Freedom to Marry

Is marriage a basic civil right that all American possess? That question has begun to dominate the political and social landscape. However, the issue of marriage has been around for a long time. Social conservatives say that marriage is the foundation of our society, and they would be correct. However, the views around marriage have shifted. Two hundred years ago it was widely accepted that marriage was more of an economic transaction than an expression of feeling. Marriage allowed a man to work without having to care for the household or bother with raising the children, it allowed a woman to care for the house and raise the children without worrying about financial security. However, in modern times the beliefs of what marriage is are changing. Is marriage a fundamental right, or is it still an economic survival mechanism?

The institution of marriage has been in a constant state of evolution. Pair bonding began in the Stone Age as a why of organizing and controlling sexual conduct, and providing a stable environment for raising children. However, the basic form of marriage has taken many shapes across different cultures and eras. What a traditional marriage or family is shifts depending in locations and time period. Steven Mints, a history professor at Columbia University says, "Whenever people talk about traditional marriage or traditional families, historians throw up their hands. We say, when and where" (The Week). Most cultures around the world have engaged in polygamy at some point in their history. The Bible says the Solomon has seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. In fact, polygamy is still practiced in much of the Muslim world. The idea of a monogamous union between one man and one woman is a relatively recent idea. Harvard historian Nancy Cott says, "monogamous households were a tiny, tiny portion, found in just Western Europe and small settlements in North America" (The Week). The definition of marriage is in a constant state of flux, and has been since its inception.

Historically love has played almost no part in the institution of marriage. Marriage was seen as too serious a matter to be based on such a fragile emotion. In fact Montesquieu wrote, that any man who was in love with his wife was probably too dull to be loved by another woman (The Week). It wasn't until the 17th and 18th centuries when Enlightenment thinkers developed the idea that life was about the pursuit of happiness that romance began to enter the definition of marriage. The Industrial Revolution paved the way for a middle class in which young men could support a wife regardless of parental approval. This same freedom to marry also gave rise to a demand to be released from unhappy unions.

For thousands of years law and custom had led to the subordination of wives to their husbands. In the 20th century that began to change as the women's rights movement gained strength and wives insisted on being seen as their husband's equal rather than his property. Marilyn Yalom, author of A History of the Wife says, " by 1970 marriage law had become gender neutral in Western democracy" (Yalom, 352). During this same period the invention of contraception allowed couple to choose whether they would even have children. The more traditional view of marriage being for the conception and raising of the next generation was being challenged in fundamental ways. This new definition of marriage being a personal contract between two individual looking for love, happiness, and stability opened the door for gays and lesbians to seek the right to marry.

Same sex unions aren't a recent invention. Male bonding ceremonies were common across Europe until the 13th century. These unions known as spiritual brotherhoods were indistinguishable from any other marriage (Live Science). While some historians believe that these rituals were used to seal alliances and business deals, Eric Berkowitz, author of Sex and Punishment, says it is "difficult to believe that these rituals did not contemplate erotic contact. In fact, it was the sex between the men involved that later caused same-sex unions to be banned." (The Week).

Centuries before the same-sex marriage movement, the U.S. governments, its constituent states, and their colonial predecessor tackled the idea of race mixing. Making the right to marry a battle in the U.S. In 1664 Maryland passed a law that banned black men from marrying white women, and actually enslaved any white woman who had married a black man (civil liberites.com). Later more colonies followed in Maryland's footsteps. It wasn't until the 1800's when the line distinguishing between free Northern states, and slave Southern states that some of these laws began to be repealed. In 1871 a Constitutional amendment was introduced banning marriages between people of color and whites in all states of the union (civil liberties.com). This was the first of three unsuccessful attempts at such an amendment. Twelve years later in Pace v. Alabama, the Supreme Court ruled that state level bans on interracial marriage do not violate the fourteenth amendment, because the punishment for violation of the law was the same for both parties (civil liberties.com). This ruling would stand for