The Big Lie: Marriage and "Tradition"

The Kansas City Star has an lengthy op-ed piece in the form of an open letter to Obama that does an amazing job of exposing the lies fabricated by anti-gay Christianists concerning "traditional" marriage which in point of fact is a relatively recent development in the time line of history. Few are more dishonest and prone to re-write history to support their agenda than the anti-gay forces who rely on the ignorance of the masses when it comes to knowing history. The column is lengthy but should be read in full because it fully exposes President Obama's spinelessness and also the disingenuousness of our foes. The fact that the "family values" organizations lie incessantly in and of itself evidences that they are the ones who are the false Christians. Here are selected highlights:

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Dear Barack (I can still call you “Barack,” right?) If you have any plans for the rights of gay and lesbian Americans that don’t involve high speed and a very large bus, it’s time to say what those are. Because in the battle for the equal rights of gays, lesbians and their families you’ve been MIA. Especially on two recent and very visible fronts: “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and securing same-sex marriage.
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Not only does DOMA clearly discriminate against same-sex couples and families headed by same-sex couples, but your Justice Department is helping it move forward on a lie: that two-partner, heterosexual marriage is the “traditional and universally recognized form of marriage.”
That lie is based on a bigger lie that one often hears touted by religious opponents of same-sex marriage: that marriage itself has been an unchanging and unchangeable institution for two thousand years.

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Leaving aside the history of legalized same-sex marriage in pre-modern Europe and Asia (You may be interested to see the works of university professors John Boswell, Gary Leupp and William Eskridge) and the failure of current nations which have recently legalized same-sex marriage to fall to ruin and make their dying flops onto that “dustbin of history” Pat Robertson warns about, over historical time and geographical space “traditional” marriage has looked many different ways.

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Depending on the time, society, economy and “tradition” under question, traditional marriage has taken polygamous (one man, multiple wives) and even polyandrous (one woman, multiple husbands) forms as well as the opposite-sex couple formation currently fetishized. Even this is a laughably broad and simplistic characterization of the history of human marriage.

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Not only has marriage changed greatly over the course of thousands of years, but it’s changed substantially in our own nation’s short history. Most often as a result of the demands of democracy itself. American democracy has demanded the inclusion of formerly excluded groups and forged change in the rights of individuals within marriage as the rights of less empowered partners (women) had to be increasingly considered under the law.

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One hundred forty years ago enslaved blacks had neither rights of legal marriage nor rights in the ownership of their children. Marriage rights for enslaved blacks would have undermined the property ownership rights of white slaveholders who supplied plenty of biblical and legal support for slavery. Consequently, marriage, as recognized under the state, wasn’t between “one man and one woman.” It was between “one white man and one white woman.”

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One hundred twenty years ago, white women were still legally “covered” in their marriages. Under “laws of coverture” women didn’t have the right of ownership of property or children. Nor did they have the right to enter contracts (though this varied somewhat by state with progressive states offering more rights and conservative states restricting them.) A woman’s property given by her father became her husband’s to control. Nor did most women have the right of divorce despite physical or sexual abuse, or economic mismanagement or deprivation.

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And, a little over fifty years ago, interracial marriage was against the law in over half the states of the union. Moreover, it was denied federal recognition until the Supreme Court decided Loving vs. Virginia in 1967. In the year that you were born, Mr. Obama your own parents would have been denied the right to marry in over 19 states.

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If you can understand that being gay is a natural, healthy state of being which can’t be changed through “reparative therapies” (as does the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry) how can you not fight fully and forcefully to affect equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans?

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Now, in the clarity of hindsight, we can see that the deep and sincere religious conviction of southern segregationists was as wrong as those of Christian men (and women) fearful of giving women the vote and equality in marriage, and as misguided as those of religious whites who believed allowing interracial couples to marry violated God’s law.

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Finally if you are a believer in our Constitutional creed that “All men are created equal” and have the historical understanding that group after group in our great nation (African Americans, white women, Native Americans, Asians, Mexican-Americans, the disabled) have had to fight against the “tyranny of the majority” to become part of that “All men,” why won’t you put the full force of your power behind ensuring the entrance of this group of Americans?