Undermining Marriage....

There has been a lot of talk of late about allowing gay couples to get marriage, would undermine marriage.It made me think that the starting point has to be a definition of marriage.

Well the truth is that marriage has been, for most of our history, a civil agreement between two parties. At its most basic, this is two people who make a mutual agreement to be married. No religious ceremony, no witnesses, nothing. At other times, it was a civil agreement, made to some authorities, rarely a religious event. One of the more famous ones is the "jumping the broomstick" ceremony used across Europe - a ceremony in front of the community. All of these were simple commitments by two people in the community.

It is relatively recently - 250 years or so - that the idea of marriage as a religious ceremony came in. There is probably nothing that redefined marriage more than the religious involvement in the ceremony. Alongside this, civil ceremonies meant that all marriages became formal, civil or religious ceremonies. Now it seems that the biggest redefinition of marriage is this insistence of a ceremony, requirement for doing something formal. Not that I have a problem with this, but it did redefine marriage.

Now gay couples have, throughout history, had personal agreements to stay together. For much of the history in the west, this is the essence of marriage. Gay couples have been married for centuries, should they wish to be, and it is only the formalisation of marriage that has disallowed this.

One thing that has changed in the last 2 centuries is the status of women. Up to a century ago, women were treated as possessions of their husbands - and their fathers before that. If you want events that have changed the definition of marriage recently, then the rights of women to own property and be their own legal entities must be the biggest redefinition ever. Related to this, the establishment of a married couple as a separate entity, and the legal benefits of a married couple changed the institution of marriage fundamentally. This has fundamentally and critically changed the nature of marriage in our society.

And of late, there has been a tendency for couples not to marry at all, or not until they have saved up for a big do. Marriage today seems to be far more about a big celebration than anything else. This has also redefined marriage - for far more people, it is a celebration of a partnership that is already happening and is already committed to - the civil agreement has been made previously, and the wedding ceremony itself is about a big event, a family occasion.

So redefining marriage? Redefining it from what? And why not, as we have redefined it repeatedly throughout our history. Allowing gay couples to marry will permit them to make their personal commitment to each other into a public statement, and enable them to benefit from the legal entitlements. All of which seems perfectly reasonable to me.