New Jersey Gay Marriage

I'm a little slow on this one, it happened a week or two ago. The New Jersey legislature voted down a bill that would have provided official recognition to gay marriage. The typical comments were made on blog sites that I cruise, i.e. how does this make my marriage safer, how can the legislators be so out of touch with the populace, Fox News, Republicans, all the usual stuff.

A few thoughts on that, some are mine, some are what I think that other people think, I'm not saying which is which -

How out of touch are the legislators, really? They got elected, presumably fairly, right? If they aren't truly representing, vote for someone else next time. It's on the opposite side of the country, in all the ways you can think of, but the referendum in California on the subject seems to have shown that neither side has the convincing majority that they seem to think they should, if only people had the slightest bit of sense.

Marriage has already become cheap enough, being treated as if it's dispensable. Couples don't get married because they don't care, couples rush into and out of marriage because they don't care, people cheat on their marriage vows because they don't care. "Defense of marriage" is the idea that marriage is one of the most significant committments that people can make, that serious married relationships are good for societal stability, and telling people that their marriage counts the same as one they don't respect hurts an important pillar of civilization.

Now for my skewed view of the history of marriage -

As was pointed out on the judgemental monkey show on Durham, NC public access cable (I don't know the guy's name or what he calls the show), the modern idea of marriage for love is a pretty recent (last 100-200 years) concept. If you had money or royal status, marriages were arranged for political and power reasons, and the kids didn't get a say in it. They did it for the good of the family, the man and woman each understood that the other didn't have a say in it, and they made the best of it. Some worked better than others. But, they produced heirs, they kept the family line going, they kept the money and power in the right place, and that was the point.

If you didn't have money or status, you got married to whoever was handy, and marriages were usually still arranged by the parents, to try and create a stable union that would benefit the family. A man needed a wife to bear children for him, so that as he got old, they could help him in his labors, eventually taking over, and taking care of him in his dotage so he didn't starve to death. A woman needed a man to support her, because there were very limited options for a woman to make a decent living (they could do it, but there weren't many openings), and again, she needs children to take care of her in her old age. Again, the family line continues, the farm stays in the family, no one dies as a beggar in the street.

Marriage was for the good of the family, to generate children and create a stable social structure. Most people lived their whole lives where they were born, staying close to their families, within a larger supporting social structure. The whole "it takes a village" deal. Stability and continuity were critical for life in this essentially "tribal" society.

What to do with people who don't want to get married or have children in a system like this? One common response would be, "suck it up and do it, we all did it, and you don't have any other options". In Europe, the church was useful because it could take excess children as monks, nuns, or priests. Then they didn't have to get married to continue the social structure, as the clergy created its own continuing tribal society by recruitment rather than breeding, generating a young/old mix like a family so again, no old folks are freezing in snowdrifts.

What was the point of marriage in such a preindustrial type society? Social, legal, and religious aspects are all part of it. Rich or poor, marriage was a social contract, that's the point of the ceremony. Make the couple stand up in front of their family and the community and make promises to each other. That's a heavy obligation, everyone witnessed it, and you've got nowhere else to go if you change your mind, so you're stuck with it. Legal was more important if you had stuff or were royalty. Properties were exchanged and merged, kingdoms were allied, and wars averted by judiciously arranged unions. Again, a lot of pressure on the happy couple, and the pressure to produce an heir was enormous, as the future of the political alliance depended on it.

Religious is an extension of both social and legal. The social significance of having to live up to your promises after the entire community heard you make them is enforced by the idea that God heard your promises too, and is watching whether you live up to them. The religious/legal connection is more important, again, when you have stuff. Kings and queens ruled by divine right, and were coronated by the clergy, so again, the religious marriage ceremony is an obligation before God, and a symbol to others that God has blessed this economic and political union.

Humans love ritual and ceremony. Anything that gets done more than twice gets a ritual built around it, we all invent them in our own lives. You're less likely to walk out on your spouse when you've been through a big ceremony, made promises, and been married in (important words) "the eyes of God and men". They're all watching you and holding you to a standard. From the other direction, decent and honest people didn't interfere in the marriages of others out of respect for the obligations that those people have to each other.

I know, I know. People have been screwing around on each other forever, but a lot didn't, and many of those that did at least felt bad about it, and if they got caught, there was severe social stigma. Never discount the power of social stigma in an insular tribal society (Scarlet Letter? The Crucible?)

So, marriage is important to a society working to survive, and to people trying to keep what they've got. Bringing us to children. When a group stops having children, it ends. When all of humanity was composed of small units trying to kill their neighbors, while not being killed by their neighbors, you've got to crank out the babies to have a next generation to keep the fighting going. Kill half the men of a tribe, the women and children will repopulate it the next generation like nothing ever happened (allowing polygamy and barring other catastrophes). Kill half the women, and you're at a severe disadvantage for generations, since females are the limiting reagent in population growth.

