American society is currently involved in one of its episodic, deep-rooted turmoils,typically avo... Same-sex marriage: Prospec

American society is currently involved in one of its episodic, deep-rooted turmoils,typically avoiding more substantive and urgent matters to tinker with its laws related tomarriage.

The issue du jour is trying to figure out how to define marriage in terms ofgender, a quandary idiosyncratic to our peculiar mix of legalism and religion.

Google the word marriage and you may be in for some surprises. Several kinds ofrelationships are defined as marriage, including some variants in our own time, culturaltradition and part of the world.

The gist of all the listed definitions is that marriage is a relationship betweenindividuals which is certified, approved, registered or otherwise rendered acceptable tothe society, culture or legal entity in which the people reside.

Hidden within the word "traditional" is the implication that it is thebest or correct way. The words "traditional" and "marriage" do not belong in the samesentence.

Civil statutes and religious beliefs are not necessarily incompatible, but in ourrepublic, shotgun weddings between law and religion are always incompatible, and hereinlies the crux of the current brouhaha.

Conventional contemporary practice assumes that marriage is a relationship between oneman and one woman, but no existing U.S. laws stipulate as to the gender of the parties tothe contract. Efforts to make the law gender-specific draw their energy from religiousbeliefs. Trying to capture, contain, control and codify a religious concept is trickybusiness in our secular democracy.

There are now, and always have been, so many varied interpretations of the word"marriage" that one is hard put to come up with a legal definition or functionaldescription that suits everybody, or subsumes every situation considered to be amarriage.

Appeals to religious authority, teaching and tradition are no help. Nothing in theBible refers to marriage as a relationship voluntarily entered into by two totally freepersons; such persons did not exist at the time or within the culture in which the Biblewas written, particularly women.

A Jewish man caught stealing the property (wife) of another Jewish man could expect todie under a pile of stones, but he could bed any non-Jewish woman with impunity. He wasforbidden to water down, i.e., adulterate, the purity of his family bloodline by marryinga gentile woman, but illegitimate offspring were commonplace and sometimes welcomed intothe family, but with no right of inheritance.

Jesus implicitly approved the Jewish practice of levirate marriage, a legalrequirement that the closest male relative of a married man who died childless wasobligated to marry the widow and produce heirs for the deceased. I think that rule wouldgive a man an extraordinary interest in who his brother married, and some ongoing concernover the state of his brother's health.

In this complex conglomeration of rules to handle inheritance rights and protectbloodlines the idea of two people of the same gender "marrying" was anon-issue because marriage had no essential connection to personal preference, romance,sexuality or freedom of choice.

The same-gender marriage controversy will, one hopes, be decided on the basis ofprinciples of equality and fairness rather than preference and prejudice, but ourAmerican track record in matters of sexuality do not encourage optimism.

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