Historian Makes The Case For Same-Sex Marriage [Historical Revisionism]

SFChronicle ^ | January 12th 2010

[Steelfish]

Historian Makes The Case For Same-Sex Marriage

Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO -- A Harvard professor made a historian's case for same-sex marriage in federal court today, saying defenders of California's Proposition 8 are using the same rationale that was offered against interracial unions and equal rights for wives - that the survival of marriage itself was at stake.

Those who supported prohibitions on weddings across racial lines, bans dating from colonial days that the Supreme Court abolished only in 1967, often argued that "the institution would be degraded, their own marriages would be devalued" if such unions were allowed, Nancy Cott testified in San Francisco on the second day of the trial of a suit challenging Prop. 8.

Similarly, she said, 19th century laws in most states that required women to surrender their property, earnings and legal status to their husbands were viewed by their supporters as "absolutely essential to what marriage was." It took a series of Supreme Court rulings in the 1970s, Cott said, to stamp out the last remnants of sex discrimination in marriage laws.

[HiTech RedNeck]

It’s quite a leap to liken “challenges to marriages” to “rendering the idea of marriage into no more than a sick joke.”

[NurdlyPeon]

There’s a big difference between regulating the particulars of marraige and redefining marraige. All of these are just the same old straw-man BS arguements we’ve heard before. They were BS then, and they’re BS now.

[a fool in paradise]

Bisexuals are going to be in a dilemma if they can't have one spouse of each.

[a fool in paradise]

These are the same sorts of individuals who began the push for same sex marriage after the nation’s laws against same sex sodomy were ruled unconstitutional (all such laws, regardless of the wording of the law) and yet they claimed there was no “agenda” afoot.

Next on the board is same sex parents adopting a child who does not get to consent to being raised in an alternative sexuality household.

It’s not about “consenting adults in private”. Never was. It is in public schools and pushed on minors these days. Public funding of programs too.

When they decided to lay the cards on the table and have an honest debate, we can talk. Until then, denial ain’t a river.

[eclecticEel]

All this being irrelevant to the actual issue of the case - the contention that the Constitution guarantees the right to legally recognized homosexual marriage. If the judge had a spine and an ounce of sense he’d throw them out of court and slap a contempt charge on them for making a mockery of what a trial is supposed to be about.

[VR-21]

One of the most lowdown tactics of the gay lobby is trying to co-opt the civil rights movement. It’s apples and oranges.

[Psycho_Bunny]

Straw man.

[Isabel C.]

Even during the period in our country’s history when there were prohibitions on marriages across racial lines, same-sex marriage still wasn’t allowed.

[RobbyS]

Ahistorical rubbish from a historian. The laws against mixed marriages were indeed racist but also practical. If blacks and whites could marry, then their children would be come, at least to a limited extent, members of white families. Inevitably some of the offspring would be white enough in appearance to pass, and to excite the affection of grandparents who would not deny them inheritances. The miscegenation laws helped prevent the erosion of racial barriers by making mullatoes bastards. As it was, common law marriages between blacks and whites were more common than it is often recognized. Probably a third of the whites in the South have some black ancestor, and a majority of blacks have some white ancestor. Then of course we have the Indian mixture. Over all the population of the South is white, black and Indian.

[Wuli]

There is one obvious flaw in all those examples.

Regardless of arguments some people gave, the essential issues were about the terms of marriage between those who everyone accepted as comprising a marriage- one and one woman, which the various terms and limitations did not deny; they did not deny the essential definition of marriage.

That is the difference of the past issues and the present issue.

[SECURE AMERICA]

The vast majority of Americans are against same sex marriage simply because it is a perversion that they do not want to see normalized. What’s next Man and Beast? Adults and Kids? Stop already.

[GregoryFul]

Nancy Cott, overeducated nutcase, says “birds do it, bees do it, even common fleas do it. Why not us? It is so unfair!”

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

The country is at war and in the middle of economic meltdown, yet these clowns are cloistered safely in their court, protected by armed guards, trying to overturn free elections and arguing about their little wee wees?

[Claud]

Disputing assertions by the measure's defenders that marriage has been defined uniformly over time and across cultures, she said she found an "overall direction of change" in the United States toward equality within marriage and fewer restrictions on one's choice of a partner.

This is part of the progressive fantasy held by many academics--a world of gradually increasing tolerances and gradually dissolving prejudices. But is it historical?

Laws strictly against racial miscegenation were first passed in some of the American colonies in the 1690s. They were largely unprecedented at the time--and their introduction was a fairly radical departure from legal and ecclesiastical tradition--which admitted impediments to marriage in terms of religion, kin, slave status, etc., but almost never race. Racial restrictions on marriage were an abberation in America--a novel, dare I say *progressive* introduction. They were not part of some longstanding legal and moral tradition. Prior to 1690 there were no laws against miscegenation. After 1690 they started to come in. Then they were abolished between 1780 and 1967. In many states they didn't even sit around for a hundred years before they were repealed.

Does that sound like an "overall direction of change"? Not to me. For 1000 years Christian civilization in general didn't care one way or another if you married a dark-skinned person. Then a few countries did care. Then they went back to not caring again. No restrictions, then restrictions, then back to no restrictions again. Now compare that situation to supposed "same-sex" marriage, which was never allowed anywhere for any reason. Always restricted. Never allowed. I don't see a comparison. I really don't.

If anything I think the history of miscegenation argues against progressive idiots tampering with the universal institution of marriage.