About That Ancient Tradition

This has been popping up here and there, but reader Firle sent me a link. In spite of the contumely heaped on the late John Boswell on the publication of Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, he did produce a lot of evidence. Now another scholar has provided more:

Commonly used rationales in support of gay marriage and gay civil unions avoid historical arguments. However, as Allan A. Tulchin (Shippensburg University) reveals in his forthcoming article, a strong historical precedent exists for homosexual civil unions.

Opponents of gay marriage in the United States today have tended to assume that nuclear families have always been the standard household form. However, as Tulchin writes, "Western family structures have been much more varied than many people today seem to realize, and Western legal systems have in the past made provisions for a variety of household structures."

For example, in late medieval France, the term affrèrement -- roughly translated as brotherment -- was used to refer to a certain type of legal contract, which also existed elsewhere in Mediterranean Europe. These documents provided the foundation for non-nuclear households of many types and shared many characteristics with marriage contracts, as legal writers at the time were well aware, according to Tulchin.

Opponents of same-sex marriage, and of gay rights in general (not to mention those other liberalities that most of us now take for granted) tend to bank on the tendency of their followers to have no sense of history. In their minds, history is not a past in which trends arose, developed, and withered away and in which vast social changes took place. It is "tradition," the unchanging universe that is central to their world view and that enables them to cite with a straight face "the five-thousand-year-old tradition of marriage" and the idea that their God created each "kind" exactly as it exists today no more than 10,000 years ago. Therefore, the "traditional" marriage that they saw as children is the traditional marriage that has always existed. The prejudices embedded in the law had the weight of that tradition -- it had "always" been that way, when in fact, for most of history it hadn't.

The rest of us look back and realize that the thirteenth century, the sixteenth century, and even the nineteenth century were very little like our own time, and that China and the Inca Empire were very unlike Rome or Britain or the U.S. We may even -- and quite justifiably, I think -- wonder why the tribal taboos of a group of nomadic herders from the ancient Middle East would be thought to be appropriate for our own time and place.

Here's a mention of the story at Box Turtle Bulletin.

And, illustrating how far we've come -- and how far we have to go -- reader PietB provided a link to this story from the Oakland Tribune. It's interesting that unions are so far ahead of our governments. But then, I suppose they always have been, at least when the governments are being run by the Oligarchy Party.