by E. J. Graff
By now even explicitly Christian marriage counseling advises couples on how to improve their bedroom lives, seeing sexual pleasure as refreshing the marital commitment. Tim and Beverly LaHaye of the Moral Majority and Concerned Women for America organizations, and leaders among those conducting the “family values” charge, even wrote a book suggesting that reading the Song of Solomon offers information on clitoral stimulation. They write that the verse “Let his left hand be under my head and his right hand embrace me” can be carried out with “the wife lying on her back with her knees bent and feet pulled up to her hips and her husband lying on her right side.” When even evangelical Christians wholeheartedly dispose of the Refraining ideal to prescribe sex a mano, which Catholic theologians declared a sin that deserved the fire, the Refreshing ideal has utterly swept the field. And if the LaHayes are correct—if, as that minister wrote in the 1920s, “the sexual act, as a sacramental act, has a value apart from any results which may follow it. . . . [and] is the attainment of that spiritual, mental, and bodily unity with the person beloved”—then my nuptial life most certainly belongs.
From the post-Griswold point of view, what is marriage for? For the close companionship and sexual pleasure of the pair. By legalizing birth control, our nation’s laws recognized that the goal of sex was now love, pleasure, and that other response so difficult to put into words—that temporary transcendence of self, that deep gratitude of belonging to another, which so many of us—including Madeline and myself—want to surround with a gold band’s determined, optimistic promises. Once society has gotten rid of the idea that sex without babies is bad—or to put it differently, once our philosophy and laws protect sex for pleasure and love—how can same-sex marriage be barred?
The new code put in a terrible bind anyone who—upon all that introspection encouraged by the capitalists, Protestants, and that new breed of priests, the psychologists—discovered within herself affections and desires aimed at her own sex. How could she now justify imprisoning herself in a baby-making marriage? In the seventeenth or even eighteenth century she could simply have lay on her back for her husband and then politely greeted him in the morning over breakfast after gathering the eggs or opening the shop. But now simply making babies wouldn’t do. Now she had to feel a deep, intimate, personal union with this guy—which made her inner dryness toward him an insupportable hypocrisy, even a sin. But on the other hand, if she wanted not him but a woman, she was—in accordance with newly invented theories about homosexuality—sick. Suddenly hers was an impossible conundrum, a shocking difference from her sisters, a difference far more visible and disturbing than it would have been only two hundred years before.
And so, conveniently, she became the latest—and now the only—scapegoat for the “crime against nature.” Sodomy was no longer defined as any nonprocreative seedspilling; instead, the laws attacked only those who loved someone of the same sex—and with terrible consequences. When a Virginia appeals court agreed that Sharon Bottoms’ son should be brought up not by his mother but by his grandmother, the court explained that Sharon Bottoms was an admitted felon—that she’d admitted to having oral sex and admitted she’d do it again. Never mind that no police officer was going to arrest Sharon for her felony; never mind that some 95 percent of American women say they have oral sex; never mind that no judge would yank away the son of a heterosexual woman if she “admitted” to having oral sex with her new husband (which does count as “sodomy” in the Virginia statute). The most thoughtful and prominent theorists against homosexuality make clear that they oppose homosexuality on the same grounds that they oppose “the acts of a husband and wife whose intercourse is masturbatory, for example sodomitic or by fellatio or coitus interruptus . . . or deliberately contracepted”—in other words, any sex that cannot make babies. But only lesbians and gay men are now legally expected to live by that early Christian Refraining ideal: know and conquer your sexual feelings. How, in a pluralist democracy, can you draw a circle-and-slash around one group’s inner lives? How can only one group be barred from the Refreshing ideology that guides the West’s sex and marriage law?
