Cross culturally, marriage is primarily about the assignment of specific (though culturally variable) rights and privileges, especially in children.  It is also about biological and social reproduction of society (though not the only or always the most important mechanism for that).  It is also linked to the gendered division of labor, which primarily plays out in domestic contexts.

That said, marriage takes a wide array of forms and may be totally absent among the Mosuo of southwestern China.  Here, and among some other groups, men and women remain in their natal households (all large extended family households comprised of blood relatives) throughout life and primary socialization is handled by a wider array of relatives.

You left out (what I think is) the most important reason for marriage: people enter into long term domestic partnerships. In these partnerships property and income are generally shared. Also frequently these partnerships also take on the responsibility of child rearing.

This will happen whether or not there is a legal idea such as marriage. But without a legal concept of marriage it is difficult, though not impossible, to legally manage the diverse issues that come from these partnerships. ( death, dissolution, serious illness, child custody)

It seems to me that marriage (or domestic partnership) is the easiest way to handle this. You register as domestic partners, which is legally binding for the purposes of the law.

Anyway, I’ve been in the same relationship since 2003. We are legally married and I think we are both pretty happy with the situation. Its nice.

Another reason for marriage which fits within conservative social preferences is that it is the codification of duties and the creation of a predictable (mandated) contractual relationship: offer, acceptance, conduct, consequences of breach.

My argument has always been “we’re either all drinking out of the same water fountain or we aren’t”.

Being gay is not illegal, therefore there are no rights afforded to heterosexual people that should be denied to homosexual people. Heterosexual people have the right to enter into marriage, therefore, homosexual people should have the right to enter into marriage.

stephen, that’s “social stability”.  Long term partnerships are a matter of social and government concern, because they promote stability

Ok, got it.

I suspect Ted Olson is that rara avis—an intellectual (and intellectually consistent) conservative.  As for the issues that concern you, Amanda (if I’m understanding them correctly, they relate to the privileging of the marital relationship over other social and personal relationships), I’m sympathetic to them but am coming to see it this way:  Marriage, historically, has had a LOT to do with institutionalizing patriarchy and the subjugation of women, as well as curbing, confining and controlling sexuality (usually of women) and that has been a big reason why I’ve been hostile to it most of my life.  But I’m beginning to understand that it is also about community recognition of, and support for, the commitment of two people to one another (an important aspect of the “social stability” factor you’ve identified)—and one of the reasons I’ve begun to understand this and to appreciate its value is because of the movement for same-sex marriage.  This, I think, is a small “c” conservative value I can get behind.  Transgressive liasons can be fun, but at some point you get pretty tired of the world not taking your relationships seriously, or having to explain who someone is to you.  Not to mention people taking it much less seriously if you lose a “boyfriend” or if your “boyfriend” gets sick or hurt or dies just because it wasn’t a marital relationship.  Screw that.

I’m also beginning to understand the emancipatory and transformative power of legitimizing same-sex marriage.  Someone (probably one of the commenters here) said social conservatives hate same-sex marriage because they can’t tell who’s supposed to be the chattel, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that.  Weirdly and wonderfully, the small “c” conservative imprimatur on wanting a social structure for our intimate relationships may help to blow up the patriarchal structure of marriage, and leave us with a healthier model.

Re: reason #1: I never really understood the arguments against gay marriage - by I which I mean I just had no idea what they were on about - until I heard someone sneer, in reference to a gay couple, “Which one is the wife?” It was like a light bulb went off.

There’s absolutely no solid reason to OPPOSE gay marriage, conservative or not.

Most religious right types oppose gay marriage on two grounds:

1. It’s not what God wants.
2. By getting all loosey-goosey about marriage, we undermine the tradition family, creating more broken homes and instability, especially for children.

I think #1 is by far the most motivating factor for the religious right. But they know as well as everyone else that basing our laws on what God wants is unconstitutional, so they fall back on #2.

