>>I make the argument that much of the social change and societal unrest in the world is a reaction against Modernity.
>>I have given up hope that people understand that sentence. It is like arguing Camus versus Nietzsche. . .
>>However, that argument has surfaced this week before the Supreme Court.
>>I'm going to copy this article whole and not as bits.
>>This article explains the changes in society that change the circumstances of marriage much better than I can.
>>When the world stood against slavery, stood against the Divine Right of Kings and monarchs, stood for "liberty, equality, fraternity", and move against colonialism, against women as mere chattels of their husbands, then society moved forward and into the modern world.
>>
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/0 ... sentences/
During Tuesdays marriage equality arguments in the Supreme Court, several of the Courts conservative members suggested that same-sex couples should not be given equal marriage rights because these couples have not enjoyed those rights for most of the past. As Justice Antonin Scalia summed up this argument, for millennia, not a single society supported marriage equality, and that somehow exempted same-sex couples from the Constitutions promise of equal protection of the law.
Not long after her conservative colleagues raised this argument, however, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained exactly why marriage was long understood to be incompatible with homosexuality in just five sentences:
[Same-sex couples] wouldnt be asking for this relief if the law of marriage was what it was a millennium ago. I mean, it wasnt possible. Same-sex unions would not have opted into the pattern of marriage, which was a relationship, a dominant and a subordinate relationship. Yes, it was marriage between a man and a woman, but the man decided where the couple would be domiciled; it was her obligation to follow him.
There was a change in the institution of marriage to make it egalitarian when it wasnt egalitarian. And same-sex unions wouldnt wouldnt fit into what marriage was once.
Justice Ginsburgs point was that, until surprisingly recently, the legal institution of marriage was defined in terms of gender roles. According to Sir William Blackstone, an eighteenth century English jurist whose works are still frequently cited today to explain the common law principles we inherited from our former colonial rulers, [t]he very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything. As late as 1887, fully one third of the states did not permit women to control their earnings. And married women could not even withhold consent to sex with their husband until shockingly recently.
Under the common law, by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given herself up in this kind unto her husband, and this consent was something she cannot retract. The first successful prosecution in the United States of a husband who raped his wife did not occur until the late 1970s.
So American marriage law, and the English law that it was derived from, presumed that the wife was both financially and sexual subservient to the husband. In a world where marriage is defined as a union between a dominant man and a submissive woman, each fulfilling unique gender roles, the case for marriage discrimination is clear. How can both the dominant male role and the submissive female role be carried out in a marital union if the union does not include one man and one woman? This, according to Justice Ginsburg, is why marriage was understood to exclude same-sex couples for so many centuries.
But marriage is no longer bound to antiquated gender roles. And when those gender roles are removed, the case for marriage discrimination breaks down.
End of article