Many people imagine that any sexual act between two women or two men must feel like a loveless and barren perversion—just as sex with men felt, to me, numb and degrading. And of course many young men are afraid of being treated, or even thought of, the way they treat or think of women: Norman Podhoretz wrote in one Commentary article that “men using one another as women constitutes a perversion,” which is an amazingly open admission of the disgust for women that lies behind much antigay writing. But neither this secret misogyny nor this failure of imagination, this inability to accept others’ inner lives as different from one’s own, is a justifiable reason to bar lesbians and gay men—and only lesbians and gay men—from testifying that when we love we, too, find sex to be a sacrament, a language for love, a marital bond. As one pundit has written, we want to commit monogamy. If sex is justified by your inner life—whether the high spiritual standard of love or the low pragmatic standard of willingness—then no one else can testify about mine.
The war of the words And so, naturally, the rhetoric of those opposed to same-sex marriage has grown more and more hysterical—echoing other marriage battles. In the anti-gay campaign of the 1920s, one newspaper pundit charged that, “Once a man assumes the role of homosexual, he often throws off all moral restraints . . . they descend through perversions to other forms of depravity, such as drug addiction, burglary, sadism, and even murder.” In the 1970s, Anita Bryant picked the perennial danger-to-children theme when she called her campaign against a human rights ordinance “Save Our Children” because of “fears we now felt of widespread militant homosexuals’ efforts to influence children to their abnormal way of life.” Some of her allies used that other perennial charge in the marriage wars: that any protection for lesbians and gay men was “a carefully disguised attempt to break down further the moral fabric of society.”
And of course, there’s the traditional charge that any change in the marriage rules will pollute society and therefore lead to disease. The fact that, in the developed west, HIV has spread especially among gay men—unlike in Africa and Asia, where AIDS is primarily a heterosexual epidemic—has made this charge particularly potent. As one opponent writes, “Vaginal intercourse is the only kind of sexual intercourse that medical research has shown causes no physical or mental damages.” Such a sentence entertainingly ignores the facts: because penises are so efficient at dispersing viruses and battering vaginal walls, lesbians have lower rates of gynecological and sexually transmitted diseases than do straight women or men.
Underlying most of these charges is the basic fallback position of those who fear change: God is on their side. As one pamphlet puts it, “Homosexuality is not what God intends for individuals or society. . . . it is the willful sin of human beings which causes homosexuality.”
Disease, bestiality, incest, polygamy; a flagrant violation of the very definition of marriage; threats to children, family, society, and civilization; God’s coming punishment for sin: These same apocalypse-now charges are hurled in every marriage battle. Are such predictions any more true now than they were, say, when early Christians advocated celibacy; when nineteenth-century women struggled to control their own wallets; or when twentieth-century feminists worked to legalize birth control? Such outcries are always a backlash against social and economic changes that have already taken place. For instance, today’s commentators have genuine concerns about what will happen to family life in a consumer capitalist age. There remains an uneasy tension between, on the one hand, marriage as a way to resist consumer capitalism’s pressure on the individual soul—and, on the other, consumer capitalism’s ideology of individual love and fulfillment. But they wrongly choose those who love among the same sex as their scapegoats. The movement toward same-sex marriage is the consequence, not the cause, of many other changes in Western life—changes like legalized contraception, already inscribed in Western laws.
A pluralistic democracy cannot fairly bar as pariahs people who fully fit its ideology of the meaning of sex within marriage. Madeline and I now belong.
THREE:
Babies
Marriage has universally fallen into awful disrepute.
—MARTIN LUTHER, “On the Estate of Marriage” (1522)
The family, in its old sense, is disappearing from our land, and not only our free institutions are threatened but the very existence of our society is endangered.
—Boston Quarterly Review (1859)
Will the family, that institution which we have long regarded as the unit of civilization, the foundation of the state, survive? . . . The family of our fathers’ time has almost entirely gone. . . . The home made by one man and one woman bound together ‘until death do ye part’ has in large measure given way to trial marriage [T]he bearing of children, finds less place in the conduct of this generation.