But there’s no hard evidence (besides anecdotes about the respectable married mother who runs of with a lesbian) that gay marriage undermines the family. Which two states have the lowest divorce rate in the entire country? Massachusetts and Connecticut. Which part of the country has the highest rates of divorce and teen pregnancy? The Bible Belt.

When confronted with this, opponents usually respond that the low divorce rate in gay-friendly states is due to better education, higher income, etc. They argue that people in Southern states get divorced and “oops” pregnant more because they’re less educated.

But that’s basically an admission that tolerance of gays is NOT a factor in divorce rates, now isn’t it?

I’m sorry but Amanda’s post and the comments, while certainly germane, miss the central point of marriage: the exchange and maintenance of property rights. Marriage is a way of keeping property in the family or adding to the family’s aggregate wealth or social status.

In many parts of the Arabic-speaking world, it is the stuff of every romantic story that a man marries his daughter off to his brother’s son: this is not taboo in their culture like it is in ours. Because for one reason, it keeps property in the nuclear family. In medieval Europe, marriage was explicitly an exchange of property rights: the father “giving away” the daughter in traditional weddings even now is a relic of this meaning of marriage. Look at Jane Austen, or pretty much any Victorian novel, and you’ll see an example of a wealthy but common industrialist entering into a relationship with a down-on-their-heels high-status family and trading wealth for class by marrying his daughter to a scion of that family.

The goal was not so much to subjugate women as it was to use them as tokens of property and status. Admittedly, this does subjugate women, but that’s more of a useful consequence than the original objective.

Marriage is a way of keeping property in the family or adding to the family’s aggregate wealth or social status.

That’s why lower-class people in England generally didn’t bother getting married until Victorian times (and often not even then).  They had no or very little property to protect, so there wasn’t really any point in legally tying yourself to someone, and most communities were pretty tolerant of couples breaking apart (unless someone left their family destitute and dependent on the rest of the community).  Marriage was originally mainly for the upper classes, then moved on to the middle classes as they became more prosperous and hence had more property to protect.

I’m not as familiar with the history of family life in other parts of Europe, but I assume it’s pretty similar.

Also, to what felagund way saying, look at how many of the original laws to protect women’s rights centered around giving women sole access to money that they brought to the family.  First women were allowed to inherit money in their own names and then they were allowed to keep money that they earned.  Before that, it was all community property, which meant that if you had married a gambler or a drunk, he had a perfect legal right to spend every penny of the money your grandfather left you.

I sometimes wonder if 9/11 impacted Ted Olson in such a way as to give him some sense of empathy…

His wife Barbara was one of the victims on Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon that day… she was headed to a taping of Politically Incorrect in Los Angeles, and they spoke on the phone moments before she died.

But without a legal concept of marriage it is difficult, though not impossible, to legally manage the diverse issues that come from these partnerships. ( death, dissolution, serious illness, child custody)

Yes and no.  It all depends on what jurisdiction you are in of course but none of these are necessarily easier just because you have a marriage document.

Child custody is always going to be a big ugly brouhaha not matter what the circumstances.

Death is always made easier by a will.  Lots of people think if their married they are totally covered but the truth is dying intestate (without a will) will be a longer and more expensive process for your family.  It is better to be not married and with a will than married without one.

Dissolution of a partnership all depends on the people involved.  You can either be adults and split amicably or you can be like my parents who are still arguing over shit twelve years later.  Unfortunately a license doesn’t change anyone’s maturity level.  The only ones I can say that this is guaranteed to help is if one of the partners is reliant on the other financially but even then in some countries individuals are protected by common law.

Serious illness is definitely a big issue in the States when it comes to marriage status. However in other countries with decent common law status this is not nearly as big of an issue unless there is some conflict between family members on the appropriate care for an individual.  It is wise to remember of course that marriage did not protect Terry Schiavo (sp?) from a big spectacle about her end of life decisions.

When confronted with this, opponents usually respond that the low divorce rate in gay-friendly states is due to better education, higher income, etc. They argue that people in Southern states get divorced and “oops” pregnant more because they’re less educated.

