If Gay Marriage, Why Not Polygamy?

John Corvino is chair of the Department of Philosophy at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Marriage is a Contract

Texas marriage license and certificate, 1879; the couple was married by a justice of the peace, not a clergyman - which made it a legal marriage just as good as any celebrated in church.

I've blogged about this a time or two before, but since a couple of you fellas have touched on this point in some recent comments, seems a good time to put the legal definitions out there so everyone can make use of them as need be.

One big huge ginormous problem with the whole marriage debate is that our oh-so-holy religious kin, friends, and neighbors have got the idea so strong in their heads that marriage was invented by the Christian Church, and is thus The Will of God and eternally unchangeable - and moreover has always and everywhere been exactly the same thing it is right now, except of course for those nasty, perverted, pagan places like Spain, Canada, and Massachusetts.

Wrong.  Dead wrong.  Even your Bible shows you, knucklehead, that people were marrying long before Jesus ever walked the earth.  "Well, the Hebrews started it then, when God gave them the Ten Commandments."  Wrong - don't you ever go to Sunday School, you heathern?  Jesus himself said, "in the days that were before the Flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark" (Matthew 24:38). Before the Flood. You ain't a-gonna argue with the Lord, are ya bubba?  Though there is some folks I've knowed who was just so bullheaded, they would argue with Jesus Christ hisself.


So then, going just strictly by the Bible, you see there was plenty of marrying going on away long before the time of Christ, long before the Ten Commandments, long before Moses or even Abraham.  Long before there was any notion whatsoever of a Christian Church, and long before there was any idee of a Hebrew religion, even.  You can check out Genesis for more references to marriage and husbands and wives, including ol' Noah hisself, who natcherly took his wife along in the boat with him - not to mention his sons and their wives.  You do remember that story, don'cha bud?

There was also marriage going on in every other place on the face of the earth too, whether God liked it or not - you remember who tempted Joseph, don't you?  That's right - the wife of Potiphar, an Egyptian woman.  So marriage wasn't something the Hebrews dreamed up all on their own. 

"Oh well it doesn't matter, because marriage has always been the same, and I want to keep it just like it was in the Bible."  Izzat right, friend?  Well now, how 'bout you consider the fact that Abraham, Jacob, Gideon, David, Solomon, and a lot more of them old boys had several wives, and concubines too - and nobody thought a thing in the world about it, including God himself, who actually encouraged that kind of thing with some of them. 

"Oh but Jesus changed all that." Well now if you're a-gonna start quoting Jesus, how about this saying from his own mouth: "Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her. And if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery" (Mark 10). But say, bubba, that didn't stop you from trading in your old lady for that purty little blonde you got a-stirring your grits now, did it? And you ain't felt a minute's guilt about any o'that, have you bud? Still setting up there in the pews, front and center ever Sunday morning, pleased as punch with yourself, ain't ya?

So enough with "thuh Bye-bul says" routine; it's plain as day from your own scripture that marriage - of all kinds and stripes and shapes - was going on long before there was ever a Christian to be seen on the face of the earth, and also that you straight boys have done just exactly as you please with the rules of it, in every century and in every clime.  So just sit down and shut up about it now.  You might learn something.

Continued after the jump . . . .

WTF: Uganda Protects Polygamy

How.Very.Interesting.  I had no idea.  Honk to Box Turtle Bulletin for this gem from the Ugandan newspaper Daily Monitor:  "Government Asks Court to Protect Polygamy."  Spelling as given in the original:

The state on Thursday moved to protect the principal that a man can have more than one wife.  The Attorney General’s office has responded to a petition seeking to nullify the practice of polygamy by arguing that polgymay is protected by the Constitution under Article 37.

The Attorney General’s defence of the practice that allows a man to marry more than one wife follows a petitioned filed by human rights group, Mifumi Uganda Ltd, on February 8, 2010 asking the Constitutional Court to declare that the practice violated the right to equality between men and women and therefore was unconstitutional.

But Attonery General Khiddu Makubuya stated in his response to the petition, that the law does not stop two consenting adults to choose the marriage of their choice.  He said polygamy was protected under Article 37 of the Constitution which gives everyone the right “to belong, practice, enjoy, profess and promote any culture, tradition and religion of his or her own choice.”

The utter and obvious absurdity here, in a country considering a law to execute gays and lesbians even for merely talking about their sexuality, is so great that anything I could say would seem superfluous.

Marriage, Explained

Found on Joe.My.God. today:  Dan Savage gets right to the heart of the marriage argument.



All that Dan says is correct.  Until straight people changed the laws - with no little opposition from conservatives, mind you - in the late 19th/early 20th century, women in the English-speaking world who married lost their legal identity, being subsumed into that of their husbands':  a single woman, in legal terms, was a femme seule (single woman); a married woman, however, was a femme couvert (hidden woman).  A woman's property, with rare exceptions for very wealthy women, belonged entirely to her husband, down to her smallest personal possessions.  If a husband wanted to, in theory he could sell all her dresses - though of course, I doubt any man who enjoyed three homecooked meals a day and some nookie at night would be that stupid.  But realistically, women had no legal say in the disposition of their money or property:  a husband, for example, could demand that an employer pay his wife's salary to him, not to her.  And so forth.

The point being, until the laws on property and divorce were changed, women were in a legal sense owned by their husbands:  I don't have time now to go look up the references, but I can tell you that both Queen Victoria and Virginia Woolf - and it's hard to think of two more contrasting personalities - at different times in their writings made the identical statement:  women are slaves to men.

But most people's historical knowledge does not extend any further back than their parents' time or their grandparents'; yet they believe that the way mama and daddy lived is the way people always lived, as far back as Adam and Eve.

It just ain't so.  Marriage in the Old Testament often included multiple wives:  go look it up.  But oh my goodness, you never hear the Bible-thumpers arguing to bring back polygamy, do you?  A while back, I wrote a lot more in my post about the history of marriage, and the difference between civil marriage and religious marriage, if anybody wants to read it.  Bottom line:  just as Dan said, straight people have been redefining marriage for centuries, millennia, as it pleased them.  But people forget that:  it didn't happen in mama and daddy's time, so they don't know anything about it.

Legal marriage serves a number of very useful, necessary purposes for society and for individuals.  There's room enough for gay people - my God, it's not like we're asking to abolish it, we just want to get on board with it!  

Not that everybody needs to be married:  I'm thinking of some straight and some gay people.  Some folks are just not equipped for the job, some just can't stand to be "tied down," and some just don't want that much responsibility.  But for those who do, it should be an equal opportunity institution.