—CHAUNCEY J. HAWKINS, Will the Home Survive (1907)
Then your family disintegrated, began to split into groups. . . . the apartment rang with “Dad, I’m taking the car!” from 16-year-old Bill; “Mother, I’m sleeping over at Alice’s house—it’s too far to come all the way home” from adolescent Mary; “Let’s eat out dear, and we’ll have time to do something on the outside” from Mother. . . . For one reason or another, the middle class family has been disrupted. Women who will not settle into domesticity and maternity, fathers dispossessed of their sovereignty, children running tangentially against their parents’ wishes, the pull of outside forces, all have made middle class society homeless. . . . A single generation has marred them completely.
—JOHN H. LAVAL, “The Disappearance of the Family” (1939)
The American family has, in the past generation or more, been undergoing a profound process of change. . . . Some have cited facts such as the very high rates of divorce, the changes in the older sex morality, and until fairly recently, the decline in birth rates, as evidence of a trend to disorganization in an absolute sense.
—TALCOTT PARSONS, “The American Family” (1955)
It would be silly to pretend otherwise: one of marriage’s goals has always been children. However quaintly familiar the jeremiads that start this chapter, it is a sign of dizzying social change, of how profoundly the Refreshing ideology has triumphed, that you can now ask a classroom of college students what marriage is for—and they can talk for an hour or more before anyone mentions kids. The Egyptians didn’t even have a word for marriage, which men and women could enter and leave at will; rather, a man was said to “establish a household,” implying a home that would include offspring. A typical medieval catechism defined marriage as a “sacrament instituted in order to have children legitimately and to raise them in the fear of God.” Enlightenment thinkers agreed, although they boldly tossed out God and substituted the State when defining marriage as “a civil contract whereby a man is joined to a woman for the procreation of legitimate children.” That concept was losing ground by the late eighteenth century, when The Lady’s Magazine huffed that traditional marriage was being destroyed by a new romantic ideal: “The intent of matrimony is not for man and his wife to be always taken up with each other, but jointly to discharge the duties of civil society, to govern their families with prudence, and to educate their children with discretion.” All these are clues to how unfamiliar that word “family” gets once you investigate its history.
Whenever today’s pundits throw up their hands about society’s morals, they point to the disintegrating family as evidence and cause of every other social ill—just as their predecessors have done for nearly two hundred years. Opening marriage to same-sex couples, in this view, would be the final straw that would cause the entire family structure to come crashing down around our heads. The pillar of society is apparently paper-thin. As James Q. Wilson writes, “Marriage is an institution created to sustain child-rearing. The role of raising children is entrusted in principle to married heterosexual couples because after much experimentation—several thousand years, more or less—we have found nothing else that works as well.” Such commentators are trying to call up, in our historically unfurnished minds, the flickering ghosts of the 1950s TV family—itself a radically new aberration that was once considered a social horror, not “traditional.”
Are they right? Is the family now, and has it always been, one mother, one father, and two or three or ten children? Have children always been raised by their married heterosexual biological parents? These turn out not to be simple questions with obvious answers, but rather, questions with even more questions nestled inside them, like Russian matriarch dolls. Although there are an astonishing number of ways in which “family” has varied in the West, this chapter will look at three key questions, all hot topics in today’s debates. When has a group of human beings been designated as a “family”? When was a child considered socially and legally “legitimate,” or to put it differently, when were her parents considered properly married—and more important, why did anyone care? Who has society considered to be the most “natural” parent: dad, mom, a legally assigned biological stranger? History’s disorienting answers differ depending on who, and when, you’re asking.
In other words, the meaning of “family” is shiftier than just about anything else in the history of the marriage wars. And exactly what family is, what it has been, and what it can or ought to be, is one of the questions tucked inside this book’s main question: what is marriage for?
