Wedding flashback #1 — 2010: Marriage bigotry an old pastime

 

      My older son is getting married this weekend. Lots to do. So I hope you will forgive me if I shirk my EGD duties for the next few days and dig into my considerable backlist of wedding columns. As a rule I don't edit old columns, though I almost balked at publishing the sentence below with four dashes — I did that? Ouch! But I kept it, both as penance and to show I've grown. Two dashes per sentence, max. Your indulgence, as always, is appreciated.

     On June 2, 1886, President Grover Cleveland married Frances Folsom in the White House. He was 49. She had turned 21 that day, making her the youngest first lady the United States has ever had.
     I almost added, "or will ever have." But that would be a mistake, the common blunder of assuming that the way things are now is the way they always were or the way they always will be.
     So yes, today no savvy national politician would wed a woman 27 years his junior. It would violate the protective cocoon we increasingly build around our young people. A hundred years ago, a girl turned 14 and could, in many states, get married or go to work in a thread factory.
     Today that's not the case. Marriage is a social institution, a civic bond with religious overtones, and as with all social institutions, it changes. How young you can legally marry shifts, as does whom you can marry. Issues once thought of as trivial — youth — are now viewed with deadly earnest. I doubt Ringo Starr could get away with singing "You're Sixteen" the way he did in 1973, when he was in his 30s.
     Meanwhile, issues that once were huge stumbling blocks — race, religion, class — are increasingly seen as no big deal, except in those places where they still are.
     I bring this up in the wake of U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker's ruling last week that California's ban on gay marriage violates the Constitution. Of course it does, unless you are trying to use said Constitution to promote your religious morality, in which case you will be talking about gay marriage violating the timeless traditions of marriage. Someone needs to point out how that's a lot of hooey.
     Not only have we seen the average age of marriage shift — 20 for a bride in 1954 when my mother got married at 19, rising to 24 when I got married in 1990 to a bride who, like me, was newly 30. But almost every aspect of marriage has shifted.
     Heading out to the train this morning, I grabbed my copy of Edward Westermarck's 1926 A Short History of Marriage, to remind myself of just how ductile, plastic and malleable the institution really is.
     Westermarck (at the time the Martin White professor of sociology at the University of London) makes a lively guide, pausing at one point to mention, I believe with a hint of satisfaction, that no more significant critic than Sigmund Freud objects to one of his theories.
     In his chapters on "Endogamy" — marrying within a certain group — and "Exogamy" — marrying outside a group — he points out that forbidding certain sorts to marry certain other sorts is as old as time, focusing not just on race and religion, but nationality and class. He skips around the globe illustrating his points.
     "In Polynesia, commoners were looked upon by the nobility almost as a different species of being, and in the higher ranks marriages between nobles and commoners were strongly opposed by the former. In Rome, plebeians and patricians could not intermarry till the year 445 B.C."
     Hmm . . . sounds familiar. We have an echo of this today in fairy tales — stories of forbidden class romance lingering in an age when Cinderella would marry the Duke of York and few would mind.
     "Modern civilization tends more or less to lower or pull down the barriers which separate races, nations, the adherents of different religions and the various classes of society," Westermarck writes.
     Ain't it the truth? With that in mind, not only does the eroding of the stigma against gay marriage fail to detract from the institution, but it is in harmony with marriage as we have been redefining it for 100 years.
     Which brings to mind another point clear in the book: Marriage has value.
      "Marriage is something more than a regulated sexual relation," he writes. "It is an economic institution, which may in various ways affect the proprietary rights of the parties."
     Spouses have economic rights that unmarried couples don't, relating to insurance and such. Plus, there is still some stigma to being unmarried, particularly in politics — Cleveland was our last president elected as a bachelor.
     Despite the changes we've seen, marriage still has worth, and withholding it from gay people based on nothing is mere religious oppression. It's odd — in some American colonies before the Revolutionary War, clergy were not allowed to perform wedding ceremonies; that was the realm of judges. The colonists, with fresh memories of the monolithic Church of England, did not want to let state religion get its foot in the door. So if you know your history, marriage in the United States is not a religious realm being intruded upon by the government, but a governmental realm that has been shanghaied by religion. In that light, it's time to correct the balance, and to treat all American citizens with the equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that they were endowed with by their Creator.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, August 8, 2010