You know what argument I don’t get that I hear from the side of people that are against same sex marriage is? That its tradition for marriage to be between one man and one woman. They sometimes go on to point out various historical accounts illustrating how that was so. Well, I’m not a huge historian on the past of relationships or marriage, so I don’t know if in every culture in the history of the world they only celebrated unions between opposite sex partners or not, but the big idea that comes to my mind is: whether it was tradition or not, it’s irrelevant to the topic today.
Cultures revolutionize with every passing generation. New ideas and changes are presented all the time. If you ask me, I think things like outlawing slavery, letting women be able to hold professional careers, and the inventions of things like cars, airplanes and the internet served as bigger shocks to our culture and way of life than letting two people of the same sex sign a document that legally binds them together ever will.
Bingo.
But even with all that said, they're still historically wrong. That's not terribly
important, but it certainly is hilarious.
Plenty of cultures have never minded gay unions (whatever they called it). Check out the Maoris in NZ (which recently legalized gay marriage) for one example.
Also, historical, traditional Abrahamic religious marriage (and let's be honest, that's what they're talking about: Abrahamic religious tradition) was not always one man, one woman. Sometimes, it still isn't.
For quite a long time, it was one man and however many women he liked. Maybe he had some wives, some concubines, and then some slaves he just liked to screw. But there was no pressure for men to be monogamous. Only women.
In fact, women weren't really considered part of the marital unit at all. There was no "unit." There was only the man. Women were property, often traded for things like cattle, or simply money. Women were a tool, used as a means to an end; usually to produce heirs, or to increase social standing. The women themselves were not partners in their household. They were property. Slaves, basically.
In medieval times, it was usually one man, one woman, sort of. But not really.
Married men often had mistresses. And in some European cultures, high status married women had courtiers. They weren't officially married to these "pieces on the side," but they were accepted as part of the marital unit.
And then of course there's the Mormons. A lot of Christians like to disown them as "not Christian," but really, they're just crying "no true Scotsman." Polygamous Christian marriage is still practiced, in the shadows, to this day.
And of course the same thing occurs in Islam. Also one of the Abrahamic off-shoots, though again, Christians don't like to talk about that.
In truth, Abrahamic monogamous opposite sex marriage where women are commonly and truly part of the unit is a very recent invention. It's really only been a reality in practice for the last 50-100 years, if that. And many places in the world still practice the old "traditions."
The ignorance of history has no bearing on the fact that it is wrong to discriminate against same sex couples, of course, but I always find it kind of hilarious when people sputter out their revisionist accounts of history.
I can see why they do it though. Who would want to associate themselves with
real "traditional marriage," which was not only non-monogamous, but basically just a gendered version of slavery? The only way they can claim "tradition" is to re-write what the tradition actually was.
