lives no matter the outcome of the marriage. And although only married women could be accused of infidelity (adultery was defined as having sex with a married woman – the man’s marital status was never a concern), women in ancient times had just as much right to sue for divorce as men. Of course, if children were present, the courts had to get involved. But if a childless couple decided to separate, it was simply a matter of returning the bride price and the dowry and moving back in with daddy. Ancient Egypt was similar, although women had many more rights. In Babylon, it appears that women were subject to their fathers (or oldest brother) until married, and then subject to their husbands after marriage. This concept of obeying the husband survived, it seems for many thousands of years. In Egypt, women could own property, borrow money, sign contracts, appear in court as a witness, initiate divorce, and, of course, even be pharaoh (but only under special circumstances). But when it came to household chores, ancient Egypt looked a lot like pre World War II America. The women stayed home to care for house and family, while the men earned a living (and were once again allowed to have as much extra-marital sex as they wanted as long as it wasn’t with another man’s wife). You see, marriage, it appears, was more an institution created to help insure a stable community and allow for the growth of the nation (or tribe) than an ultimate expression of love between two people. It was more important to procreate and expand the population in this harsh world than to find true happiness. (And, I suspect, the institution of marriage helped cut down on the amount of hostility between men within the society over both the ownership of their women and the parentage of their children.) Now, that’s not to say that love didn’t enter into the equation. There is plenty of evidence that love of spouse and children was an important part of Egyptian society. Also, there is abundant love poetry found in the written record of all of these ancient civilizations, along with those marriage contracts. Women and men did marry for love even 5,000 years ago. It just wasn’t the norm. In ancient Greece, for example, men routinely didn’t marry until their late twenties or early thirties, and then only out of civic duty. And their choice of partners, it seems, was governed more by whether they could control their wife than whether or not love was part of the mix. You see, these thirty-year-old men most often took 12 to 14-year-old brides. But what I find interesting in all of this is that we find actual written records of marriages and divorces dating back as far as the earliest written documentation of anything at all. This has a couple of implications. First, like the laws of the time, these rules of marriage were not invented, whole cloth (or whole tablet, I guess) at the time of the earliest recorded documents. Of course not. They were more likely the compilations of the accepted practices of society that, for the first time, could be passed down in some fashion other than orally. Marriage must have existed in prehistoric times as well. How far back, we’ll never know, because there’s just no historical record of the first marriage. Secondly, and this is much more important for our present-day debate on what constitutes a marriage, and who can get married. The history of marriage was not intertwined with the history of religion at the beginning. It was a simple legal contract entered into for the good of society and the benefit of the families involved. In fact, marriage didn’t become a religious event in Europe until the Middle Ages. Before the 9th Century, marriages did not, as a rule, involve the Church at all. Up until the twelfth century, the only Church involvement was a simple blessing by a priest who then witnessed and insured that an agreement had been made between the couple. It wasn’t until the 13th Century that Upper Class English Weddings became a Church event. But even then, the Priest was merely there to bless the couple. It wasn’t until the Council of Trent in 1563 that marriage became a legally binding church ceremony with two other witnesses. By the 18th Century, religious weddings had become common throughout Europe. So, the simple fact is that other than recording in an official capacity that a marriage had taken place, there has been little Church involvement in marriage for the majority of recorded history. A few hundred years at most. Sure, each religion had its own rules on who could or could not get married. But these varied widely. The UUA has an interview with E.J. Graff, author of the Beacon Press book What is Marriage For?, wherein she says:
Her point is this: “the history of marriage is the history of debate and change and disagreement.” Marriage, it seems is much more malleable than the Religious Right in this country would have us think. Marriage, which from the dawn of recorded time (and probably before) had been viewed as a civic duty – as Graff puts it: “an obligation to produce heirs and increase the tribe,” has become, only in recent times, narrowly defined and controlled through religion. In her Brief History Marriage, Samantha Callan, quotes Pope Nicholas I, who said the following about marriage in 866 A.D.: “Let the simple consent of those whose wedding is in question be sufficient; if the consent be lacking in a marriage, all other celebrations, even should the union be consummated, are rendered void.” This is the Pope sanctioning the dissolution of marriage in the eyes of God. So where does this bring us today? Much of the polemic in the debate over same sex marriage is religious in nature. It is against God’s law, they say. But this is the same God who allowed Jewish uncles to marry their nieces (and then to divorce) if they so wished. This is the same God who was not even present when marriage was created, by man, at the dawn of civilization. This is the same God who allowed the United States of America to ban inter-racial marriage until only the last half of the 20th century. I was appalled to find that state laws barring interracial marriage were not struck down until after World War II. The first such law to be removed was in California in 1948. It took another twenty years before the U.S. Supreme court overturned the remaining state laws barring interracial marriage, stating that “the freedom to marry” belongs to all Americans. Ten years later, in 1978, the Supreme Court declared marriage is of “fundamental importance to all individuals,” and declared it to be “one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’” noting also that “the right to marry is part of the fundamental ‘right to privacy’” in the U.S. Constitution. So how do we now justify taking that right away from an entire class of people? Simply put, we cannot. There can be no justification in this free society, governed by arguably the foremost constitutional document ever written – a document that even the Religious Right argues was created with Christian morals in mind – there can be no justification outside of personal disdain against homosexuals fostered by centuries of religious dogma – there CAN BE NO rational justification to EVER limit the freedom of any person to choose who they wish to marry. Period. Last year, the high court in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ruled that discrimination against gay couples in matters relating to marriage violated the Commonwealth's constitution. This ruling stands even though the Governor decried the ruling, stating that he “agreed with 3,000 years of history.” Well, as we’ve seen, the concept of marriage extends far beyond 3,000 years, and far beyond the long arm of the Church. But interestingly, there is, apparently, as much (if not more) historical support in favor of the high court’s ruling than against it. In a published letter to the Governor of Massachusetts, historian Gary Leupp rebuked the governor for invoking the specter of history before checking his facts. Here is a small portion of the letter:
But history aside, it’s simply time to realize that marriage, like all of this world’s institutions, is a fluid thing that has changed, must change, will always change as society changes around it. We’ve come a long way from the time when women were purchased from their fathers, often for the price of a slave, and transferred like property from one household to another. We’ve come a long way from the time when divorce was a social stigma that followed people (women especially again) to their graves. We’ve come a long way from the time when inter-racial or even inter-faith marriages were seen as an affront to nature or to God. Are we not free to choose in this country? Isn’t that the one truth that we cling to – that freedom should reign from sea to shining sea? Isn’t that what our government has told us was the reason we went to war with Iraq? To bring freedom to a country that was enslaved? So, will we now enforce Christian morals on a mostly non-Christian world as we try to force those same mores on our own people? Or will we, finally, open our eyes, and realize that a freedom is a freedom only so long as it is protected for everyone, and not just for those who agree with a certain religious point of view. Tuesday, May 17, 2005, marks the first anniversary of all those same-sex couples who were married in Massachusetts a year ago. It is my hope that Massachusetts becomes the new California in this fight against marital discrimination in our country. Too many states have fallen to public pressure by a vocal and adamant minority and passed laws banning same-sex marriage. If we are to call ourselves a free society. If we are to believe that we have the moral authority to bring our democratic way of life to the rest of the world. If we are to EVER live up to the hopes and dreams of those great men who built our country and declared that “all men are created equal.” Then these laws must be struck down, just as the laws against interracial marriage were struck down forty years ago. |
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