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YALOM: Don't forget love.
Reid S. Yalom |
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.
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