But that’s basically an admission that tolerance of gays is NOT a factor in divorce rates, now isn’t it?
Comment #9: Ashley Herzog on 01/15 at 06:57 PM

Uh… how do they do that and at the same time sneer at intellectuals?  For Southern Conservatives and others of the “bitter, small town realm”  being uneducated (or pure of those socialist ideas them thar socialist teachers and professors put in young’uns heads) is a point of pride.

I think for some Conservatives, #1 and #2 aren’t all that mutually exclusive.  Feminism and equality upset what they see as “social stability”, aka male privilege.  To some, social stability is the subjugation of women - especially among the fundamentalists.  Women are to be the helpmeet to men, and must submit to the authority of their husbands, and that is the social order that it should be.  If something is wrong with the man or the marriage, even if he is an abusive asshole, the woman will be blamed for something, some transgression on her part (usually in her faith) or that she wasn’t submissive enough.

Gay marriage would upset that - proving that social stability can be achieved through marriage without the subjugation of women, and that is the real threat to fundamentalists.  I think it’s why they go on an on about the promiscuity of gay people as being a reason to deny them marriage - it’s not the promiscuity per se, but the fact that it will upset their worldview of “social stability=subjugation of women”.

But I fear that the more conservatives who get mixed up in this, the more likely it is that gay marriage is going to end up becoming a tool that’s used to justify continued de-privileging of people who can’t or won’t get married for various reasons, including asexuality, non-monogamous inclinations expressed honestly, loner-ism, or political objections to the existence of marital privilege/enforced monogamy.

This is the main reason I was against gay marriage back when I was a crazy radical college kid.  I’ve changed my opinion over the years, but I still have certain fears about this.  The bottom line is that arguing in favor of marriage is ultimately a conservative position, and as gay marriage becomes more of a mainstream thing, that’s going to become apparent.  In a political point-scoring sense, I’ve never been sure that gay marriage was really going to move the ball down the field in the direction we thought it was. 

Again, not to say I don’t support gay marriage.  I just don’t think it’s going to turn out to be as radical as we think.

Marriage is a way of keeping property in the family or adding to the family’s aggregate wealth or social status.

I’m not really sure this is true anymore in contemporary Western culture, except maybe for the very wealthy.  For instance, I’m a pretty typical middle class woman.  I don’t share any property in common with my family of birth.  The same is true for my boyfriend, who is for the most part a typical middle class man.  If we were to marry, property (keeping it “in the family”, acquiring more of it, solidifying it, whatever) wouldn’t really have anything to do with it.  At most it would be tangential, like for instance our parents being willing to outlay a lot of money for a wedding and give us gifts (hardly the main reason that sane people get married). 

It does make a material difference (health insurance, tax breaks, and the like).  And it can affect social status, though I think nowadays it’s more about cementing or preserving social status rather than moving up the ladder (“gold-digging” being looked down upon).  But it doesn’t much seem to be about property anymore.  In fact I’d posit that marriage started being about romance as it stopped being about property in any substantial sense.

In this culture, the privileges associated with state-sanctioned marriage make the most powerful arguments for marriage equality.  If, however, we had universal health care and other social safety nets, then domestic partners would have no need of marriage.  Which may explain the conservative hostility toward health care reform, as well as their fears of gay marriage (in which they perceive the partners may not need those benefits in the say way that heterosexual women [one man away from welfare, used to be a saying among social workers] and children have in the past.

Loved this little exchange between the defense counsel for the Prop 8 side, and activist Helen Zia’s account of her life as a lesbian and the long road to her (finally) legal marriage:

P: Your marriage did not affect your view of marriage as a patriarchal institution. Married Ms. Shigimura because you wanted “to express your defiance of the war mongering, hate filled machine in Washington.”

Z” That sounds like something I would write.

[GALES OFLAUGHTER!]

