IS POLYGAMY NEXT? From E.J. Graff:

E.J. is the author of What is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution (Beacon Press, 1999). This is from her June piece in the Boston Globe, "Here Come the Brides,"

For all the apocalyptic rhetoric employed against same-sex unions, lesbian and gay couples fit easily into the contemporary Western philosophy of marriage that has evolved over the past 150 years.

In 1965, contraception became legal nationwide, after 75 years of ferocious opposition by forces ranging from the Catholic church (which called it "the crime against nature") to Theodore Roosevelt (who declared it the equivalent of polygamy). No more mandatory offspring: today, Americans have come to see the purpose of sex as intimacy, not just making babies. After even nastier battles (which nearly split all the mainline Protestant denominations, much as same-sex marriage is today) over laws governing divorce and remarriage, most of us now believe that marriage is not a lifetime labor contract, as it was for our ancestors, but a pledge of shared love—whose presence creates and whose absence unmakes a marriage. Finally, our laws now consider men and women to be formally equal in marriage: no longer do our laws require him to support her financially, or her to obey him and put her body at his disposal. If gender discrimination has no place within marriage, why should it exist at marriage's entryway?

But at the moment, the opinion that counts is the SJC's. And the court clearly has its concerns. During oral argument, perhaps the most pointed question faced by the plaintiff's lawyers was this: If we knock down the sex requirement for marriage, why wouldn't the next logical step be legalizing polygamy?

Mary Bonauto offered an answer that hadn't been stated quite so clearly before. Gender-neutrality, she said, is precisely the direction in which Massachusetts (and Western) marriage law has been moving for the past 150 years. She's right: In ''traditional'' marriage law, according to the famous pronouncement of the English jurist Sir William Blackstone, ''husband and wife are one person, and the husband is that person.'' Today's Bay State marriage law is fully gender-neutral-except for the rule limiting marriage licenses to different-sex couples. While there are now many statutory and case law precedents for eliminating the role of gender, there are no such precedents for changing the number of spouses in a marriage.

When full marriage rights for same-sex couples arrive here in the United States, it will be just another incremental step in the ongoing transformation of marriage into an egalitarian institution based on love. Or to put it another way, same-sex couples are following, not leading, changes in our marriage law.

posted by maggie at 2:16 AM VOTE

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