It’s been more than two weeks since America elected its first African American president, and the excitement is still running high. But that wasn’t the only major story to develop on Election Day. A hotly contested ballot initiative to squash gay marriage in California was also approved, and gay rights supporters are not taking the defeat quietly.
Perhaps they should have seen it coming. Numerous states (including Georgia) have put “Defense of Marriage” amendments to their constitutions on the ballot in recent election cycles and they generally pass by solid margins. It seems clear that a majority of Americans are not ready to extend full marriage rights to gay couples, though that majority does appear to be shrinking, especially among younger folks.
Supporters of the California initiative advanced their case using an argument that has become ubiquitous in these campaigns. Marriage has been a sacred bond between one man and one woman since the dawn of human history, they say, and those who seek to extend marital recognition to gay couples are on a crusade to tear down this pillar of our moral foundation.
It’s a powerful argument, but as we all should have learned in our high school social studies classes, it’s not a very accurate one.
The fact is that the restriction of marriage to one man and one woman is a relatively recent social convention. For a very long time, the standard practice in many societies was for marriage to be a sacred contract between one man and as many wives as he could afford to support. For examples of widely practiced polygamy one need only crack open the Old Testament, where it is reported to have been practiced by many important spiritual figures and is never expressly condemned or forbidden.
But some would argue that polygamy is an ancient practice that has rightly been tossed on the scrap heap of history and that marriage has been recognized by right-thinking persons as a one man/one woman proposition at least since the founding of our great nation. And that is true, but even in the US it is misleading to say that the concept of marriage has been a static one.
Until a Supreme Court decision in 1967 struck them down, numerous states (including Georgia) had laws on the books that made it a crime for white people to marry anyone outside of their race. The fact is that even in America, and even in relatively recent times, the concept of who should be allowed to marry has evolved over time, and most of us would even agree that is a not a bad thing.
But is it time for marriage to be radically redefined once again to accommodate same-sex couples? Frankly the libertarian in me wonders if that is really the question we should be asking ourselves. Maybe the question we ought to be asking is whether or not it is a good idea to rely on the government to decide which unions God does or does not sanction.
I wonder if it is time that we draw a bright line between the civil and the religious aspects of marriage. Maybe a couple looking to build a life together should have the option to engage in a strictly civil union, or be joined together in a religious ceremony, or to do both – separately.
That would leave the debate over which unions God does or does not sanction to the church and the individual, and the debate over which unions the state should recognize to the government and the voting public. It seems like a logical solution to me, but it is probably a non-starter because it fails to appeal to the irrational, emotional side of people that usually takes over all decision making faculties around election time, and at most other times for that matter.
And so, I now return you to the competing chants of “We demand our civil rights!” and “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” that will surely entertain you in the months and years to come. Enjoy.
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