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Weekend
Edition
December 13 / 14, 2003
On Marriage in "Recorded
History"
An
Open Letter to Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney
By GARY LEUPP
Dear Governor Romney,
On November 18 the Massachusetts high
court ruled that discrimination against gay couples in matters
relating to marriage violated the Commonwealth's constitution.
You immediately rejected that decision, declaring: "I agree
with 3,000 years of recorded history. I disagree with the Supreme
Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Marriage is an institution between
a man and a woman ... and our constitution and laws should reflect
that." Your official
website informed the public that you "will support an
amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution to make that expressly
clear[M]arriage is a special institution that should be reserved
for a man and a woman."
So you "agree with history,"
you say, on this question of gay marriage. As an historian, I
don't agree or disagree with "history," which is not
a person with an opinion, but merely the record of countless
people pursuing their own ends, interacting with one another
and their environments through time. (Occasionally they make
breakthroughs, producing new things; there's no reason for sentient
beings to be stuck on precedent.) "I agree with history"
is really a meaningless statement, rather like saying "I
agree with time," or "I agree with reality,"
or "I agree with the way my father and grandfather and my
ancestors before them thought about things." What I suppose
you're really saying is that you agree with the proposition that
heterosexual marriage (of some sort) should be recognized by
law, to the specific exclusion of homosexual unions. You deploy
in support of that proposition the assertion that this is the
way it's always been. Gay marriage, you thus contend, will be
a radical departure from our civilized past.
But this is just not true, Governor.
You invoke "History" as though it's some source of
authority, but you really don't know much about it, do you? "No
investigation, no right to speak," I always say, and if
you want to talk about homosexual unions in recorded history
you should do some study first. First I recommend you read John
Boswell's fine book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality
(University of Chicago Press, 1980), in which he documents
legally recognized homosexual marriage in ancient Rome extending
into the Christian period, and his Same-Sex Unions in Premodern
Europe (Villard Books, 1994), in which he discusses Church-blessed
same-sex unions and even an ancient Christian same-sex nuptial
liturgy. Then check out my Male Colors: The Construction
of Homosexuality in Tokuga wa
Japan (University of California Press, 1995) in which I describe
the "brotherhood-bonds" between samurai males, involving
written contracts and sometimes severe punishments for infidelity,
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Check out the literature
on the Azande of the southern Sudan, where for centuries warriors
bonded, in all legitimacy, with "boy-wives." Or read
Marjorie Topley's study of lesbian marriages in Guangdong, China
into the early twentieth century. Check out Yale law professor
William Eskridge's The Case for Same-Sex Marriage (1996),
and other of this scholar's works, replete with many historical
examples.
What the study of world history will
really tell you, Governor, is that pretty much any kind
of sexual behavior can become institutionalized somewhere, sometime.
You know that polygamy remains normal and legal in many nations,
as it was among your Mormon forebears in Utah. In Tibet, polyandry
has a long history, and modern Chinese law seems powerless to
prevent marriages between one women and two or three men. Getting
back to same-sex issues, the Sambia of New Guinea have traditionally
believed that for an adolescent boy to grow into a man, he absolutely
must fellate an adult male and chug the semen down. I'm not making
this up; see Gilbert H. Herdt, Guardians of the Flutes (Columbia
University Press, 1981). Now you and I would see that as a kind
of child abuse, but to the Sambians, it's just common sense.
It's been that way for well over 3,000 years of their
history. (You might want to ask yourself: does that 3,000 year
record make it right?) Some ancient Greek tribes had a
similar notion of the necessary reception of semen to make a
boy a man, only with them it was an anal-routed process. (See
works by Jan Bremmer, for starters, on this practice as an "initiation
rite" among various Indo-European peoples.)
Some suggest that there have been two
basic traditions of male homosexual behavior on this planet,
prior to the evolution of the contemporary egalitarian model:
these inter-generational role-specific ones, in both pre-class
and more sophisticated societies; and those that involve males
who assume a female or transgender identity, who often also have
shamanistic roles, such as the berdache of Native American
peoples, or the hijra in Hindu society. These are generally
available for "straight" men to bed with if they want
to. A variation of this tradition is the ancient Mesopotamian
 male temple-prostitute (the cult
of which spread to Israel, as recorded in the Old Testament;
see 1 Kings14:24, 22:47, etc.). The idea was, you'd bugger one
of these holy prostitutes, mystically unite with the deity thereby,
and by your fee for this pleasure opportunity, assist in the
maintenance of the temple. I'm not trying to gross you out or
anything, Governor, just help you recognize that there may be
more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your (somewhat
too confident) philosophy of sexual history.
Over the last 3,000 years to which you
specifically allude (someone else was telling National Public
Radio that the Supreme Justice Court ruling defied 5,000 years,
which would make departure from precedent even more serious),
there has in fact been no global marriage norm. In some societies,
a man and woman, of their own free will, formed a relationship,
decided to forge a life-long commitment, got the necessary permissions
and ceremonial legitimacy, started having sex after that, and
maintained a monogamous union thereafter until one died. That's
been very unusual, though. Arranged marriages involving varying
degrees of input by the couple (usually less by the female) have
been more the norm. (Do you realize, Governor, how radically
sections of humankind departed from the prior "history"
you so validate, when we started insisting on the freedom of
young couples to marry without their parent's consent, and to
do so based on "love"---which is another complex and
evolving historical category? You might perhaps read Friedrich
Engels' still relevant book The Origins of the Family, Private
Property, and the State, and learn something about how capitalism
and the whole notion of the free market played a positive
role here.)
