Marriage and the Mists of Time
Someplace — I forget where now — during the height of the pre-election gay marriage "debate", I was keeping track of new records claimed for the length of time over which marriage had remained "traditional" and "unchanging". Generally, it looked like the claim was peaking at around 2,000 years. People seemed willing to risk guessing back that far, presuming that Jesus had invented the one-man + one-woman thing. They were wrong, of course — that the M+W concept is steeped in tradition and its origins lost to the mists of time is a naive modern concept — but it was fun to watch the competition. One could calibrate the piety and sanctimony of the speaker by noting the length of time he or she claimed for most the fundamentally important institution of our society.
But wait! The game is not over. We have an exciting new entry!
In his article "Activists undermine gay marriage pitch" from the Bucks County [PA] Courier Times, J.D. Mullane reveals startling information.
For context: you can tell from the title of his opinion piece that Mr. Mullhane is freely offering some objective advice as a sensitive heterosexual kind-of-guy to the gay-rights movement, at least to a group there in Bucks Country who apparently are about to scuttle the entire equal-rights movement for the rest of us. I can still remember a time when I was in secondary school and groups of earnest white guys would talk about the dangers of the latest negro escapade and how it wasn't helping their movement any.
Come to think of it, I remember when I was in graduate school (this was at Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut, around 1979, about 10 years after Loving v. Virginia), and the undergraduate newspaper ran editorials with titles like "Is Inter-racial Dating an Eyesore" without any apparent embarrassment. I'd kind of like to know how those authors feel today about how they "debated" that vitally important social issue.
Anyway, after he finishes laying out his remedial suggestions for the gay agenda, Mr. Mullhane sums up with some sweeping statements. First,
Suggesting in public that straight opposition to gay marriage is attributable to blatant discrimination or closet homosexuality is a cheap shot.
I have some difficulty with this, since I'm not accustomed to thinking of the truth as a "cheap shot": it is discrimination however you look at at, albeit discrimination that some people think is justified. But this isn't the good bit.
The next thing is this startling statement:
Most of the students I spoke with cited the Bible, their faith, their values or simply 6,000 years of human tradition as reasons why they oppose gay marriage.
Fascinating! To think that we can know about "traditional" marriage as far back as 4,000 BC, a time that is commonly referred to as the beginning of the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, the cross-over period in Britain from hunting-gathering to farming. It seems, then, that M+W marriage arrived with the "Dawn of Civilisation" [in the British spelling] in Britain. In Egypt, it was the "Pre-dynastic Period", and possibly the first use of paper; the earliest Mesopotamian cities were appearing, no doubt with cute bungalows for traditionally married couples; and China during the Longshan (or Dawenkou) period, since they'd already discovered metallurgy, were probably already traditionally marrying fools. It was still over 200 years to the first year of the Jewish calendar, so it's hard to say what they were up to.
This was also the time, it turns out, when the horse was first domesticated in the Eurasian steppes, no doubt helping to create domestic tranquility.