The origins of natural - one man, one woman - marriage (Repost)

Ancient Egyptian couple.

A few writers in this newspaper’s Readers’ Forum have questioned, either implicitly or explicitly, the role of religion in general, and of religious people – Christians in particular – to have their worldview dominate in our society, at least until recently, the civil definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

Proponents of same-sex marriage dismiss this worldview as “patriarchal” and somehow “pre-scientific”; and also clamor for a better justification for natural marriage in other than religious terms.

I will attempt to do so briefly.

The one undeniable fact apparent to all students of the history of the institution of heterosexual, “natural” marriage is that its existence as a social institution precedes written history. That is to say, that its origins are pre-historical.

Other kinds of bond-pairings may have been tolerated more or less across global societies, but none of them enjoyed the social standing of natural marriage. Marriage, as the union of one man and one woman – or as a union of one man and several women – appears fully formed in the historical record at the time writing was invented.

For those of us who find no contradiction between evolutionary theory and faith-informed reason, it is easy to observe that the institution of marriage arose naturally from the evolutionary imperative of propagating the species in an orderly and efficient fashion.

It is reasonable to think that since the dawn of modern man, or Homo sapiens, roughly 200,000 years ago, human beings tried every conceivable form of pairing throughout countless generations until they settled upon the two kinds of unions they found most suitable for survival: Single-bond pairings (monogamy) and multiple-bond pairings (polygamy).

Other kinds of unions fell by the wayside as inefficient or disagreeable, but the “natural marriage meme” carried on through all human societies until today.

Early humans soon understood themselves to be distinct from other higher primates in whom other kinds of pairings occurred in situations of stress, or as a consequence of internecine rivalries between male or female animals.

Human psycho-emotional development and differentiation from other primates doubtlessly played a role in this process of “natural selection” of competing forms of social organization.

Polyandry – a female having relations with several males – and same sex-relationships may occur naturally or occasionally among chimpanzees and other higher primates, but early humans progressively discovered that such practices destroyed the emerging social fabric of mutual duties and responsibilities needed to raise the young and to maintain the emerging polity of equities between elders and juniors, adults and youth, parents and children, brothers and sisters, and between members of the extended family.

Ancient Roman wedding.

This polity of equities evolved into our concept of justice, moving from families on to clans, then to tribes and up to nations of peoples who understood themselves as sharing a common history and a common future. Our concept of justice started in the bosom natural marriage and the family that it created.

The “sacralization” of the marriage bond and its protection by means of law, custom, ritual and taboo highlight the importance of marriage and is the culmination of millennia of experimentation that yielded the unit of social organization best able to guarantee the continuation of the species and the requirements of justice.

Same-sex marriage advocates want to do away with this valuable insight and start over as in a blank slate. Ironically, they are availing themselves of the judicial and legislative processes to achieve their aims.

In light of the antiquity of natural marriage, I find the arguments of same-sex marriage advocates unpersuasive.

I, as a citizen of a pluralist society, am willing and able to tolerate same-sex pairings, but must resist in conscience any artificial attempt to raise these relationships to the status of marriage and to subvert the natural order. Call these pairings whatever you want, but “marriage” they are not.

Let me end by saying that I would not dismiss so cavalierly the “religious” argument against same-sex marriage.

Natural marriage as we know it today may be the one single “racial memory” left to us by our remote ancestors as the conclusion of multi-generational, hard-learned lessons.

In fact, the core truth of natural marriage may well be that men and women can become fully human only within the sacred bounds of marriage, and not outside of it.

Religions have preserved this primeval insight for the rest of us. We shun it at our peril.