Omnigamy, anyone?
Evan Wolfson, the civil rights attorney and advocate, has said, "The right wing would love nothing more than for us to spend all of our airtime discussing distractions such as polygamy, bestiality and other - from their point of view - doomsday scenarios rather than engage the public about committed same-sex couples being discriminated against."
There's truth to that. And look at the mess we have now with certain citizens denied the right to marry. Different states have different rules, which do not go across state lines. In California, some 18,000 same-sex couples are married and now, with Prop 8 upheld, other same-sex couples cannot marry. Oy. Let's take care of this first, please. However, having people understand that marriage is an ever-changing arrangement to meet individual, social, cultural, and religious needs does open the door to other ways for us to love, bond, procreate, and raise the next generation.
Will the next big controversy be about bestiality? Oh, come on (see one of my earlier posts). Most societies have always had laws against it, animals can't give consent, and most of us don't work and live around livestock. Our horses and cattle - not to mention our Great Danes -- are pretty safe from that discourse.
Will the next big controversy be about polygamy? We've had that discussion before. Once upon a time in America in the nineteenth century, particularly when Utah wanted to join the union, the big controversy around marriage involved polygamy. In 1862, the Congress under Abraham Lincoln enacted the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act that made polygamy illegal throughout the U.S. and its territories. The 1878 Supreme Court decision of Reynolds v the United States said that plural marriage was not protected by the Constitution, as the laws would not interfere with religious beliefs but do govern actions. In 1890, the Church of Latter Day Saints prohibited the practice of polygamy. Of course, having had the discussion before doesn't exclude it from being discussed again.
Where is marriage in the U.S. now in the first decade of the 21st century? If one looks at marriage flat on without a moral or idealist squint, as do the social historians Stephanie Coontz, Andrew J. Cherlin, Paul R. Amato, Alan Booth, David R Johnson, and Stacy J. Rogers, to name a few, one sees a diverse set of practices. With a divorce rate around 50% and out-of-wedlock births somewhere around 40% (these involve cohabiting couples more often than the single-mother scenario usually mentioned in the media), obviously the 1950s ideal of breadwinner husband + homemaker wife + 3.2 kids is not the paradigm. We embrace more options. Cherlin sees us having numerous partnerships, involving nonmarital cohabitation, marriage with or without children, divorce, and re-cohabitation and remarriage with or without children and step-children. Some of us are serial monogamists, some are polyamorous, and some never marry at all.
Our focus since the '60s and '70s has been towards individual growth and expression. We want marriages that fulfill our needs - and, if they don't, we want the opportunity to divorce and re-partner. (Americans always have divorced more than Europeans by large percentages.) We have gone - or are going, as it is a process -- from the institutional marriage to the companionate marriage to the individualistic marriage. That is, in institutional marriage, people marry for economic and religious reasons. In the companionate marriage, people marry for love and friendship. In the individualistic marriage, we look for a mate to meet economic, sexual, and emotional needs as we grow in our own ways. And with women in the work force, with property rights, with no-fault divorce, and with custody rights (in previous centuries the courts favored children going to the father), it would be an unlikely trend for women, except those with particular religious beliefs, to give up those rights in favor of a patriarchal polygamous union.
Does that mean we're heading towards sci-fi pods of twosomes and threesomes and groupsomes à la Samuel Delaney's Triton? Are we heading towards omnigamy? I don't have a crystal ball to predict the future of marriage in America, but omnigamy will probably remain part of science fiction - for now. As a medievalist, as someone who studies the history and literature of the past, I can say that the definition of marriage always changes. Germanic and Celtic societies - as did ancient Hebrew societies -- allowed polygamy, although it was usually practiced only by the wealthy. Charlemagne touted the Christian principles of marriage (one man + one woman, which was a Roman paradigm) and divorce. However, he personally had many concubines by whom he had children as well as marriages that ended in repudiation or death. Some priests and even popes in the first millennium were married. It took several centuries for the church to enforce rules against such unions. Marriage did not become a sacrament in the Catholic Church until the twelfth century, far later than baptism or the eucharist. That is to say, marriage is always being debated and is always in flux; the door is open.
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Everything outside of support for male-female marriage tends to dilute support for that. You don't have to examine the bizarre alternatives, just the common ones, and to note that acceptance of them has risen in exact parallel to one another. Adultery is glamorized now; premarital sex is the mainstay of movie plots increasingly; things considered pornographic years ago are accepted increasingly; cohabitation has quadruped in the last few decades. The approval of homosexuality shouldn't be seen as separate from this at all, nor should transgenderism, and so on. They all tend to reinforce one another, and social approval of them is chipping away at the groundwork of harmonious, orderly community.
"Everything outside of support for male-female marriage tends to dilute support for that."
Only in the minds of the hopelessly insecure.
Yep. Change scares people. However, everything changes.
With a divorce rate around 50% and out-of-wedlock births around 40%, the marital model looks as though it's in the process of changing. Andrew Cherlin has a thoughtful new book, The Marriage-Go-Round, on our changing habits. The concern he raises is for the children, who do not always do so well from divorce to cohabiting friend to divorce.
The divorce and out-of-wedlock birth rates have been skyrocketing because of the every-increasing eagerness to violate social taboos, and approval for homosexual unions is just the latest of these. The attitude toward divorce became casual, the attitude toward adultery became one of fascination, and no one is ashamed at cohabitation any more. Taken together the taboo-breaking craze has been the biggest wrecking ball to an orderly and loving society in history, even more than most of the wars. The inner city is reeling with the disappearance of fathers to exercise discipline and the prisons are bursting at the seams.
Although, I personally am so far to the left, that even the even the democrats appear to me to be "right-wing," I consider myself to be a strict constitutionalist. It is my opinion that since its inception there has been an organized and systematic assault by the conservatives in the United States on the civil liberties written into the US Constitution. The “War on Drugs”; “War on Terror”; “War on Communism” and a host of other wars waged by the right wing are really nothing more than a War on People--an excuse to erode civil rights to the point of non-existence. I invite you to my website devoted to raising awareness on this puritan attack on freedom: http://freethegods.blogspot.com/
Interesting point. Just looked at your site and want to search around it some more.
It's amazing that when you discuss homosexuality with repressed conservatives, they immediately jump on the fringe bandwagon.
When I told my mother that I believe gay people should be given the same rights and respect as straights, her response was: "Do you believe that necrophilia, bestiality and pedophilia are fine, too?"
Can you f-ing believe that???
I laughed at her sad, narrow-minded, fear-based, judgmental perspective.
It's not her fault - she was indoctrinated by the church. Jesus christ!
It is amazing what they jump to. Society changes and the way we form our household units changes along with it. One man and one woman has not always been the model, nor is it the model now in parts of the world. There are many ways to love, share resources, and raise our young.
I don't believe that for a second. You just fabricated a story so you can make a smart-aleck comment about religion.
Different societies have different models and those models change over time.
Polygamy is practiced today in Africa, for example, and in some Islamic societies. If you want to see about marriage models today, check out the Enthnographic Atlas Codebook, which is online.
If you want to read about older European marriage customs, check out "The History of Marriage" by Stephanie Coontz. My absolute favorite is "Law, Sex, and Christian society in Medieval Europe" by James a. Brundage. He follows the debates in canon law from the beginning of the Christian church until the close of the Middle Ages.
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