Marriage

Marriage is an unusually pervasive social institution that confers social status by joining social actors together in sexual and procreative partnerships. It often serves as a rite of passage to adulthood and a means of enfranchising young people in society. Marriage standardizes, normalizes, and legitimates some sexual partnerships and family formations while marginalizing others as abnormal. As an institution that contributes to social stability through the legitimating of offspring and the conferral of rights of inheritance, marriage canalizes sexual urges into formations regarded as legitimate and worthy of social sanction.

Marriage may be, as some social conservatives aver, the bedrock of civilization in its contribution to social stability. But there is no denying that marriage has taken vastly different forms in different societies. Polygyny (meaning multiple wives joined to one husband), polyandry (multiple husbands joined to one wife), complex marriage (polyamorous or multiple-partner arrangements), and temporary marriage all have a place in the history of marriage and in the history of religions. What constitutes marriage, even within a single marital form such as monogamy, has fluctuated so immensely over the centuries that the term traditional marriage simply has no meaning.

In ancient Rome, for example, marriage vows were spoken by the groom and the bride's father, as was appropriate in a society that deemed many categories of women unable to make legal decisions for themselves. Major religious traditions recognize a wide variety of marital forms as ideal, and have diverse views on the question of whether marriage is an absolute social good for all persons. Historically, marriage as an institution that contributes to social stability has sometimes been welcomed and legitimated by religious authorities and has sometimes been deemed contrary to the religious goals that religious leaders hold dear. Precisely because it contributes to social stability, because it perpetuates a social world deemed problematic, marriage did not win the approval of many early Christian and early Buddhist authorities, for example. As these religions became more established and less countercultural, both had to reckon with and find a place for marriage and family life. But many early Christians, as with early Buddhists, tended to devalue mainstream society to the extent that they were either indifferent to marriage or regarded celibacy as the proper path of religious practice.

Marriage exists as both a civil affair, in which civic authorities (such as a justice of the peace) preside over a secular ceremony of marriage, and as a religious affair, in which clergy preside. Some religions, like Buddhism, leave marriage largely in the hands of civil authorities and have no set liturgy for marriage. Other religions have canonical forms, but these are not always rooted in scripture.

ASSESSING WOMEN'S RIGHTS AND AGENCY

Gender relations in marriage are often built out of assumptions about essential differences between women and men, girls and boys. The study of marriage is instructive as a window onto diverse historical interpretations of gender differences. It can help one see that whereas many marital formations crystallize unequal relations between women and men, endowing husbands with more rights (and sometimes with more responsibilities, it should be said) than wives, there are other modalities of marriage that challenge familiar assumptions about the fixity of gender and the differences between male and female gender roles. Some marital formations seem to grant women more agency, or allow for more autonomy in some spheres of life, than do other marital forms.

Given the wide variety of marital forms and the differing expectations of the spouses within these forms, it is interesting to consider what marital form might be best for women. Which marital form best ensures that a woman's legal and human rights will be protected? Within a given marital form, what are the conditions for divorce, and do both women and men have the right to ask for divorce? Which marital form gives women the broadest scope for agency in terms of their education and the vocations they can pursue? Are women's rights better protected in monogamous arrangements, where a woman is paired with a single spouse, than in polygynous arrangements, where a woman potentially competes with co-wives for affection, attention, and enfranchisement? These questions are asked for heuristic purposes here as a prompt for future research. But one might take up the last question as an example of what can be learned by investigating marital forms in a comparative manner.

MONOGAMY AND THE DOUBLE STANDARD

Monogamy would seem to put women on equal footing with men by taking the element of competition between women out of the picture. But much depends on whether a double standard prevails in a monogamy-dominant culture or subculture. Prescriptive literature on monogamous marriage in the major religions often construe marriage as a set of norms that both spouses must follow to win social sanction and religious merit. However, these normative rules are often more assiduously applied to wives than to husbands. There are a number of reasons why this is often the case. Men's inability to conceive children certainly makes male extramarital sexual activities less conspicuous and thus less subject to detection, stigmatization, and punishment.

Dominant religions supported by the state tend to reinforce social hierarchies, and when those hierarchies favor men over women and children, enfranchising men as autonomous social actors while disenfranchising women and children as dependents, one is more likely to see that men's sexual affairs are considered to be their own business. In patriarchal societies where women are sexually and economically subordinated to men and only gain access to material resources and power through their ties to men, men are likely to be held to less rigorous standards of behavior in terms of sexual ethics, as was the case with the elite men of classical Athenian society. Wives are more likely, across vast spans of history and cultural terrain, to be rewarded for sexual loyalty to their husbands and socially stigmatized (if not physically punished) for conducting extramarital affairs, whereas husbands have enjoyed relatively more freedom in this regard.

