Same-Sex Marriage Talk
To opponents of same-sex marriage, it seems so simple. Let's just preserve marriage the way it has always been.
"OK,'' says feminist biblical scholar Mary Ann Tolbert. "What is that?''
The fact is from issues of divorce, race, religion and the role and rights of the partners, the concept of marriage has always been in play.
And it continues to be today, including in this country. <>
Many would be surprised to know that as recently as 1967 in many states it was illegal for a mixed race couple to be granted a marriage license.
An even bigger surprise, given current debate over same sex marriages,
is that when the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of interracialmarriage, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that the "freedom to marry or
not marry a person of another race resides in that individual.
'' Note that Warren wrote "person,'' and refers to "persons'' -- not man or woman -- throughout the opinion.
So, when President Bush said yesterday that the country needed a constitutional amendment to beat back attempts to redefine marriage in
this country, at least some legal experts suggested he was far too late.
The institution of marriage has changed and morphed constantly through the years, and almost always to a hue and cry from those who worry about the structure of traditional marriage.
As the Massachusetts Supreme Court said in last year's ruling to allow same-sex marriage in that state, "alarms about the erosion of the
'natural order of marriage' were sounded over the demise of anti-miscegenation (mixed race marriage) laws, the expansion of rights
of married women and the introduction of no-fault divorce.''
Or perhaps you would be safer going with the strict biblical definition.
That gets a little tricky too.
"It is really much more complex in religious perspective than you might think,'' says Tolbert, the George Atkinson Professor for Biblical
Studies at the Pacific School of Religion. "What the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) suggests as a general model for marriage is polygamy. You
look at someone like Solomon who had 200 wives and 600-and-some concubines. Or Abraham, who had his first child by his wife's slave. It sounds as if it was quite normal.''
Tolbert, who is also the executive director for the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry, points out that marriage didn't even become a sacrament of the church "until the 12th century.
For the first 1,200 years (A.D.) in Europe there were civil unions by town or village government.''
Nor does the New Testament offer much help. In fact, by some selective readings it sounds as if the Bible has mixed views of marriage. As Tolbert says, Jesus says very little about marriage, and both he and Paul were single men. And Paul, at least, recommended chastity.
"Marriage is not a sin,'' says Paul in First Corinthians, "but it is better to be unmarried.''
"The Bible is an incredibly important sacred icon in our culture,'' says Tolbert. "But I just think a lot of people don't read it.''
Although same-sex marriage will be the subject of sermons and a source of debate in churches, the real battle as the president has framed it
will be in the courts. His point, he says, is that "local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization.''
If so, it won't be the first time.
The roles of the people in a civil union have changed dramatically over history, including the recent history of the United States. It begins in
the 1700s and 1800s, when married woman actually lost many of their legal rights when they agreed to get married. After marriage, they were
not allowed to own property, pay taxes or sign a contract. Any money women earned outside the home was to be turned over to their husbands.
"You go back to the early years of this country,'' says Joan Hollinger, a professor at Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley specializing in
child welfare and family law, "and you find that the wife became a kind of possession of the husband." It was not until the latter half of the
19th century, she said, that married women reacquired the rights they had when they were single.
As recently as 1920, the states of Arizona, Florida, Louisiana and New Mexico hadn't changed their laws.
A far greater change in marriage law came in 1948, when California was the first state to make it legal for a couple of mixed race to be
married. It took another 19 years for the U.S. Supreme Court to make the same ruling. So until 1967, in many states, a couple of mixed race could not get a marriage license, and if they went to another state and were married, when they returned home they could be arrested.
"When I tell my students that was in 1967,'' said Hollinger, "they sort of gasp.''
And if you think the commotion over at City Hall is something, Hollinger says you should have been in the South when attempts were being made to
overturn the anti-miscegenation laws.
"I hear Gov. Schwarzenegger talking about riots,'' she says. "I was in Mississippi in 1964. Compared to that, this is a lovefest.''
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