I just wanted to add a couple of comments to the discussion that our Blue Voice partner Marigolds2 has taken up. Mari, bless her heart, assumes enough goodwill in some of her nastier commenters to get angry with them. She's being way too generous.
She did a good job of discussing the notion that marriage was created to facilitate having children. As she notes, that definition would exclude marriage from couples who, for whatever reason, could not have children or chose not to.
She was too nice to say that the concept that childless couples are somehow inferior or that their marriages are invalid is a throwback to some of the most lamebrained petty moralism of tradition-bound rural communities in America. More specifically, it's a throwback to the thoroughly reactionary notion that a woman who doesn't produce babies is thereby an inferior creature, having failed in her allegedly most important purpose. This is a narrow, bigoted attitude.
And in the "reality-based world", we do know a few things from history, biology, anthropology and paleontology. For one thing, it's a perfectly safe assumption that homo sapiens had babies long before anything resembling the institution of marriage was created. But I know that Christian Dominionist types who want women to restrict themselves to Kinder, Kuche und Kirche and to do what their husbands, fathers and brothers tell them don't give a flying [Cheney] about what the current scientific findings on the origin of the family are.
For anyone who does care, though, it's a question on which plenty reality-based research is available. But, no, you won't find any bibliographies of them at the Focus on the Family Web site. My friend Bob McElvaine looked at many of the relevant historical issues in his book Eve's Seed(2003), with particular reference to the influence of Western Christianity on the roles of women. (I see it's now available in Adobe e-book format, too.) In the real world, the original institution of the family had to do with a lot of things, like inheritance and particular clan arrangements, not just with assigning responsibility for children.
Mari rightly observed, too, that those who try to link gays and lesbians, or advocates of gay marriage, or consenting adult gays and lesbians engaging in same-sex sexual activity, with pedophiles and incest are just making a sleazy smear, not an argument. Spain, Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands have all legalized same-sex marriage. None of them have legalized incest or pedophilia. But again, those are facts that are only meaningful to those functioning in a reality-based mode. Rightwingers making sleazy smears never cared about the reality in the first place.
Ironically, the reference to incest emphasizes how socially-based the institution of marriage is. As Freud observed a century ago, if incest were a biological repulsion, we wouldn't need laws against it at all. All human societies have prohibitions against it. Yet the precise rules are defined according to laws and customs. Is it acceptable to marry a first cousin? I haven't seen any comparisons lately, but I know that at one time the laws in various American states differed on that issue.
The same is true with ages for marriage. In more traditional societies - traditional in the anthropological sense, not in the Christian Right ideological sense of "traditional" - young people that have reached puberty are considered of marriageable age. I believe in most states of the US, the minimum age for marriage is 18, although at 16 or 17, people can be married with the parents' permission.
The Mexican actor Mauricio Islas last year wound up copping a plea in Florida for a misdemeanor count, community service and probation after getting busted for having consensual sex with then-16-year-old Genesis Rodriguez, his co-star on the Telemundo series Prisionera. In his public statement, he explained that such an act would not have been against the law in Mexico. (Although presumably his wife and the girl's father would have still been upset about it! Gabriela Spanic, another of Islas' [grown-up] co-stars in that series and an activist against domestic violence, also claimed he had sexually harassed her, as well.)
Marriage is a social institution, in other words. And, like all social institutions, it changes. Just within the last half-century in the US, most states have adopted community property laws for married couples. (I don't have any particular expertise in family law, so there could be more exceptions between states than I'm assuming in this post.) With community property, married couples are assumed to be entitled to equal shares of the common property. That in itself was a change in the institution of marriage.
In Austria, it was legal up until the early 1970s for a man to beat his wife. One of the reforms that Bruno Kreisky's Socialist Party instituted when they took over the national government from the Catholic-oriented, conservative People's Party was to change that law - along with a general reform of family law, which was still based on a 19th-century framework. Which party was more "pro-family" in that situation? The secular, partially anti-clerical Socialists? Or the conservative, Catholic People's Party who hadn't bothered to update those laws when they ran the government for the previous two decades?
In any case, Austria is still a functioning democracy. Incest is still illegal there. And, short of a nuclear war or other apocalyptic event, it's a safe bet that in 50 years, civilization in Canada, Spain, Canada, Belgium and Holland will have survived the shock of same-sex marriage. More likely, civlilization there will have been strengthened by recognizing that laws against same-sex marriage no longer have a valid social purpose, if they ever did.
