IT LOOKS LIKE MARRIAGE is back in the spotlight, or hot seat, depending on your point of view. Expect a whole new round of “DOMA” (defense of marriage act) ballot initiatives this fall, and not just in California.
The irony is that those who purport to defend the institution of marriage seek to defend something that doesn’t exist anymore—and hasn’t for over 300 years. Or so says Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families and author of “Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage.”
In January Coontz wrote a post—essentially a distilled version of her book—for the Cato Unbound, a blog of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank. In her post she outlines the evolution of marriage.
For most of it history, she says, marriage has been a way to put people in their place and distribute (read: concentrate) wealth and power. Coontz: “[For] millennia, marriage was much more about regulating economic, political, and gender hierarchies than nourishing the well-being of adults and their children. Until the late 18th century, parents took for granted their right to arrange their children’s marriages and even, in many regions, to dissolve a marriage made without their permission.”
Love, compatibility, equity and equality—the things we now associate with marriage—weren’t considered as a basis for matrimony until the Enlightenment, a short 300 years ago.
“These [Enlightenment] marital ideals appalled many social conservatives of the day,” she says. “’How will we get the right people to marry each other, if they can refuse on such trivial grounds as lack of love?’” they asked. “Just as important, how will we prevent the wrong ones, such as paupers and servants, from marrying? What would compel people to stay in marriages where love had died? What would prevent wives from challenging their husbands’ authority?”
Not much has changed. The idea that love is the only prerequisite for marriage, the principle that drives advocates for marriage equality, doesn’t sway conservatives today for the same reason it didn’t sway conservatives 300 years ago: Marriage is about proper societal organization and allegiance to Judeo-Christian morality, not merely the love between two people.
Some so-called defenders of marriage aren’t actually trying to save the institution of marriage as it exists today; it’s already too far gone to be saved. They’d have to turn back the clock to pre-Enlightenment times. Instead, they’re trying to save us from what they see is the socially and morally destructive aspects of homosexuality, and if they can no longer have an outright ban on same-sex relationships (not politically feasible or culturally acceptable anymore), they’ll settle for a ban on same-sex marriage (still politically feasible and culturally acceptable—though I suspect not for much monger, what with Millennials showing an exceptionally high level of tolerance for the untraditional).
Anyway, check out the Coontz’s post. Very illuminating.