Societies in this state can't afford full-time homosexuality. Ancient Greek men enjoyed homosexuality (in reality, not just stereotypes), but still went and knocked up their wives. In Sparta, men in active military service (which was pretty much everyone who was of the proper age) were kept separate from their wives much of the time, but required by law to spend a certain amount of time with them, to produce the next generation's army.

A few non-breeders are acceptable, as long as they don't make up too much of the tribal population, and again, as long as they're men. Plains American Indian warriors who dressed as women, but fought alongside the men; the eunuchs in a variety of cultures, especially China, given great power in the court, on the assumption that without children of their own, they would operate on behalf of the rulers, not to position their own. As long as there were just a few of them, and they pulled their weight, that was fine. Like keeping around old people who can't hack it anymore, physically speaking, or the borderline autistics who can act as repositories of knowledge, and doers of repetitive tasks, but can't function as an integral part of the social structure. Potentially useful to have around, if you can afford them.

What people really seem to be afraid of is the loss of the "traditional family". Like I was talking about earlier, the modern idea of the perfect traditional family is just that, a modern idea. Going back to the agrarian or pre-industrial society, children lived at home until they got married, at which point they might still live at home, or move all the way to next door. The large extended family with close ties was the standard; now, there's all kinds of variations. What people seem to be bemoaning is children being raised by single parents, parents too busy to do the child-raising themselves, children of divorce and remarriage, children in shared custody that have either two parents who don't care, or are both trying too hard.

Children raised until all sorts of circumstances can turn out fine, but the empirical evidence indicates that the best results come from children raised in stable households, who get to play with lots of other kids, and who have good adult role models, both male and female. They need more adult role models than just their parents, they need aunts, uncles, teachers, coaches, and neighbors. Kids need to see adults who ACT LIKE ADULTS so they can learn how to do so when their time comes.

Opposition to gay marriage isn't necessarily out of opposition to homosexuality, it's opposition to the perceived further cheapening of the institution of marriage; to loss of stable family structures; to raising children haphazardly so that they aren't true scions of their culture and family heritage, but rather yet more randomly bouncing members of a dysfunctional society, with no regard for who they are, where they came from, and their obligations to the bigger picture. It's opposition to the discarding of rite and ritual that lend solidity to peoples' actions, makes them part of something larger than themselves, and again, gives them obligations to fulfill. It's opposition to the perceived creation of a nation of extreme individualists.

So, back to the different types of marriage. In the social marriage, for homosexuals to declare their marriage means that they are committing to each other in front of whoever they feel is important in their lives. In the religious marriage, they are declaring their union before God, and the church is declaring their marriage the equal of any other marriage within that religion. In the legal marriage, the government is granting a set of rights, legal obligations, and powers to the individuals, relative to each other, and again, declaring the marriage equivalent to any other marriage recognized by the government. The problem is that "tradional married couples" don't think that those types of marriage should get to count the same as their own, sometimes for some of the reasons I've given above.

Now, if you've put up with all this crap, and still give a flip what I actually think, here it is:

Socially, the most important place to be married is in your own head. Your marriage only means as much as it means to you, and can only be as strong, committed, and loving as you believe it can be. If you are genuinely committed to the other person, no person or institution should stop you from being with them. Beyond your own acceptance, recognition by friends and family is all you really need. And if they don't accept it, screw 'em.
Religiously, it's up to the religion, which means it's up to the people who comprise it. No decision is going to make everybody happy in a religion, that why there's so many of them, they keep splitting and getting reinvented. The rejection of a marriage performed in one faith by another faith is unfortunate, but nothing new. If your religion won't change to fit you, you have a really sucky decision, but it's your decision, and you're the one who's going to have to change something.
Legally, I like state's rights. It's up to the people to decide what flies and what doesn't, and if you don't like it, see the sucky decision under the religious heading. That said, government could cut the Gordian knot by doing away with a lot of things. A legally recognized marriage essentially confers automatic power of attorney, inheritance rights, tax rules, and a few other things on a couple. Most of these things can be done by paperwork, without a marriage. The state governments could just provide simple legal means to give another person those rights, and legal ways to end those rights, i.e. a divorce. (Have you noticed that marriages tend to be religious, but divorces tend to be entirely legal proceedings? If the church is the instrument marrying you, shouldn't it be the instrument divorcing you? Yes, I know that a variety of churches approve annulments and divorces, but this is really something for another time.) The fair tax would probably also be useful in this case, as removing the tax implications of joint filing would eliminate a lot of ground for arguments (just had to get that one in for N.B.)