“Traditional marriage” is a moving target

Kevin Drum points to McClatchy today:

11,000 couples later, gay marriage largely a nonevent in Mass.

Says Kevin, “Good.”

Ampersand quotes from the California court ruling (pdf) that proposition 8 can be officially described as “Changes California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry” (opponents and advocates both recognized that the change of description worked in favor of those who oppose the initiative):

There is nothing inherently argumentative or prejudicial about transitive verbs, and the Court is not willing to fashion a rule that would require the Attorney General to engage in useless nominalization.

Says Ampersand, “Personally, I’d enjoy watching the news if high government officials were required to engage in useless nominalization at all times.”

MAJeff hasn’t been paying attention to the John Edwards affair, but uses the occaision to observe that “Traditional marriage” is a moving target:

One thing I’ve heard is, “at least he didn’t break the law.” Well, depending upon where his trysts took place, Edwards may have broken the law. Here in Massachusetts, for example, adultery is a crime that carries a penalty of incarceration in state prison for up to 3 years, jail up to 2, or a fine of up to $500. As of 2004, 24 states criminalized adultery. (Cossman, 2007: 209. fn6). Admittedly, such laws are rarely enforced, and the no-fault system means that even if cheating takes place, it’s less likely to be the legal “reason” for the divorce ["Irreconcilable differences" or its equivalent is the norm].

Marriage is a regulatory system. When folks stand in front of their witnesses, and take their vows (the state won’t allow you to marry without a public ceremony), they are entering a three-way contract, with conditions set by the state. One of those conditions is sexual monogamy. Mess around, and you’ve violated the terms of the contract. You’ve sinned against the state, and have committed a criminal offense.

Adultery itself has changed. At the founding of the Republic, it wasn’t sex outside of marriage but involved a married woman having sex with a man not her husband. Adultery laws were put in place to establish men’s property rights over their wives, and particularly to ensure that the children born into such relationships were theirs and not some other man’s. It wasn’t about violations of intimacy or trust, as we take it to be today. It was about stealing another woman’s womb. [Ed. Oops. Big difference]

Indeed, the comment of Edwards’s, that he “didn’t love” the woman with whom he had the affair is a sign of that. In contemporary society, marriage has become about companionship and intimacy [see, for example, Giddens or Seidman]. One of the things that makes same-sex marriage imaginable to many people is the fact that marriage itself has changed in such ways as to make it imaginable. We no longer have the explicit gender-based marital roles established in law. (Everyone say, “Thank you” to the feminist legal activists who brought about a lot of those changes.) Marriage isn’t gender-role based, at least legally, in the rigid ways that it once was.

Says me, “Thank You!”