This is simply a longer, more relaxed version of the definition-of-marriage stuff from chapter 5. I liked the fun it let me have, but it slowed the pace down too much, and it became predictable.
“Gays and Lesbians have a right to live as they choose; they don’t have a right to redefine marriage for the rest of us.” According to the website for the National Organization for Marriage, which is a national organization against marriage, this is the single sentence most effective at persuading people to oppose marriage equality. Over and over again during the last decade or two we’ve heard arguments about the definition of marriage and redefining marriage and the time-honored definition of marriage and oh my God I want to bash my head in with a dictionary made of granite.
According to what I will henceforth call the National Organization Against Marriage and the other defenders of what they call “traditional marriage,” the definition of marriage is and always has been “a union between one man and one woman,” which means that to allow same-sex couples to marry would indeed be redefining marriage.
Looking around, you can see that pretty much every married man in America has one wife, and every married woman one husband. So the National Organization Against Marriage’s definition of marriage seems reasonable, right?
Well, sort of.
It starts to come undone a little bit when you consider the “always has been” part. The National Organization Against Marriage and the other Defenders of Traditional Marriage spend a lot of time talking about God and what He tells us in the Bible about how we should live. The problem with this is that the Bible is full of marriages that are not unions between one man and one woman. King David, for example—Jesus’ 28th-great grandfather—had eight wives and ten concubines. King Solomon (David’s son by his eighth wife, Bathsheba) must have had some Oedipal issues, given how far he went to he outdo his father; in the end he had three hundred wives and seven hundred concubines.
“But God punished David and Solomon,” say the Defenders of Traditional Marriage. “Before David and Bathsheba had Solomon she bore a child who died, and Solomon’s wives turned him to idolatry, as a result of which his kingdom was fractured in two, forever sundering the twelve tribes of Jacob.”
Well. It seems pretty clear from the text of the First Book of Kings that David’s dead son was God’s punishment not for marrying Bathsheba in the first place but for committing adultery with her before doing so and then having her husband murdered so as to take his place; God seemed to cool down pretty quickly, though, and after the dead baby He sent them Solomon, who by all reports was a pretty great kid. And if God was pissed off about wife number eight, why didn’t he punish David for wives number two, three, four, five, six, and seven? He seems to have been fine with those.
(This means, by the way, depending upon your interpretation, that Jesus was an illegitimate child descended from two people who by rights ought to have been put to death before they had any children at all, or, to put it more bluntly, that Jesus was arguably the bastard offspring of criminals.)
And as for those twelve tribes of Jacob, so tragically severed from each other by Solomon’s idolatry—well, what about their source, Jacob and his two wives, Rachel and Leah, and his concubines, Bilhah and Zilhah? What was their punishment? (I keep imagining Jacob and his concubines in a threesome, and he suggests that one of them perform a particular act upon his person but in the excitement of the moment his pronunciation is sloppy and the result is disaster.)
And what about Abraham, the founder of the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition, with his three wives, Sarah, Hagar, and Keturah, and his concubines? Their punishment?
It seems to me that, to be strictly accurate, what the Defenders of Tradition Marriage ought to say is that the definition of marriage “is and always has been ‘the union of one man and one woman,’ except before a couple millennia ago, when it was (using David as a measure but being conservative about it) ‘the union of one man and anywhere between one and seven women.’”
Except, actually, that’s not quite right either. How about this? The definition of marriage “is and always has been ‘the union of one man and one woman,’ except a) before a couple millennia ago, when it was ‘the union of one man and between one and seven women,’ b) in seventeenth-century Fukian, China, where it was “the union of one man and one woman or one man,” and c) in nations currently governed by Islamic law, where it’s ‘the union of one man and up to four women.’ “
Oh, wait—drat. Um, how about this? The definition of marriage “is and always has been ‘the union of one man and one woman,’ except a) before a couple millennia ago, when it was ‘the union of one man and anywhere between one and seven women,’ b) in seventeenth-century Fukian, China, where it was ‘the union of one man and one woman or one man,’ c) in nations currently governed by Islamic law and in Israel for Jews who have moved there from nations governed by Islamic law, where it’s ‘the union of one man and up to four women,’ d) among African tribes like the Nuer of Sudan, who allow women to marry women and even, on occasion, ghosts, e) among Indian tribes like the Nayar of Kerala, who allow a woman to marry as many men as she wants, f) among South American tribes like the Caingang, who allow any number of men to marry any number of women, or, spectacularly, g) among Jews, who as of 2028, according to some, will no longer be subject to the thousand-year Edict of Rabbenu Gershom ordering them to practice monogamy so as not to arouse the hatred of Christians among whom they lived.”
Which I admit is a touch awkward as a sound bite, so I understand why the DTMs would want to stick with the one-man-one-woman thing, but isn’t truth important in matters like these?
Maybe what they really mean is that the definition of marriage in the United States of America is and always has been “the union of one man and one woman.” That would be much better.
If it weren’t for the fact that many American Indian tribes don’t just allow people to marry whoever they want, regardless of sex, but also accord same-sexers privileged status. (The federal government, by the way, considers Indian territories “domestic, dependent nations,” which means that they are not governed by the laws of their surrounding states, but the question of federal recognition of marriages in the territories has not yet arisen.)
Maybe the DTMs mean their definition of marriage to apply only to colonized America?
Great, except that the American legal dictionary popular well into the 20th century started its definition the same way, more or less, but then added these words: “Marriage . . . vests in the husband all the personal property of the wife; . . . it also vests in the husband the right to manage the real estate of the wife, and enjoy the profits arising from it during their joint lives. . . . It gives the husband marital authority over the person of his wife. The wife acquires thereby the name of her husband, as they are considered as but one, of which he is the head.” And if that’s the traditional American definition of marriage then I’m not sure it’s entirely fair of the Defenders of Traditional Marriage not to quote the whole thing.
But enough of these linguistic and definitional contortions; rather than continuing them I’m going to suggest that the National Organization Against Marriage and the other Defenders of Traditional Marriage have gotten the definition of marriage wrong. The definition of marriage is not and has never been “the union of one man and one woman.”
Or, put another way: The Defenders of Traditional Marriage have a right to live as they choose, but they don’t have a right to redefine marriage for the rest of us.
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