I went to a party the other day at the house of two new friends. Recently come to Town, these witty and cheerful women had already made a comfortable home together, complete with soulful-eyed beagle. Two women and a dog--it looked like a marriage to me.
Despite such personal arrangements made between lovers, "real" marriage is a legal contract conferred by the state. The right to marry has emerged as a key demand of many gay and lesbian political activists. Marriage is also the place where many straight people draw the line. Real marriage, so they say, requires a man and a woman. Dogs are optional. This growing dispute over marriage, many have noted, reflects the noisy rhetoric of "family values" that has dominated much of American politics for the last two decades. One can draw easy connections between an increasing instability of the American nuclear family and panicky public evocations of family values. Nowadays, half of married people get themselves unmarried. This recent collapse of American marriage is nobody's fault in particular. Rather, it is an effect of the expanding labor and other demands of our post-industrial economic system that sucks up female workers. Perplexed and worried, those of us who find it harder and harder anymore to stay married respond emotionally to fearful media-hyped stories of abused and abandoned children, and to blustery Sunday sermons about Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.
Clearly, it's already too late to save much of American marriage (as this existed up to the 1970s) even if all the fifty states outlaw unions between homosexuals. And one might ask those gay activists who are struggling to gain the right to marry (and the legal and economic benefits and respectability marriage offers) to also prepare us for the divorces that are sure to follow. At least my ex-boyfriend hasn't cost me any alimony--unlike my mercenary ex-wife who spends my salary in Honolulu. As human societies go, divorce rates in United States are recently creeping into the upper range. Still, in some societies, almost everyone marries and divorces at least once and a 100% divorce rate in no way threatens the general social fabric. Anthropologists call the marital pattern now emerging in the US "serial polygamy." Most of us will have more than one spouse during our lifetimes, just not all at the same time. Why even Frank Sinatra, that all-around American guy, good buddy of Jane and Nancy and Ron, had made it to wife number four.
When I took my first anthropology course in 1971, my professor impressed on me the difficulty in coming up with a universal definition of marriage. The multiple and complicated ways that humans around the world unite themselves are exceedingly difficult to encapsulate within a single label like "marriage." In much of the world, including large parts of rural Utah, a man may have more than one wife. In other places, such as the Himalayan highlands, three or four men (often brothers) will together be married to one woman. Nuer women (of the southern Sudan) sometimes are married to dead men. Their children (go figure how!) become the legal offspring of this ghost. The Nayar of Kerala, southwestern India, were famously difficult for anthropologists trying to classify human marriage. Nayar women do go through a ritual union with a man. They might never sleep with him, though. Instead, they remain in their mother's home merrily having sex and children with whomever they please.
The term "marriage" accurately describes various sorts of gay or lesbian relationships in societies around the globe. Some Nuer women, by exchanging cattle, marry another younger woman. Her children are socially recognized as the children of the female "husband" who provided the bovine bride wealth. The glossary of that 1971 anthropology text, politically correct avant la lettre, defined marriage in a way that omitted our Adam/Eve presumptions. Human marriage is "an institutionalized form of relationship in which sexual relationships and parentage legitimately take place." This definition would cover my new doggy friends, except for the fact that their union is illegitimate as defined by the law of the state in which they live. There are other sources of legitimacy beyond the state, though. My friends, and anyone else who wants to be joined, can establish a "domestic partnership" recognized by increasing numbers of communities and companies, and they may arrange for themselves a "holy union ceremony," offered by various churches, temples, and other religious groups.
This begs the question why gays and lesbians are demanding state-legitimized marriage just at the point in American history when straight marriage is in such deep hot water (we might call it). Well, there's respect, of course. And various tax and financial advantages. And there're the kids. You wouldn't want that innocent beagle to be illegitimate, would you?
