Marriage: Better in the Dark Ages?
by: Bob
Mon Nov 26, 2007 at 14:42:11 PM EST
Stephanie Coontz, a professor of history at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and the author of "Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage," offers a concise summary of several thousand years of history in a New York Times piece today. Her conclusion, phrased as tentative but which I suppose she endorses:
Perhaps it's time to revert to a much older marital tradition. Let churches decide which marriages they deem "licit." But let couples - gay or straight - decide if they want the legal protections and obligations of a committed relationship.
Here is her argument:
Why do people - gay or straight - need the state's permission to marry? For most of Western history, they didn't, because marriage was a private contract between two families. The parents' agreement to the match, not the approval of church or state, was what confirmed its validity.
For 16 centuries, Christianity also defined the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple's wishes. If two people claimed they had exchanged marital vows - even out alone by the haystack - the Catholic Church accepted that they were validly married.
Is it possible that what we think of today as progressive is really just trying to revert to a custom in keeping with the period between the Roman empire and the Englightenment? Were loving couples better off under, for example, Charlemagne and William the Conqueror than today?
More:
http://www.bluemassgroup.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=9524