Gay unions accepted as routine in cultures for centuries

Salt Lake City Tribune ^ | Feb 29, 2004 | Will Bagley

[george wythe]

Marriage, says BYU law professor Richard G. Wilkins, "has always been about one sexual relationship -- the union of a man and a woman." Of course, this would be news to Brigham Young, who said "I do" to some 56 women.

    Consider the furor and outrage Mormon polygamy evoked in the 19th century.

    The laws sanctifying the one-man, one-woman model of marriage had forced millions upon millions of women "to become a prey to man's lust and a consuming sacrifice upon the altar of illicit passion," the Deseret Evening News thundered in December 1885.

    "One man to one woman only," the newspaper proclaimed, was "the exception in Christendom as well as heathendom" and was "one impracticable standard."

    The News argued that polygamous marriage "prevails all over the world, and those who pretend to the contrary are very simple or very untruthful." That's a debatable point, even though it appeared in the pages of what The Salt Lake Tribune used to call "the font of truth," but marriage has been a flexible institution throughout history.

    Much of the current debate over same-sex marriage reflects a relatively new tradition of fear and hatred of homosexuals in American culture. The concept of homosexuality only appeared in European medical literature in the late 1860s and reached the United States by 1892, but it was the sodomy trial of British poet Oscar Wilde in 1895 that introduced the concept to popular culture.

The "queer eye" was nothing new, however, even in Utah.

    When Wilde (popularly known as the "Sunflower Apostle") visited Salt Lake City in 1882, he complimented LDS Church President John Taylor for his fine aesthetic judgment, and the Deseret News reported that young men adorned with enormous sunflowers filled the front row of his crowded lecture on interior decorating. (None of this was a stereotype in 1882.)

    The Victorians turned it into an identity, but same-sex sex has been going on since time immemorial and was considered entirely natural in ancient Greece and Rome.

    First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill didn't actually say "the only traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, sodomy and the lash," but he may have wished he had.

    Rather than treat gay people as social outcasts, many cultures integrated men and women with transsexual natures into their societies. When French Jesuit missionaries found men among the Iroquois who dressed and acted as women, they called them berdache, incorrectly equating them with male prostitutes.

    Many scholars now prefer the term "two-spirit." American Indian languages had a variety of terms -- winkte (Lakota), nadleeh (Navajo), hemanah (Cheyenne), kwid-(Tewa), tainna wa'ippe (Shoshone), dubuds (Paiute) and lhamana (Zuni) to identify "a person who has both male and female spirits within," notes Lakota scholar Beatrice Medicine.

    Anthropologists such as Elsie Parsons long ago observed that two-spirited men often married other men. Even earlier, William Clark told the first editor of the Lewis and Clark journals that Hidatsa boys who showed "girlish inclinations" were raised as women and married men.

    Somehow, male-female marriage managed to survive in these cultures. Marriage even survived polygamy, which had extended the "blessings of matrimony and of home instead of discarding or destroying them," the Deseret News argued. "It surrounds the domestic relations with safeguards and a sacredness that are stronger and more enduring than any others."

    Restricting such a good thing seems selfish.

Historian Will Bagley is happily married.

[Lazamataz]

True. But some people do quit. Others do not. You can't remove the aspect of desire from this argument. Desire to overcome an addiction has to be paramount before anyone can overcome it. You can't characterize it solely as a biological experience, or else you never would have been able to overcome your addiction, Laz.

Nu-uh. (shaking head in denial)

Okay, I don't have a great comeback, so maybe just raw denial will distract you.

Um, hey, look! Cows! (pointing)

(runs away when you look at the cows)

[Auntie Dem]

The Tribune began its life as an anti-mormon rag. It became a left-wing rag when most mormons voted right-wing. They exist solely to harrass and denigrate the mormons.

Now, as to the article's implication that homosexuality is a natural thing and should be allowed to exist because it is natural: If the homo lobby wants to pursue that argument to its logical extension they would soon be extinct. To argue that homosexuality in humans should be tolerated and/or accepted/embraced, because it occurs in the animal kingdom, then we would be allowed to kill other humans that crossed into our "territory" because animals do it. We would be able to take any female we wanted if we could beat up or kill her current "mate" because animals do it. We could mate with any number of willing or unwilling females because animals do it.

Our ability to think and reason, and to evaluate "right" and "wrong" is what separates us from the animals. Homosexuality is an animal behavior that has no place in human society.

[kanawa]

You can't remove the aspect of desire from this argument. Desire to overcome an addiction has to be paramount before anyone can overcome it.

Drug and alcohol addiction are instances of a strange class of diseases where the only diagnosis that counts is your own. Until you see the problem ,in all it's starkness, the necessary desire to quit the behavior is not generated.

Other than demonstrable instances of genetic/biological differences, I see a similarity in homosexual behavior. The difference is one of subtlety. Alcohol and drug addition tend to smack you up the side of the head with the problems they create, ex. loss of job, family, freedom. Homosexuality has its own support group that appears to validated your choice, at least in your own eyes. At some level you feel good. It's difficult to put all homosexuals in one basket. Some are promiscuous; some aren't, some are a drain on society; some aren't.

The problem, as I see it, is identical in all but expression to those hetrosexuals that find overriding personal validation through sexual behavior. Part of growing up for me was to realize that my value as a man did rely on how many notches were on my bedpost nor upon the acceptance of another for me. Homosexuals, like all of us, have to take an honest and courageous look into the motivations for our behaviors.

If they do and still consider themselves homosexual then more power to them. Civil unions may be an fair compromise. Just keep it between consenting adults and please keep your hands off the dictionary. Your right to pursue happiness does not give you the right to redefine words for the rest of us.

[webstersII]

"Other than demonstrable instances of genetic/biological differences, I see a similarity in
homosexual behavior. "

I have pondered that same thing.

"Homosexuality has its own support group that appears to validated your choice, at least in your own eyes. "

Good point. Hence the resulting cultural implications we see now.