Many readers may have heard of Philippe Ariès’s thesis that “childhood” was only recently invented, that premodern children died in such numbers that most parents withheld their affection lest they be plummeted again and again into grief, that—in Lloyd DeMause’s famous phrase—“the history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have just begun to awaken.” As it happens, these are hotly contested theories in the history of the family, scholarly minefields into which I dare not step. But even without worrying about whether parents loved or ignored their children before the nineteenth century, we can easily discover that “the family” has never held still but has veered from one conception to the next—its current manifestation vanishing in a way that rightly terrifies a given generation, since family really is just as central to society as everyone insists. Family is where wave after wave of human beings are socialized and cared for, where children are raised to be useful members of society instead of dangerous cast-outs. Family is often an urgent part of how individuals make decisions that affect state, economy, and employer—as when an adolescent chooses a college a thousand miles away to flee his troubled family, or when a woman starts a home-based consulting company because she urgently needs both the income and the flexibility to stay home with the kids, or when a forty-year-old computer whiz turns down that fabulous posting to Germany because his New Jersey-bound ex-lover is ailing and needs care. Without family—without others we are responsible to and for—we scarcely seem human.
And so the questions underlying any changes in the definition of “family” truly are socially urgent. What makes it possible for children to grow up successfully? In what configurations can people best carry out those mutual responsibilities that keep us and society alive? What is a “family”? The question puzzles historians far more than it does those involved in today’s shouting match over “family values.” What they do agree on is that “the family” as we know it was invented in the middle of the nineteenth century—which is when cries about the “death of the family” began to rise in number and pitch. And yet somehow “the family” always seems to reappear in a way that—despite jeremiads—manages to rear children for the duties of the newly onrushing world.
What Makes a Family?
One of the first and most urgent questions that faces any society is: how can we best ensure that children will grow up into a successful adulthood? The contemporary intuition that a child must be raised by his “natural” parents is one about which many feel quite passionately. It’s therefore exceedingly dis
concerting to discover how recently we got sealed off into the “family” we now call traditional, the one whose goal is to provide a safe and secure nest for the tender young. Of course, the idea that a child belongs to its parents is ancient—but the key phrase in that sentence is belongs to, not belongs with. In many eras, while plenty of parents raised their own children, they also felt free to ship them off with impunity, from infancy through adolescence.
Most historians warn readers that to grasp “family” history you must first abandon the idea that you already know what “family” means. “Family” seems to be a word invented by Humpty Dumpty, who told Alice that “a word means what I say it should mean, neither more nor less: the question is, which is to be master, that is all.” Historians always remind us of the word’s etymology. Our family is related to its root in the Roman familia just about as closely as a Chevy Suburban is related to an elephant- and camel-drawn caravan. Sure, both of them move—but who’s inside, and what are they doing in there?
Inside the Roman familia was everyone in the household: legitimate children, adopted adults, secretaries and other dependents, slaves of various ages. “The Romans rarely used it to mean family in the sense of kin,” writes Roman family historian Suzanne Dixon. What counted, rather, was ownership. The words for children, slaves, and servants were so often interchanged that historians can’t always tell how many of which lived under one roof. And for good reason. The patriarch’s rule was complete: he could educate, beat, sell, give, indenture, marry off, endow, or kill any one of them, almost at will.
He could, of course, care for his familia as well. Romans lived with their slaves and servants so closely that it “in some ways resembled kinship, even if the slaves were always in the position of poor relations,” explains Dixon. Masters might inscribe the tombstones of especially beloved slaves in grieving words that mourned someone expected to care for the masters during old age; ex-slaves might write similar gravestone encomiums to former masters. (Did slaves really feel affection for their masters, or were they hoping to keep those ex-masters’ children as patrons? Probably both—although at this distance, it’s hard to read between the epitaphs’ lines.) Dixon cites one hard-fought custody battle between a freed slave and her former owners over who would keep the ex-slave’s daughter Patronia Iusta, a custody battle as vicious as that over Baby M. The masters “clearly wanted to treat [Patronia] as a daughter and were prepared to insist on her servile birth as a means of keeping her from her mother.” Could it be that the daughter was biologically the patriarch’s?