SOCIAL HISTORY AND SSM: Mark Barton replies to David Kuner

David concedes that history is far from a reliable guide to what's optimum, but still wants to point to a core concept of marriage that has endured. I agree that marriage of some description has always been a historical reality, and that the enduring theme has always been bonding together people involved in acts of procreation. At the same time, there are several ways for this to be true, and it's far from obvious that history lends much support to the one that is most commonly mentioned on marriagedebate.com and that David probably has in mind: marriage as a supposedly optimum child-rearing environment for kids. There are at least
two other main ways that marriage can be "meant" to bond together
people involved in procreation: as an expression of male property rights over women and children, and as an expression of religious notions of sexual purity.

Of course, all these purposes are entangled, and some aspects of marriage
serve all three at once, but you can still get an idea of what the ancients thought was primary by looking at what they emphasize, especially where there's tension between the goals. For example, the author of the marriage laws in Deuteronomy (e.g., 22:13ff) clearly considered women to be property, first of fathers, then of fiancees and husbands, and apparently considered marriage mostly as a scheme for ensuring that the property remained untampered with. In this view, marriage is less about ensuring that kids are raised by fathers than ensuring that men don't have to raise kids fathered by others.

One must seriously consider the possibility that institutions have been skewed towards the interests of the individuals with the power, i.e., the men, at the expense of those who need the protection, i.e., the children.

Even to the extent marriage may have arisen for less than admirable reasons, it could still be true that it was a much better child-rearing environment than anything else. My point is that all one can conclude from its historical persistence is that it benefited somebody. If David wants to argue that it benefited children primarily, he needs to supplement his argument.
posted by Eve at 11:08 AM | link

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