And here’s a handy chart showing that divorce rates appear to be higher overall in states with bans against gay marriage:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/01/divorce-rates-appear-higher-in-states.html

<i> I do wonder if Olson moved over because he was a true believer in the arguments made by mostly disingenuous conservatives, or if he has gay people in his life that have made the discomfort with these disingenuous arguments more pronounced, because they’re such obvious cover stories for bigotry.  <\i>

Maybe neither—I think what happened is, when his wife was killed by the conservative mis-governance of the presidential administration he helped install in a judicial coup d’etat, he began to have doubts about conservatism more broadly.  Surely that sort of experience—having your ideology fail that badly and impact your own life that catastrophically—has got to make you start questioning them.

Historical arguments are tricky, though. In earlier times, in some places, I’ve heard, people without property didn’t necessarily undergo formal weddings.

Generally true.  Also, in western civilization, formal weddings have been heavily tied up with Christianity, which has caused some quirks which amuse us today (ex. in the Wife of Bath, I believe there’s a very casual mention of marriage as being “at the Church steps” or some such, to the confusion of certain students).  In ancient Rome, there were laws that made marriage very much more complicated for a lot of people, so there were huge numbers for whom it wasn’t a practical option.  Then again, iirc, there’s some good evidence for plebeian Rome having been very liberal about who people were sleeping with and in what configuration, and in ancient cultures sexual roles were very different from our modern definitions.  There are limits to how far historical precedence can be stretched.

(ex. in the Wife of Bath, I believe there’s a very casual mention of marriage as being “at the Church steps” or some such, to the confusion of certain students)

Since marriage was a crass commercial transaction, you couldn’t actually get married inside the church.  You did the formalities (like signing the contract) outside the church and then went inside afterwards to celebrate with a mass.

They did eventually combine the two, mostly for convenience, but that’s how it worked in most of medieval Europe.

It has always baffled me that other conservatives argue against gay marriage, because it always seemed self-evident that a just government must treat every citizen equally.  If benefits are offered for agreeing to couple your life with some long-term partner, they should be available regardless of that partner’s credentials (obviously, some radically pernicious things like incest, age of consent issues should be excluded).  The scope of the benefits is up for negotiation, but the pool of potential candidates should not be.

It’s for this reason that I pitch the idea of universal civil unions to my more mainline conservative friends.  I think a separation of legal and spiritual/romantic marriage is the best answer to all of the hand-wringing fear about all the sudden evaporation of the sanctity of marriage.  It forces them to say that they want the government to support their own particular religious view or, at the very least, protect a tradition with it’s roots firmly grounded in religious observance.  Most of my friends, admittedly people with reasonably good heads on their shoulders, are willing to see the inconsistency that instituting religion and tradition for their own sake creates when juxtaposed with their own more intellectually conservative positions.

Hanlon: It’s for this reason that I pitch the idea of universal civil unions to my more mainline conservative friends.

That probably suits them just fine, since anyone with enough common sense to walk and chew gum at the same time knows that mixed-sex couples will never support getting rid of their right to be married, so promoting “universal civil unions” is just another means of arguing against the right of same-sex couples to get married.

.  I think a separation of legal and spiritual/romantic marriage is the best answer to all of the hand-wringing fear about all the sudden evaporation of the sanctity of marriage.

Given that in the US there has been absolute separation between legal marriage and spiritual/romantic marriage for at least a century before the first application by a same-sex couple for legal marriage, I have no idea why people are still ignorantly suggesting that if only it were possible for same-sex couples to be married legally without benefit of religion, homophobes wouldn’t have their handwring fear: patently, it’s not so. The multiple bans on same-sex couples marrying across the United States were not passed to prevent same-sex couples from having spiritual/romantic weddings, but to ban legal marriage. Evidently, it’s not the spiritual/romantic aspect of marriage homophobes have a problem with - it’s same-sex couples having the same legal rights.

It forces them to say that they want the government to support their own particular religious view or, at the very least, protect a tradition with it’s roots firmly grounded in religious observance.

Just shows how conciliatory your position is to your homophobic friends, if you’ve never had them move smoothly on from claiming that marriage just is for mixed-sex couples only (a religious position) right into claiming that same-sex couples can’t/shouldn’t have children, and having children is apparently all marriage is all about.