For demographic and economic reasons
(rather than articulated moral ones), monogamy has generally
been far more widespread than polygamy. But in more societies
than not, wealthy, powerful men have enjoyed the
polygamous option. That of course goes for the ancient Hebrews,
whose example inclined the founders of your church, that of the
Latter-Day Saints, to enthusiastically endorse the practice from
the church's founding in 1830 up to Wilford Woodruff and his
Manifesto in 1890. Then, whether due to a divine revelation,
or to a desire to get Utah admitted to the Union (it's not for
me to judge) LDS up and banned polygamy. Although, of
course, some rogue elements continue the practice which mainstream
Mormons now consider illicit.
But to agree with three, or five,
or twelve thousand years of random past practice would require
you, Governor Romney, to oppose the ban that the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts has from its inception placed on polygamy. I
tell you, though: if you refused to do that, I'd be right there
behind you. I'm a tolerant person and I realize that lots of
Thai and Nigerian and Saudi guys have multiple wives, and maybe
I even sort of lust, Carter-like,
in my heart to emulate them. But I'm not a total moral relativist,
and as public policy, I think monogamy's the right road, and
you should stand firm in its support, never mind the Mormon past,
which isn't your fault in any case.
Another thing. Not to get personal, but
I've been married to a Japanese woman for 20 years. I'm aware
some people have problems with this sort of arrangement; for
a long time (from 1905) in California "miscegenation"
between whites and "Mongolians" of all types was banned
by law. But such laws seem so stupid now, don't they? At the
time, such intimacies were depicted as "unnatural"
mixes of racial superiors with inferiors bound to mess up the
pure white gene pool. Of course the Mormon Church was committed
to the view that African-Africans were inferior (and certainly
unfit as partners to Mormon whites) way up until 1978, when Spencer
Kimball, the 12th Prophet, got his word from the Lord and the
policy was revised. Before that, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled
that Virginia state law banning black-white intermarriage could
not be enforced; very recently (1998), South Carolina chucked
its constitutional clause, dating to 1895, forbidding "marriage
of a white person with a Negro or mulatto or a person who should
have one-eighth or more Negro blood." Things change if
people want them to.
When I got married, the Japanese had
a law that the children of Japanese men and foreign women would
automatically have Japanese citizenship, but those of foreign
men and Japanese women would be denied that status. (The idea
was: only Japanese semen makes Japanese kids.) This discriminatory
treatment reflected the longstanding patriarchal prejudices of
the Japanese legal code. By chance my daughter was born in the
year that the law was changed (following protests by Japanese
wives of foreigners), to confer Japanese citizenship on all children
of Japanese nationals. So by random chance my kids are dual-nationals.
That just seems reasonable, right? But there was a time in which
those in power in Tokyo recoiled at the idea that a hairy-faced
foreign barbarian's offspring would mix equally with the progeny
of the Sun Goddess in the Land of the Gods. My point, again,
is just that views on these issues aren't historically static,
and good decent people can work to change them.
The freedom to link yourself to another,
and benefit from whatever range of privileges your political
and cultural environment confer on "marriage," should
not be arbitrarily confined to males who are attracted to females,
and to females attracted to males. Even if that premise had,
in fact, as you suggest, prevailed since the dawn of civilization,
it would be irrational. If history (with a capital H), has any
function at all, it is to induce people, merely through cumulative
experience, to get more rational, and thereby alleviate the kinds
of suffering they can inflict upon themselves. Recognition of
gay marriage is a step towards recognizing reality, and alleviating
the oppression homophobic ignorance and hatred inevitably inflict.
That's the reasoning behind the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts'
ruling.
You, in response, panicking at the prospect
of a broader, more inclusive concept of marriage, have proposed
as a half-way measure legislation recognizing "civil unions"
between same-sex couples. But please, Governor, go to sleep,
have a dream, an open-minded divinely inspired dream. Let God
Almighty, or whoever, Himself appear
to you and say, "I've decided to revise the earlier,
3000-year old institution you've been talking about. For no more
shall ye make any distinction among my people as to their sexual
preference. I the Lord God am no respecter of persons, but all
shall come unto me and all of legal age may be worthy to receive
all the blessings of marriage. So, Mitt, assemble the people
in the tabernacle which is the Massachusetts State House, on
Beacon Street and Park Street in Boston, and speak unto them
these words, saying: 'Gay marriage actually has lots of
historical precedents. May Massachusetts, cradle of the Revolution,
point the way once again in demanding recognition of what is
just, fair, reasonable, and civilized.'"
Sincerely,
Gary Leupp
Historian
Gary Leupp
is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor
of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Male
Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa, Japan
and Interracial
Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900.
He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 29 / 30, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
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