There’s been a lot of hoopla over the recent scandal involving the President of the Association of Evangelists, Teg Haggard. He is being accused of sleeping (and doing drugs) with a gay hooker, while at the same time being one of the Christian “fire-and-brimstone” leaders in the effort to ban gay marriage and make gays second class citizens. Supposedly he was a very “traditional marriage” type of guy, family values et all.
When that news broke it It got me thinking of two things. One is that generally the more homophobic you are, the more actually gay you really are. Mark Foley, Catholic Priests, Robert Livingston (the former to-be Republican speaker of the house who was outed by Larry Flynt). And I’m sure you’ve all seen the movie American Beauty where Chris Cooper comes out of the closet at the end after a lifetime of vitriol.
But that’s secondary to my main thought: that the idea of the “traditional” marriage between man and woman out of love, that’s a relatively new thing — with the emphasis being about love, that is.
For centuries marriage was a social contract (As it is now), but one primarily to do with business. Marriages were usually arranged, with the idea that it would be beneficial to one or both parties. That’s true even to this day in many cultures, that marriages are arranged. Locals married out their daughters not because their daughters liked the guy she would marry, but because the parents could get a profit out of the marriage. Kings married off their daughters to form alliances with other countries — damn you Princess Bride (or is it not damn?)! Even the artistic works in history showed that romance was a formula for disaster — just take a look at Romeo and Juliet.
If you look at the typical marriage ceremony, clues give off what it was really about. The father escorted her bride down the aisle because, well, women were basically property back then (and to some extent, even now). So the father was basically ceremonially handing off his property. The whole deal with asking if “any one objects to this marriage” was to see if the daughter was a virgin or not — spoiled goods that is. If anyone knew that the bride was not a virgin, he could speak out and thus the marriage would not take place. You wouldn’t get a lemon product basically.
Property, business, pragmatism. But it wasn’t about love.
It was only in these last two hundred years after the industrial revolution that the notion of “finding one’s true love” or “soul mate” started taking off. I suppose the rise of the middle class, and the ability to travel helped people to be more picky about who they would marry. And it was only in the last 40 years, with the Civil Rights movement and the end of anti-miscegenation laws has romance been prevalent enough to become the norm in Western culture.
I say all this because I find it humorous that modern movies and shows set in history talk about romance, because it didn’t really exist back beyond two hundred years lest you want to commit suicide. I also find it funny that people try to talk about “traditional marriage” because what they define as traditional marriage is not traditional at all. Unless they want to revert back to the days where women are property and a man could legally rape and beat his wife.