@ Jesuralgic: au contraire, I know of many mixed sex couples who would like to see civil unions decoupled from religious marriage.  I’ve argues for it here. For one, it removes the churches forced to perform ceremonies argument,  and it allows het couples to not jump through some religious hoops they’d rather not just to have the big wedding.  And most importantly it takes the whole idea of controlling weddings away from the religious institutions.  Think of it as raising the status of the public option.

if I’m understanding them correctly, they relate to the privileging of the marital relationship over other social and personal relationships

To be more precise, I object to privileging married people over other people.  The financial and social and even health benefits of marriage are something we’re so used to associating with marriage, we ignore the injustice of leaving the unmarried out of those benefits.  Liberals—-even radical feminist sorts on this blog!—-have argued that married people deserve those benefits because marriage is social stability, etc.  I really dislike that idea, right down to its stereotyping of single people as unstable.  Once gay marriage rights are achieved, I hope that’s far from the end of this story, and people start to ask hard questions about why health insurance is linked to marriage, why certain benefits are, why the government should cut you a break on taxes if the wife stays at home, etc.

felagund, I’d put “control of property” under social stability—-I’m not missing the point, I just thought that who controls what property being the central tenet of social stability was obvious. 

Incidentally, that’s why marriage is on the decline here and in Western Europe. Less so here, because our romanticism about it is keeping it alive.  But women’s equality plus our new economy=a lot fewer reasons to combine finances.  The increasing reliance on credit scoring means marriage is a huge risk to your credit score, since there’s only so much you can do to control another person’s spending.

For instance, I’m a pretty typical middle class woman.  I don’t share any property in common with my family of birth. 

Barbara Ehrenreich actually had a really interesting point that shows how you can both not have any property in common with your family of birth, and still be an inheritor of wealth.  You do have assets that your family gave you and that you will bring into a marriage, should you marry—-your family educated you.  That creates opportunity, which is a form of wealth.  It raises your earning potential and gives you social capital.  Many college-educated people really can’t imagine how they could marry non-college-educated people.  We don’t think of this as mercenary, but it gives you sympathy for how someone who saw other forms of wealth as a given may not see themselves as unromantic, either.

“We” in the aggregate may, but the people who suck up wedding porn aren’t usually the ones cracking cynical jokes about marriage as a trap, and vice-versa.

I doubt that, actually.  Some people may do one and not the other, but I’m guessing there’s a lot more crossover than you think.  People can and do maintain many contradictions in their heads, especially when it comes to gender.  The bride who obsesses over the placement of every flower at her wedding can, in a heartbeat, be the woman rolling her eyes at her fiance and his inexplicable maleness she expects never to understand.

So why marry?  It’s validating, and it’s what you do.  My experience is that the more invested that someone is in the “Mars and Venus” view of the genders, the more likely they are to be invested in wedding porn and getting everything perfect.  I think perhaps they see strict adherence to tradition as the only thing holding them in an otherwise untenable—-but oh so necessary—-situation.

it removes the churches forced to perform ceremonies argument

Are you (or, rather, your homophobic friends) saying that since I, as a heterosexual, am legally allowed to get married that I can force the Catholic church down the street to perform my marriage ceremony despite my being an agnostic?

They’re implying that, yes, and it just shows how much bad faith conservative arguments against gay marriage are made in.

It’s not bad faith—my experience is that they genuinely have not considered this.  They’re so far into panic mode that thinking is not really happening.

Which is to say that they’re cultural conservatives, in a general sense.

I think it is pretty much a given that, as soon as gay people can get married throughout the country, or even before, once there is enough of it going on that it is more or less commonplace, they’ll hop off the “marriage is between one man and one woman” line and right onto the “straight marriage is different and special” line.

Put another way, they are going to take our (true) statement that letting gay people marry will not in any significant way affect straight marriages and turn it on its ear to say “Well, gay marriages are different, but they don’t affect ours, so we still get to subjugate women in ours!”