This double standard in marital ethics must be taken into account, for the latitude that is often implicitly permitted to husbands can make the social labor of monogamous marriage unequal and unfair to wives. When double standards permit monogamously wedded males to go outside the marriage for sex, romance, and companionship, the monogamously wedded wife may be doubly disadvantaged. To secure her husband's affections the licit wife may need to compete with illicit partners whose social influence, level of education, wealth, and power the wife may or may not be in a position to discern. The wife's relative lack of knowledge inevitably disempowers her in this competition. Compared with the position of a woman in a polygynous arrangement who is given some role in the process whereby licit co-wives are formally brought into the family, the monogamous woman may lag behind her polygynous counterpart in terms of agency. Only if the husband of the monogamously wedded wife chooses to be faithful to her (thus eliminating the element of suspense and competition) can it be said that she enjoys more agency than her polygynous counterpart.

FEMINIST ARGUMENTS FOR POLYGYNY

Polygyny seems on the face of it problematic for women. Once again, the specter of competition between wives rears its ugly head. But in societies where polygyny is allowed, it is often the practice of the wealthiest and most powerful men, and not universally practiced by all. The wives of wealthy and powerful men have their own social burdens, as will be seen below, but in general polygynous families are endowed with more material resources than monogamous families in the same society.

In addition to the relative wealth that a polygynous wife might have at her disposal, there is the argument that in cases where women select their own husbands, a woman can select as a mate a man who has already proved himself by the manner in which he cares for his other wives. Some Mormon women who practiced polygyny in the nineteenth-century American West expressed preference for a system in which a woman could select for herself a proven breadwinner by consenting to marry only a man who had done well for himself. Not all Mormon women's accounts are propolygyny, by any means. Some women saw it as a burden to be accepted because it was divinely ordained and laid down as a holy precedent by the patriarchs of the Bible, such Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But as Mormon women tended to be pragmatic in their marital choices and there is little discussion of love and romance in accounts of their lives, the opportunity to secure a proven mate may have been appreciated by many Mormon women, who are raised to make practical and not romantic choices in marriage.

Another feminist argument for polygyny is the possibility that women can share the burden of child care with co-wives. Because household arrangements in polygynous societies differ considerably, with some grouping co-wives together in separate apartments under one roof and some spreading co-wives out under separate roofs, sometimes in distant compounds, the degree to which child care could be pursued collectively depends on the context. But the potential for a set of helping hands to share the labor of child care can free women up for other tasks. Again, there is the testimonial of some Mormon women on the American frontier to suggest that collective mothering and the organized division of labor among co-wives could be a positive arrangement for those women who were blessed with a set of cooperative co-wives. Those Mormon women temperamentally suited to tasks other than childrearing had more opportunities than their non-Mormon counterparts (especially middle-class urban American wives) to pursue other forms of work. The nineteenth-century Mormon Church encouraged women to set up commercial enterprises outside the home and to be entrepreneurs, unlike the wider Victorian bourgeois society that discouraged financial and vocational independence in women. The accounts of some of the polygynous Mormon women of the American West show considerable self-sufficiency.

WEDLOCK AS SOCIAL LABOR

Institutions such as marriage and the ownership of private property do a great deal of social labor and can be regarded as twin pillars upholding a civilized society. In societies around the world, marriage and private property regulations are often the twin foundations of social stability, two primary means of contributing to the perpetuation of a social structure that is perceived as divinely mandated. (Indeed, careful regulation of property exchange and marriage have historically gone hand in hand, with exchanges of property being negotiated by families in establishing the marriage or betrothal contract.)

For those who hold utopian social visions and see the dominant social structure as antithetical to divine purposes or humanistic ideals, attention to property and sexual partnerships are equally important. Experiments with nonmonogamous marriage often go hand in hand with the abolition of private property in utopian communities. For example, the Perfectionist community founded by John Humphrey Noyes (1811–1886) in nineteenth-century America practiced a form of polyamorous marriage in which each woman was in theory married to all the men of the community and free to invite any man she pleased to her bed. Practicing a form of biblical communism based on New Testament admonishments to believers to pool their resources, the Perfectionists came to believe that the Kingdom of God had been established on Earth with the Second Coming of Jesus (6 bce–30 ce)—an event that they located in the first century of the Common Era.

Monogamy was part of the old order of things that had passed away with the Second Coming. The Second Coming, according to Noyes, reversed the fall of humanity described in the Hebrew Bible Book of Genesis. The Perfectionists believed that the nexus of sinfulness associated with the fall (alienation from God, exile from the utopian state experienced in the Garden of Eden, monogamous marriage, private property, painful and repeated childbirth, labor geared toward private property acquisition, and the condition of death or human mortality) was ontologically broken by the Second Coming. Noyes wrote that this tenacious nexus could be laid to rest by overcoming the breach with God; the rest of the sinful nexus would then be destroyed: "The sin-system, the marriage-system, the work-system, and the death-system, all are one, and must be abolished together" (Muncy 1973, p. 171).

