On Marriage Equality

There have been many misleading claims bandied about in the media and the House of Commons over the past few months and days regarding the institution of marriage. Tim Loughton, the Conservative former children's minister, laments:

'Who are we, this government or this country, to redefine the term marriage that has meant one man and one woman across cultures, across ages, across geographical barriers since before state and religion themselves?'

Britain's most senior Catholic, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, after likening 'gay' marriage to slavery, claims:

'We are trying to redefine something which has been known and revered for centuries and making it something rather different. This is changing the whole notion of what marriage and what a family is. It affects children who are born, who have a right to a mother and father. The natural law teaching of what marriage is is quite simple. It is natural for a man and woman to be together for the procreation and education of children and for their own mutual love. I think that it is time now to call a halt to what you might call progress. I do not call what is happening nowadays progress. I would say that countries where this is legal are indeed violating human rights.'

There are a number of untruths littered throughout these statements. A cursory glance at the work of historians of the family and anthropologists studying kinship groups across cultures, ages and geographical barriers will show the reader that marriage is not a hegemonic, monolith of an institution unchanging and universal for all time. For one, it has not always been regulated by the Natural Law of the Catholic Church. Furthermore, Cardinal Keith seems to fail to recognise that the institution of marriage is no longer regulated and defined by the Church in Britain but by the State. Secondly, it has not always been between one man and one woman (see polyandry and polygyny) and has not always been the stable core of family life (see the theory that early humans lived in female-centered matrilineal clans).

The idea that man and woman marry for their own mutual love is a ludicrous statement when we view marriage historically. According to historian Stephanie Coontz, it wasn't until the seventeenth century that individuals began to marry on the basis of their own free choice and mutual love (Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, 2006). Until relatively recently (in the history of human civilisation), marriage amounted to little more than a form of slavery in some classes of society whereby dowry was an essential part of the marriage transaction. Dowry, for those who do not know, is defined as the money, goods or estate that a woman brings to a marriage, usually given by parents. Yet when dowry was in place (until as recently as the Victorian era in England), women had no property rights so essentially the money was payment to the husband for taking a man's daughter off his hands.

The husband had full rights over his wife, essentially making her his property to do with as he pleased, and though dowry has long since disappeared in British conjugal custom, marital rape was only outlawed in England and Wales as recently as 1991! Previously, it had been held that spouses had conjugal rights to sexual intercourse with each other. The concept of marital rape was thus seen as an impossibility because, as Sir Mathew Hale so vividly put it, the wife 'hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract' (History of the Pleas of the Crown, 1736).

This example alone is evidence enough that the institution of marriage has already been redefined in our own society. As the liberal philosopher and women's rights activist, John Stuart Mill, points out in The Subjection of Women:

'the adoption of this system of inequality [marriage] never was the result of deliberation, or forethought, or any social ideas, or any notion whatever of what conduced to the benefit of humanity... It arose simply from the fact that from the very earliest twilight of human society, every woman... was found in a state of bondage to some man'

Mill's argument then is that we have an unjust institution based on convention which involves the subordination of one sex to another. This institution has its roots in the inequality of physical strength and the usefulness of woman to man, which in the modern world is simply accepted, or justified, as natural.

Who are we to redefine it, the detractors of equal marriage ask? Even the Church itself has redefined marriage. Despite its early theoretical commitment to the condemnation of divorce and polygamy, for the first one thousand years of its existence it was fairly flexible about divorce and 'even waffled in its support for monogamy' (Coontz, 2006, p. 86). If the institution did not adapt and change according the demands of justice and equality and according to the changing practical reality of human relationships, then women would still be in a state of bondage akin to slavery, marriages would still be arranged by parents seeking a good match for their daughter which would bring the family connections, wealth and status, and society would be all the worse for it.The problem is that the institution of marriage is not tied to one tradition, it does not have one source of moral presuppositions. The fact that something like marriage exists across time, cultures and borders means that how we understand it depends on what tradition we inhabit.

As such, I say to you this: if the Equal Marriage Bill fails to pass through the House of Lords or gets watered down along the way so that it becomes unrecognisable as anything like the current institution of marriage, let all those LGBT people who are currently unable to marry and all the rest who support their civil right to do so tell the supporters of so-called 'traditional' marriage where to stick it. And let's go off and create a new institution which does not make arbitrary distinctions based on sexuality and gender, for those who want to make that commitment. And while we're at it, let's leave out the custom of women taking their husband's name. We are no longer man's property.