It will take quite a while for the equality model that we can’t avoid - who does the cooking, who writes the checks, who mows the lawn, who changes the diapers all being actually discussed and decided rather than automatically apportioned, for the straight marriage model to change.

But I think the conservatives are going to be shocked by the number of straight couples who pop up and say “Wait, that’s the way we’ve been doing it since way before gay marriage!”

Amanda, while I appreciate your support of equal family rights for gay people, it comes off as a really backhanded compliment.

We both suck up endless amounts of wedding porn, and then turn around and crack jokes about what a miserable trap marriage is.

I don’t want to marry my partner because I want to be a pretty princess for a day. I want us to be a legally protected family unit, not a fucking incorporated household or legal strangers.

But I fear that the more conservatives who get mixed up in this, the more likely it is that gay marriage is going to end up becoming a tool that’s used to justify continued de-privileging of people who can’t or won’t get married for various reasons, including asexuality, non-monogamous inclinations expressed honestly, loner-ism, or political objections to the existence of marital privilege/enforced monogamy.

If you don’t want to become a legal family with your boyfriend, that’s your business. You still have straight privilege no matter how you slice it, and your relationship will be respected on that basis alone in ways mine never will this side of retirement. If you two get married, no one will ask you to prove it. No one will ever judge the quality of your marriage. You two could be president of the local swingers chapter, or you could never have sex at all, and you would STILL be respected more by simple virtue of being straight.

If you want to fight for incorporated households and DP options for everyone, knock yourself out. But please stop pissing on my desire to be a legal family with my mate just because you don’t want to get married for your own personal reasons.

I really dislike that idea, right down to its stereotyping of single people as unstable.

But single people ARE “unstable” in the conservative viewpoint as unlike married couples…especially ones with children, they are perceived as having much more flexibility to live at odds with conventional norms because they are not “tied down” in a marriage/family unit and thus…don’t have to consider ramifications of their spouse/immediate family members nearly as much when considering things such as changing jobs/careers, moving to a different part of the city/state/country/world on a seeming whim. 

Also…one needs to emphasize one aspect of this stability is how marriage is encouraged as a means to enable greater social control and policing because of the ramifications for the spouse/immediate family than is possible for single persons.  After all, families were considered “miniature states” in many societies…...just look at the Roman family and the Paterfamilias…...

It is one reason why there is much appeal for small town “Real America” life among many…..perceived stability and the comfort in the familiar social norms and culture enabled by enforced conformity of everyone being able to get in each others business.

phylosopher: I know of many mixed sex couples who would like to see civil unions decoupled from religious marriage. 

Then they’re very silly, because they already have that. They can go down to the local courthouse and get married in civil union without a religious word said.

For one, it removes the churches forced to perform ceremonies argument

Then they’re very silly, because no church in the US can be forced to perform a religious ceremony.

and it allows het couples to not jump through some religious hoops they’d rather not just to have the big wedding.

Then they’re very silly, because they can have as big a wedding as they like, without any religious hoops at all.

So basically, the only arguments for denying marriage to same-sex couples that aren’t explicitly homophobic are based on silly ignorance of marriage law in the US? Yeah.

What DTG said at #13. It’s possible that losing his wife on 9/11 made him realize that a loving marriage is a precious thing, and it’s grossly unfair to deprive people of it arbitrarily.

I’m glad of his opinion, too, although I think Newsweek kind of overdid it by giving him so much space and making it the cover story. Like gay marriage needed this guy for validation.

Also, in western civilization, formal weddings have been heavily tied up with Christianity, which has caused some quirks which amuse us today (ex. in the Wife of Bath, I believe there’s a very casual mention of marriage as being “at the Church steps” or some such, to the confusion of certain students).

I don’t really get what’s “confusing” about this?  I mean, getting married on the steps of the church as opposed to in front of the church’s altar* is much less of a radical historical difference than a lot of other things that separate Chaucer’s time from our own.  Compare, for instance, the fact that my parents and all my aunts and uncles had wedding receptions at their parents’ homes, whereas I don’t know anyone my own age, barely a generation later, who has gone that route. 

