We all know that marriage remains one of the world’s most divisive political issues. Christian and conservative activists are always griping that the “blessed union” should be between a man and a woman. Because, you know, God wanted it that way so we could have babies and the such. Author Susan Squire’s new book, I Don’t: A Contrarian History Of Marriage, undercuts such right-wing arguments.
Squire, who happens to be our friend, argues that marriage isn’t based on God’s word at all. In fact, many societies only used marriage for its practical purpose: maintaining a straight lineage. The Israelites, like Sarah and Abraham, whom we’ve pictured above, had strict laws in order to ensure a valid lineage. Sex wasn’t the problem. It was infidelity.
Early Christian leaders, like lust-phobic Augustine, introduced the “marriage bed” not because they feared bastard children or God’s wrath, but for fear of lust. Nuptials were a practicality and it wouldn’t be until Martin Luther and his Reformation that emotions would be injected into the marital mix.
Our editor picks Squire’s brain, after the jump…
[Image by Lars Justinen]
Andrew Belonsky: I’d like to start with a piece I recently read by science fiction Orson Scott Card, in which he wrote, “I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn. Only when the marriage of heterosexuals has the support of the whole society can we have our best hope of raising each new generation to aspire to continue our civilization.”
Susan Squire: What makes him think that everyone doesn’t already support heterosexual marriage? A lack of support for hetero marriage? That’s bullshit.
AB: It’s a zero-sum game for him.
SS: I have yet to understand when conservatives say that gay marriage threatens heterosexual marriage, what the threat would be. Marriage was originally heterosexual – I mean, this whole thing about marriage being between a man and a woman is a religious thing. There is practical reason for that, because, in the past, there was no other way to reproduce. We didn’t have the science. It had to be a sperm and an egg meeting. It made sense that it had to be a man and a woman, because the point of marriage, until recently, was not love or comfort or protection from loneliness. The point was to reproduce and keep the race going.
AB: Well, that’s an argument that comes up…
SS: But reproduction no longer has to occur through heterosexual intercourse. That’s not the only way. Gay marriage is a moral issue. It’s no longer a reproductive issue. Social conservatives people haven’t thought this through. They’re offended by the idea of gay sex.
AB: Do you think that a lot of the social conservative fear comes out of – not even about the perceived ickiness of gay sex? I mean, all sex can be icky. But, do you think it’s the leveling of the playing field. With “man and woman” you have that prescribed role. “The good wife.”
SS: Well, that no longer applies now. Supposedly.
AB: Supposedly, but not necessarily in the minds of these people. To have two women be equal –
SS: Marriage was originally created to control reproduction, to keep the line straight, and also to control who had sex with whom. It cuts down on loose sexual activity. I mean, people still cheat and do whatever, but it still limits you – the double standard was created to limit the woman to one man, her husband. It was always much looser for men, but men were supposed to breed only with their wives, except in Israel, where they could breed with anyone, as long as she wasn’t another man’s wife. That was about property. So, if conservatives are so concerned about gay sex proliferating, if they’re so concerned about peep holes, or whatever, if they find it so loathsome, then they should be behind gay marriage, because marriage controls sex.
AB: Can you explain why Augustine had such a negative view of marriage?
SS: He was terrified of lust.
AB: Marriage was, in his mind, to control lust?
SS: He just basically codified the previous few centuries of Christian thinking. The only place to have sex was in marriage and the only way it wasn’t a sin – even in marriage – was if it was only for procreation. Couples were supposed to go about it really grimly, like they’re accomplishing this duty, or, as he called it, “the task of propagation.” All those guys talked about how terrible lust is and celibacy is better, but if you have to have sex, do it a certain way in marriage. The early Christians didn’t care about reproduction. They didn’t care about the human race. The religion began as this apocalyptic thing and they thought the world was going to end, so why would they care about propagating the earth?
AB: You said to me once that the family is essential component to society. Can you elaborate on that, please?
SS: Marriage has been the stable, sexual arrangement. The family is the stable domestic life. There’s no reason why two men or two women couldn’t also form stable families. No civilized society can be civilized if people are having sex willy-nilly and reproducing all over. Well, society is a group of people. That society is organized by families. I mean, we’re all members of the same society, we’re all a part of American society, and there are also all these sub-groups. A society gets its lifeblood from more people joining it, and they have to be organized somehow, otherwise there’s chaos.
AB: What do you think Martin Luther would say about gay marriage?
SS: Well, Martin Luther’s concept of marriage was more modern. It popularized this idea that marriage wasn’t just for reproduction, preserving wealth, land or the family name. He also added in the emotional content. Marriage gave emotional benefits, as well as financial and reproductive benefits. He added that component, which is now the biggest component.
AB: And how does that affect the gay marriage argument?
SS: That’s even more of an argument for same-sex marriage, because if the emotional component is the most important one – if reproduction can be handled in other ways, if both sides of the couple are economically independent – then it all comes down to the emotional component, the fact that you want to have someone to home to, that you want to be familiar with, that you want to come home to. That’s part of the reason people form pairs. Why deny half the population the opportunity to have that and to have the benefits of that? We’ve slowly been moving the country to this merger of church and state that’s totally unconstitutional. It’s just hilarious that conservatives and Republicans say that the federal government should not intrude on people’s lives, but they want to intrude on decisions like abortion and marriage. How is that not contradictory? Shouldn’t conservatives prefer stable families, rather than unstable families? What does it matter who is the couple at the heart of the family, as long as the family is loving and stable?
AB: And what was the result of Luther and the Reformation?
SS: Well, the Reformation came around and the Protestants said, “Marriage is good, celibacy is bad.” Lust is a natural instinct, you can’t get rid of it like you can’t get rid of hunger, but this what the early Christians tried to do. They started pushing this idea that if you have to be married, then the best form of marriage was a sexless one. This whole idea that sex was in and of itself a sin came with the Christians. Augustine wanted to get rid of the sex drive because his own was so powerful that he couldn’t deal with it. These days, if you want to control lust – yes, people can go outside their marriage, but generally you know that when you get married, when you commit to someone else, whether you choose to observe it or not, everybody accepts the fact that you’re supposed to be faithful. That does cut down on sex outside of that situation. So, why conservatives wouldn’t want to support anything that cuts down on gay sex is beyond me, if it’s so disgusting to them.
angus
This is not a picture of Sarah and Abraham.
Ian J UK
I’ve been saying for ages that marriage is not and never was a solely religious state, people were getting ‘married’ long before any Judaic/Christian religions were around, before churches and temples people just used to declare their joining in front of the community, sometimes by jumping over a stick or broom, it just so happened that when going to church became law, that was the easiest place to do it, because everybody in the community was there!
Marriage is a civil contract between two parties, nothing more, the church just hijacked it like most of their other ceremonies and festivals. Easter = Spring Festival and Christmas = Winter Solstice etc. in the UK most of the churches are even built on old pagan sites.
The church is a sham,based on lies and half truths, they can’t even put their own ‘Good Book’ (New testament) together without dispute about how many gospels there are, What about the gosples according to Saint Thomas and even Judas and the Old Testament is mainly rewrites of even older pagan creation myths and folk memories, for example Noah’s Flood was probably just a folk memory of the ending of the last ice age and the increase in sea level that flooded many river valley cities in areas like the Persian Gulf and the Black Sea.