Polycarp: Perhaps you’re right, and I should have fleshed out that argument better. I did not want to tie marriage to sex, although I obvious did in that post, but I do think it’s important to look at the specific examples of so-called “gay marriage” and see if they really fit what our society would call “gay marraige”. The question should more properly be: did any cultures allow people all people to enter into same-sex unions? I think the answer to that is “no”, and those cultures that did allow some form of same-sex unions did so only under certain proscribed conditions. Two lesbian Lakota women didn’t just set up housekeeping the way two lesibains in San Francisco or Boston might, for example.
But a couple of Cherokee women might.
That’s an example of two American women marrying, both US citizens, in a modern context. Not really different from my SF or Boston example.
I have a problem with the question because marriage hasn’t always been a love match and still isn’t in many parts of the world. Marriage is different things to different cultures in different time-periods. It would have been very hard to have gay marriage in a culture where the primary purpose of marriage was to produce an heir, for example.
Right, even today and certainly in the past, marriage was merely a financial arrangement. If it was that way for everyone else, then why would that fact that it was a financial transaction negate a gay marriage? I say that those are valid examples given above and that obviously it was practiced.
I’m not saying it wasn’t practiced, just that I can see why it wasn’t more common even in more liberal societies (Greeks, for example). If you think about, it the earliest, most basic reason for marriage is so that a man knows that the son who inherits his money is really his, so he needs exclusive sexual rights to a woman. There isn’t a lot of room for a same-sex couple in that scenario.
And let me just say that the Biblical story of Tamar is pretty much the most disturbing marital practice I’ve ever read about.
I wasn’t arguing with you. John Mace I think, said that the arrangements to retain property and such did not count since they weren’t sexually attracted to each other. I was arguing that most hetero marriages didn’t have sexual attraction, so what does it matter?
got it, sorry!
Just to be clear, I admitted that post was sloppy and that isn’t what I was really trying to get at. I wanted to point out that what we call “gay marriage”, which does generally involved two people being in love, is not analogous to the examples of “gay marraige” given in some historical societies. They typically had one person assuming the male role and another assuming the female role, and might be better compared to a modern marraige between a transgendered person and a “straight” person, but without the ability to acutally perfomr the transgender surgery.
But do you really think that most hetero marriages didn’t invlove sexual attraction? Why would you think that? It might not have been the primary reason, but it certainly was a key part of marriage for most people.