SOCIAL HISTORY AND SSM: Justin Katz replies to George McAllister

A few points on your question about the "social history" of marriage. For one thing, you might consider reading this from Peter Wood.

In short, I don't think the weight of the evidence supports the suggestion that you're making. Often specifics are blown into generalities and exceptions are blown into rules to support the notion that a society's family structure was radically different from ours. Moreover, there are two overriding considerations. First, it is quite a different thing to lay "the groundwork for Western civilization," as you say, than to exist within it (was the sexual behavior of ancient Greece indicative of the old barbarity or the coming civilization?). Second, restricting ourselves to a sociological context, one must see the various family forms within their times to make any assumptions about what was essential to them and what they required.

Andrew Sullivan's "reader" on same-sex marriage, for example, includes accounts of the practice in China. But considering the essence of the relationships, on the female side, they amounted more to sisterhoods that sometimes paired off, and on the male side, they seem most frequently to have been the equivalent of temporary boy prostitution. It mustn't be forgotten that these weren't, apparently, common family forms, and it is more important not to forget what *were* common family forms. The standard marriage at that time, as I understand, was such that marrying a male slave (one account calls the male groom a "buyer") wasn't but so different from marrying a wife; moreover, that being the case, one can understand the appeal of sisterhoods.

This all goes to say that, to the extent such innovations don't hurt the society, it is required that other attributes compensate. American Indian tribes also had some form of gay marriage, but they were considered to be a man marrying something that wasn't exactly a man or a woman. In other cases, same-sex arrangements were one of a variety of "marriages" in a man's polygamous family. I don't think today's homosexuals want to be slaves, non-men or non-women, or the black sheep in a harem. In our society, traditional marriage is one of the bricks through which we've built the modern era, giving us some of the very ideals the absence of which was required in such other societies.
posted by Eve at 11:08 AM | link

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