*Yes, I’m obviously fully aware that many people don’t get married in a church at all.  But it’s not exactly rare, at least in the West.  Shit, I live in the capital of godless heathen America, and I only know one couple my own age who didn’t hold the ceremony in a church.  Some of the couples who got married in churches, I didn’t even know they believed in god before I was summoned to a church to watch them say vows before a priest.

You do have assets that your family gave you and that you will bring into a marriage, should you marry—-your family educated you.  That creates opportunity, which is a form of wealth.  It raises your earning potential and gives you social capital.

I’m very much aware of this, thanks.  Obviously my parents gave me a great many assets, up to and including actual stuff.  I’m just not really aware of how this sort of wealth pertains to the older idea of marriage as a consolidation of property.  For instance the archetypal Jane Austen scenario of needing to marry off your daughters so you wouldn’t have to leave the estate to some long-forgotten distant cousin*.  That doesn’t really exist anymore.  Even if I inherit substantial actual property (a house, a large sum of money) from my parents when they die, who I marry has shit all to do with that.  I can’t imagine any but the most hard-assed bigots would actually disinherit their child because they don’t like the spouse they chose. 

The only people whose marriages tend to have anything to do with “property” or “inheritance” are the immensely wealthy, because there it’s important that you not marry the wrong sort of person who might squander the inheritance or dishonor the family name.  And even that sounds pretty fucking antiquated as I type it - I highly doubt there are many people even in those circles who openly arrange marriages to protect the family wealth.

*Or for a more interesting example, the Nepalese families who marry off all their sons to the same woman so they won’t have to divide the farm into useless slivers.

Also, Amanda, in saying that I think that marriage has been permanently divorced (heh) from property control/consolidation in the modern West, I don’t at all mean that economic issues never come into marriage at all. 

I think that, as you said above, social class is really the last form of acceptable segregation in romance.  I could probably bring just about anyone home to my parents, regardless of race, gender identity, appearance, or religion.  But they would be openly apprehensive if I planned to marry someone too far outside my socio-economic class (probably in either direction, too).  I just don’t think that’s because of wanting to keep property in the family, I think it’s because we tend to want to marry people who are like us.  And we subconsciously see class as too big a difference.  All while pretending it doesn’t exist, of course, which is the hilarious part.

Mnemosyne @ 27: I was told that in Medieval Catholic Church in Western Europe, marriage was a religious sacrament (thanks to Augustine and a bunch of others), but since it was so important for people to understand the vows they were making, they did a semi-religious ceremony on the steps.  Out there, they could do it in the vernacular, instead of in latin, as sacraments done at the altar were.  I’d bet both explanations played into it.

Opoponax @ 44:  Maybe it’s a ymmv thing, but I’ve done The Wife of Bath several times over and found it always ends up with somebody completely not getting her.  In highschool, very few people picked up on that kind of detail at all, so the only people who emphasized it were the teachers.  In university, English classes involved explaining a lot of the historical details just to the point where they made sense, and history classes spent a lot of time trying to get us to expand on the little details to try to get us thinking about what that culture was actually like to live in.  Possibly because my university didn’t require English Lit students to take any actual history courses, and History students weren’t asked to study the language very much.  So English classes searched for literary devices and discussed the development of fiction, while History classes tried to look at it as a primary document and discussed its moralistic intent and how much it could tell us about society.  Lots of overlap, but very different styles, and yet the same double-takes so, so often.  I found a lot of other stuff much more confusing in Chaucer, but sometimes it’s the little culture-shock things that stick out in my memories of those classes.

@ Jesurgislac 30:  It is no such thing.  It is obvious to any thinking person that marriage equality, however it comes about, should exist.  The point of the “universal civil unions” argument is not to propose a legitimate policy position.  Like you say, it is highly unlikely that straight people will get behind anything that removes their right to be “married.”  The point of the argument is to force people to think beyond their preconceptions of what marriage is.  Like it or not, most married people tend to associate their own marriage with the ceremony rather than the legal process of getting married.  It’s not a suggestion of policy so much as a rhetorical device to drive home the fact of the separation you talked about.

