Marilyn Yalom knows something about marriage. She is the author of A History of the Wife (HarperCollins, 2001), among other titles, and has been wed to Stanford psychiatrist Irvin Yalom for 50 years. These days, the senior scholar at the Institute for Women and Gender is fielding more and more questions regarding same-sex marriage.
Stanford: Is gay marriage a civil rights issue?
We have inherited two different traditions in the West. One is Roman law, and the other is the Judeo-Christian tradition. Roman law insisted not only on the father’s and the groom’s consent, but also on the bride’s consent. Consent is what made marriage legal, and that is a civil right based on a contract. Religion is not what grants legality to a marriage, neither in this country nor all of the countries in the West.
So if you ask yourself what constitutes a legal marriage, it’s the consent of two individuals. And the question is, who are these two individuals? Do they have to be a man and a woman? There is nothing as I understand it in the history of the law that would preclude two individuals of the same sex from entering into the same kind of contract or commitment.
Is marriage a changing institution today?
It has always been a changing institution if you look at it over two or three millennia. But that change has sped up considerably in the last 50 years. And if people say to me, “Well, marriage has always been between a man and a woman,” I think that’s an important consideration. It’s very hard to fly in the face of 2,000 or 3,000 years of written history. But there was a time in which slaves could not marry, and there was a time when people of different races could not marry. So when we come to the issue of same-sex marriage, we have to think of it within that same legal context.
What about the argument that marriage is really about having children?
People can and do have babies outside of marriage. People can and do have marriages that have no children. People can and do marry a second or third time beyond the childbearing age for the wife.
Marriage was once about progeny and property, but we have moved from the notion of gifting a child to the groom, through Roman law and the idea of mutual consent, to the major revolution of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. Of all the things that Luther did, allowing priests to marry is the most important. Suddenly the idea of the “good” changed, from the medieval Christian concept of the good as abstinence and celibacy. Luther and his wife established the model of the pastoral couple, and a new idea entered into the concept of marriage—that it was for mutual support, for a husband and wife to support each other emotionally and spiritually.
What’s love got to do with it?
Love is a recent entry into the factors that make for marriage in the Western world. But if we say today that love is the primary reason that people choose to live together and then to consider the institution of marriage, well, then, how do you deny that to same-sex couples, who all claim that they are marrying for love? That’s the great humanizing equalizer amongst heterosexual and homosexual individuals. They all say, “We want to be married because we love each other,” and marriage validates that love in a public way.
