With Barack Obama's recent endorsement of same sex marriage and the vote for bigotry in North Carolina, there are fortunately more and more stories hitting the news media that look at the real model of "traditional marriage," and it is NOT a model based on "one man and one woman." As the title to this post, the real millennial old model of marriage was one man and many women, some of who were mere children and some were slaves. Would that the simple minded cows like Maggie Gallagher would learn some accurate history. Or even bother to read their Old Testaments beyond limited passages in Leviticus. As seems to always be the case, ignorance, gullibility and intellectual laziness are the three pillars of fundamentalist religion. A piece in Religion Dispatches looks at the real history of marriage and it's not the image the Bible beaters and Neanderthals ignorantly embrace:
Well, it’s been quite a whirlwind week for same-sex marriage, from North Carolina to Obama to Colorado—and, of course, to the many outraged conservatives concerned with preserving traditional marriage, i.e., the time-honored sacred bond between one man and one woman. Why, just last week, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council said that marriage has meant just that for over five thousand years. Huh?
Time to break out your Bible, Mr. Perkins! Abraham had two wives, Sarah and her handmaiden Hagar. King Solomon had 700 wives, plus 300 concubines and slaves. Jacob, the patriarch who gives Israel its name, had two wives and two concubines. In a humanist vein, Exodus 21:10 warns that when men take additional wives, they must still provide for their previous one.
But that’s not all. In biblical society, when you conquered another city, tribe, or nation, the victorious men would “win” their defeated foes’ wives as part of the spoils. It also commanded levirate marriage, the system wherein, if a man died, his younger brother would have to marry his widow and produce heirs with her who would be considered the older brother’s descendants. Now that’s traditional marriage!
Later Islamic and Jewish sources, unclear on these parameters (the prophet Muhammad, of course, had several wives), debated whether it is permissible for a man to marry a three- or four-year-old girl.
And of course, even until the present day, traditional marriage has meant arranged marriage. The notion that two adults would enter into a marriage on their own volition is a radical innovation in the institution of marriage, at most two hundred years old.
Oh, and let’s not forget that in Europe and North America, marriage was considered a commercial proposition first and foremost—not a romantic one. Princes married princesses not because of fairy tales, but because their parents had political alliances to consider. Further down the economic ladder, people married for a variety of biological, commercial, and genealogical reasons—but rarely for love.
Oh, and that’s right, I almost forgot about interracial marriage, which in some parts of America was seen as a crime against nature and God up until the 1960s. (Of course, Moses himself was in an interracial marriage, but the anti-miscegenation crowd overlooked that inconvenient fact.) . . . . let’s remember that a century ago, African Americans were not considered fully human by religious conservatives.
Traditional marriage is one man with multiple wives, multiple concubines, wives conquered in war and wives acquired in levirate marriage, possibly including girls under the age of ten, but definitely not including anyone of a different ethnic group, in an arranged marriage with disposition of property as its purpose. That seems very different from “one man, one woman,” does it not?
Perhaps this is why the Tony Perkinses of the world simply ignore the Bible when it doesn’t suit their purposes . . . . The Bible’s truths are just too inconvenient.
No comments:
Post a Comment