You’re right that there has been a strict separation between legal and spiritual/romantic marriage for a very long time.  People tend to conflate the two because you’re applying for a Marriage License, not a civil union.  Getting people to think in those terms, to really view and consider the difference between what the conceive of as marriage (a ceremony with vows, typically in a church) and what the legal entity of marriage really entails is an important step for people who have never spent any time thinking about it.

All of those bans were certainly about preventing same-sex couples from having equal rights.  There’s no doubt about it; it’s unjust and won’t, ultimately, stand.  Just like bans on mixed-race couples.  But just like there were educated, thinking people who opposed mixed-race marriage, there are educated, thinking people who oppose same-sex marriage.  Are there more ignorant people who do?  Obviously, but getting those people to change their mind is likely a hopeless endeavor.  Getting people who are willing to think about it is neither hopeless nor worthless.  That’s what the “universal civil unions” idea is all about.  It’s not a policy point, it’s a rhetorical device.  Marriage equality should and eventually will exist, and most likely it will be marriage equality, not civil unions.

Most of my “homophobic friends” don’t want children; now or later for a lot of them, myself included.  They didn’t get married to have children or because they were having children.  They got married because they wanted it, and other considerations were secondary if they came up at all. 

@ robelanator 36:  There is a mental disconnect there to be sure.  For most people, and certainly most conservatives, the image that comes to mind with the word “marriage” is a ceremony in a church or some pretty place.  When same-sex marriage is brought up that image doesn’t change, only the participants do.  When it’s pointed out that a straight couple can’t force anyone to marry them either, the mental landscape changes a bit.  It’s not a bad-faith argument so much as it’s a function of their own preconceptions.  Challenge those preconceptions and the argument falls apart.  So far, among my friends, the argument has changed minds for the better.  Almost always, the resting place is marriage equality.  Not universal civil unions, but just plain marriage equality.

@ Jesurgislac The only internally consistent arguments for opposing gay marriage are bigotry, certainly.  That doesn’t mean that it’s pointless to point out inconsistencies born of preconceptions and ignorance. 

Don’t mistake me, I’m not interested in half-measures.  I’d like to see real marriage equality become a reality and put the bigots in their place on the issue.

Hanlon: Like it or not, most married people tend to associate their own marriage with the ceremony rather than the legal process of getting married.

Most people have a ceremony when they get married. Religious, irreligious, whatever. Technically speaking you’re legally married if you just sign the forms in the presence of each other and witnesses, but most people want a ceremony.

But since I gather your assertion here, that you “pitch” universal civil unions is actually done to get your conservative friends to admit that the US already has full separation of legal and spiritual/romantic marriage.

That doesn’t mean that it’s pointless to point out inconsistencies born of preconceptions and ignorance. 

There was nothing in your initial comment to which I responded to indicate that you were doing that.

I was thinking about prenuptial agreements recently and what people don’t like about them.  The implication of lack of trust and the introduction of a legal contract into a relationship that should be based on trust.  It then occurred to me that you could look at marriages in exactly the same way.  As another form of pre-nuptial agreement (although marriage certainly has many other meanings to people, personal, social, and religious).  Maybe it’s because prenuptial agreements are without all those other types of meanings that they have such a stigma, while marriage does not.

A lot of conservatives actually think that #1 is required for #2 to happen.  Plenty of them insist that if women aren’t beaten into place, then all of society will collapse.  These people will blame feminism for nearly every bad thing that is happening.  The reason they oppose gay marriage is because conservative women (and maybe even a few men) will see a case where women aren’t subjugated, and yet the world goes on.  Their entire justification of their misogyny and strict gender roles would be proven wrong.  They know they’re full of it, and they’re scared.  They don’t want other conservatives to realize that equality can work out just fine, or even better than “complementarianism”, because then some women might demand to be taken seriously, and even some men might desert the conservatives, because it’s not always as great as it sounds to be completely responsible for making every decision and having basically an overgrown child rather than a true life partner.