Marriage - a Historical Perspective

by Dae Elliott
Sociology Lecturer, SDSU

The misinformation promulgated by conservatives about marriage and the silences about their inaccuracies is aggravating. Until very recently – it was generally understood that there was a difference between state sanctioned, civil marriage and church sanctioned, religious marriage. Many divorced Roman Catholics who are not permitted to remarry in the Church understand the distinction. In the early 80s, I attended a fundamentalist Christian University. They too, understood this.

The discussion on marriage equality demands a historical perspective to correct these inaccuracies. America’s traditions of marriage and its legal precedence came from Christian Europe. Our Constitution was written in reaction to the sectarian wars and abuses that came out of the schism between the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant denominations of the Reformation. Because of this our nation has always had civil marriage.

Marriage was not even blessed by the Roman Catholic Church until about the 12th century. It was the 13th century before it took charge of the proceedings. Previously, marriage was a private and civil contract based on local and Roman common law. The Church considered marriage carnal (of the body) – not spiritual, but as the Roman Catholic Church asserted its power over both the spiritual and political spheres, marriage became one of the Church’s sacraments. Many Protestant reformers argued against marriage as a sacrament, yet the Roman Catholic Church (a state-sponsored religion) was the sole arbiter for the legal recognition of marriages with few exceptions.

It is in reaction to the state-sponsored Roman Catholic religion in Europe, and the ensuing abuses and violence, that the separation of church and state was viewed as the only means to ensure religious liberty to all. This was the legal basis for the distinction between the legal institution of civil marriage and religiously sanctioned marriages. Although religious leaders have the right to marry a couple civilly and religiously at the same time, a couple can be married civilly by a justice of the peace with no religious ceremony at all.

Additionally, our understanding of marriage and its social function has changed in our nation’s history. During slavery, marriage between slaves was not lawful because marriage was recognized as a contract covering property and filial obligations. If a person did not own themselves, they certainly could not enter into a legal contract declaring their property and children as mutually held by the couple. Until women’s suffrage, females lost their legal personhood when married. Their property, their children and their income became the property of their husbands. Such examples, together with the relatively recent (1967) overturn of laws against mixed race marriage, illustrate tremendous improvements since the founding of our country. There have been nay-sayers with each of these changes declaring society’s demise, often from the socially conservative because they feared change. Yet I do not believe any of us would want to return to slavery, coverture, or anti-miscegenation laws, nor do I believe that marriage equality will have any negative impact on heterosexual marriages any more than legally recognizing the right of divorced couples to remarry impacts marriages of others never divorced. Laws limiting our individual rights should be made only when it can be shown that allowing those individual rights will have serious and negative impact on others. Supporters of California’s Prop 8 cannot show this. Vote No on 8, it is the fair thing to do.