Marriage - I am ignorant and need a history lesson.

I have been contemplating the gay marriage issue. Here is my thoughts:

Marriage is and has been a religious institution for 2,000 years. Civil Unions have always been a, well, civil (thus governmental) affair for a long time.

How can we, in our lows, ban a concept that is essentially not our jurisdiction? I can see how we could vote that certian people would not be allowed into civil unions - but how can we even go so far as to say that certain groups of people, that have not been explicitly denied civil unions are not allowed them?

Furthermore, marriage seems to be a matter of the church - how can we deny something that is not a government function.

Or is it that marriage actually is mostly a civil concept and thus can be regulated?

What is the history of marriage - and how does that play into this question?

I fell like banning marriage is a non sequiter. Am I just drunk?

TF

...Demographic statistics from records keeping in England, where social statistics have been compiled for a longer period than any other place show that even as late as the era of the Great War, the majority of reproductive couples were not married...

I agree Lady J. This perspective was what I was missing.

This debate, then, IS a civil thing.

setanta

I agree with you. Marriage, as a civil contract, is designed to protect and secure the property, specially in it's transmission. And transmission of property means reproduction, a next generation of owners. For centuries, sons conceived out of matrimony had no successional rights.

But we must not forget the religious dimension of marriage. As we see in Fishin' reply, that dimension is still alive. And here, also, marriage is seen as the only acceptable way of assuring reproduction.
Gays cannot have children, within a gay relation.

I think the greatest opposition to gay marriage is not a civil one - today, there is no reason to refuse marriage to two people who live together, in a common economy - but religious.
It is the problem, as in many other areas of society, of the intrusion of religion in civil institutions, giving them a "sacred nature" they never had before. And, since I have little sympathy for religion, that intrusion is very dangerous, and still present. More, perhaps, than 30 years ago.

I'm leaving nothing out, the religionists are trying to foist their sacramental prejudices onto a civil institution which is not and never has been concerned with sacredotal issues.

In fact, injecting religion into such a civil contract is one of the clearest cases of attempting to impose an establishment of religion. Even in the darkest days of established religion in England, the days of the Test Act and the Occassional Conformity Act, when religious creeds other than the established church's were actively and legally discriminated against, common law imposed no religious test or principle on the marriage contract. It simply has never been historically an issue until the right wingnuts in this country began having hissy fits over the prospect of gay couples marrying.

I think, then, if the fact of the matter is that we are trying to legislate our religious convictions with out civil matters - we are going about this wrong. There is no reason to do so, simply outlaw it in your place of worship and your sphere of influence has been taken care of.

I am wondering if you think we can ignore the religious aspect outright?

IMO, the easiest way aournd all of this is to simply replace the word "marriage" in civil law with something else (civil unions is the current term most often used but it could be someting else too.) and give the word "marriage" back to the religious for a description of their religious ceremonies.

LMAO You left out quite a bit. If there is anyone displaying their prejudices it's you.

I've done quite a bit of searching about on the history of marriage in replying to these threads on A2K over the last few years and I've yet to find any reference to any society where marriage was a civil institution prior to it being a religious one. In every society I've read about marriage was a religious activity that was later adopted into civil law. The civil contract was injected into religious practice - not the other way around. The person that started this thread asked for the history of marriage. You've been very careful to couch your words in terms of "civil marrige" but neglected to mention that civil marriage originated from within the religious concept and that there is a lengthy history of marriage prior to the existance of English Common Law.

Now the followers of those relgions are being told by people like you that marrige is entirely a civil matter and that they should keep their religious opnions to themselves and keep their religious views out of an ostensibly secular civil issue.

I suspect that if we declared Hanukkah to be a secular federal holiday period and, since the menorah is a religious symbol, discarded it and replaced it with a swastika you'd hear an immediate public outcry over it (and rightly so).

Instead we've taken a ceremony that had siginficance to numerous religions and turned it into a civil affair and are now in a debate over whether or not it should encompass a practice that those religions find offensive. Then when the followers of those religions object they're told "To bad, suck it up!".

fishin' wrote:

LMAO You left out quite a bit. If there is anyone displaying their prejudices it's you.

So in fact have you. You're very careful to view the institution of marriage only as it appears in common law in the christian era. Howerver, i find it less laughable than do you, because i see you as attmpting to selectively view the record in order to impose your agenda, and that's not very funny.

I've done quite a bit of searching about on the history of marriage in replying to these threads on A2K over the last few years and I've yet to find any reference to any society where marriage was a civil institution prior to it being a religious one. In every society I've read about marriage was a religious activity that was later adopted into civil law. The civil contract was injected into religious practice - not the other way around. The person that started this thread asked for the history of marriage. You've been very careful to couch your words in terms of "civil marrige" but neglected to mention that civil marriage originated from within the religious concept and that there is a lengthy history of marriage prior to the existance of English Common Law.

So then, you are aware that there were three recognized types of marriage in republican Roman society: the confarreatio, or ritual sharing of the libum farreum--the marriage cake, a practice limited in early Roman society to the patrician order, and symbolic of the unification of the gens represented by the couple; the coemptio, or sale of a woman to the prospective husband, symbolic of the acquisition of a gens without the implication of alliance; and finally, the usus, the uninterrupted cohabitation for a period of one year. In all three cases, the censors recognized the union of the couple, and were careful to inquire into and record any transactions in property, with the usus understood to involve only the property held by the parties to the union at the time of their cohabitation.

You must also be aware of the legal equality of women in Egyptian society, intentionally codified in the Ptolemaic era, in which marriage required neither a religious nor a legal ceremony, but the simple registration of the rights in property.

I am certain then, that you are aware that among the ancient Kelts, not only did a woman party to a marriage retain her own pre-nuptual rights in property, but that at any time at which she could demonstrate that her personal property exceeded in value the personal property of her husband, she obtained control of the disposition of all community property. This is the crucial aspect of the argument between Maeve and Aillill, which lead to Cooley's Cattle Raid, the most ancient mythic tradition of the Irish--a dispute about whose personal property was of the greatest value.

Therefore, either you are playing fast and loose with the truth about marriage in human history, and willfully ignoring pre- and non-christian institutions of marriage, from which the institutions of marriage among Europeans descend, without exception, into and through the christian era--or you have willfully or ignorantly ignored pre- and non-christian marriage, as inconvenient to your thesis.

Quote:

Now the followers of those relgions are being told by people like you that marrige is entirely a civil matter and that they should keep their religious opnions to themselves and keep their religious views out of an ostensibly secular civil issue.

By people like me? Really, Fishin', you hardly know enough about me to "type" me in such a manner.

I certainly do consider that marriage is and always has been about securing rights in property, and that this has been so since long before christians, and Protestant christians in particular, came along to attempt to inject their special sacremental meanings into the contract.

You have very conveniently and selectively reviewed history here, being most careful to suggest at the outset that this is what i have done, so that you can get that shot in and hope to make the charge stick, before it can be pointed out that this is precisely what you are doing.