Another utopian community practicing a version of biblical communism was established by Rev. Jim Jones (1931–1978) in Jonestown, Guyana. As with the Perfectionists, the Jonestown community held property in common and believed that exclusive romantic relationships were a sign that the community members who engaged in such relationships had departed from the ideal of biblical communism. Such utopian links between the communal sharing of property and the communitarian approach to marriage suggest that whether one wishes to perfect society through utopian labor or maintain a society that God or some enduring sacred principle has mandated, one must couple properly and be deliberate in how one handles property.

To appreciate the couple's heavy burden of perpetuating or changing dominant social structures, the immense social labor that is performed by marriage, one only has to look at the procreative emphasis found in many religious traditions' vision of proper marriage. The demand that sex be dedicated to procreative ends indicates that marriage is often geared toward redirecting the couple's energies toward larger social goods. This makes the marriage bed a place of sexual self-control as much as a place of sexual indulgence. For early Christian thinkers who looked forward to the imminent return of their crucified savior Jesus and his establishment of an ideal millennial reign of perfection, marriage was not assumed to be a godly institution. As Peter Brown (1988) shows in The Body and Society, many early Christian thinkers were openly opposed to marriage as a perpetuator of a dominant social order that they believed to be on the verge of disappearance to be replaced by a heaven on Earth. Some of these early Christian thinkers drew on ascetic practices for the proper channeling of amorous impulses, practices that Romans bequeathed to both Christians and Hellenistic Jews.

The regulation of the minutia of sexual coupling is often the moral equivalent to religious piety of the virtuoso. This identification of the marriage bed as the arena of moral action is a crucial rhetorical step. It makes possible those religions (Theravada, Buddhism, and Roman Catholic Christianity, for example) that hold up sexually active married couples and celibate virtuosi as equally laudable exemplars of the morally proper life. Monogamy in such traditions is itself a moral exercise, a disciplining of the amorous impulses that makes it the lay counterpart to the monastic call to total self-discipline. It is no wonder, then, that many religions that scholars might characterize as pro-sex and pro-marriage raise the majority of their young to couple monogamously, a discipline that requires eschewing extramarital sex (and sometimes temporary sexual abstinence for the sake of ritual purity) while encouraging the path to complete sexual abstinence for the committed religious or monastic.

This vision of the marriage bed as a site of sexual self-control makes marriage a positive social good where lust is channeled productively. This vision of the goal of marriage can lead to the implication that all other forms of coupling are by definition sites of sexual excess and lack of control. Ruth Vanita (2005) suggests that heterosexual coupling out of wedlock and same-sex coupling are often positioned as the sexually permissive others by which marriage is constructed as a social good. (These forms of coupling are the exemplum malum, the negative examples out of which ideal marriages are constructed by opposition.) By placing marriage above mere lust, other arrangements are deemed intrinsically libidinous. Heterosexual coupling out of wedlock and same-sex coupling are thus constructed as antithetical to the larger social good in that they are defined a priori as antisocial and morally suspect.

MARRIAGE AS ALLIANCE: ARRANGED AND SEMIARRANGED MARRIAGES

Marriage plays an extremely important role in many societies as the primary means of creating alliances between different kinship or descent groups. Marriage is not the wedding together of mere individuals; marriage is the wedding of one family to another in an alliance deemed mutually beneficial to the continued fortunes and power of each. As a method of forging alliances between families, the stakes of marriage are often considered to be too high to allow children to select their own mates. As the star-crossed lovers of William Shakespeare's (1564–1616) Romeo and Juliet portray in their ill-fated adventure in mate self-selection, the children of elite families tend to be actively discouraged from becoming romantically involved with inappropriate partners (such as the children of rival families, in the case of Juliet and Romeo). Parents and extended families will utilize their contacts in the community (and sometimes the services of professional go-betweens and marriage brokers) to secure a suitable mate for their children.

Socioeconomic and religious compatibility are considered more important criteria for matchmaking than love between the bride and the groom. Among Hindus, once the matchmaking efforts of the extended family and go-betweens has determined a plausible match, astrologers may then be consulted to assess the suitability of the match based on the horoscopes of the bride and the groom. Although it is often expected that the bride and groom will develop affection for another as time goes on, the romantic feelings and sexual impulses of the children are felt to be less reliable than the judgments of elders and religious specialists about the proposed couple's compatibility.

This is not to say that romance and premarital sexual activity have no place in societies that practice arranged marriages. Children can circumvent the judgments of their elders by eloping with one another. If the relationship proves stable, marriages that began in elopement will often later be recognized as legitimate. Likewise, many families within societies that are said to practice arranged marriages actually favor something more like semiarranged marriages that take the romantic feelings of the young people into consideration. A semiarranged marriage would be one where elders serve as something akin to a dating service, introducing the children to suitable candidates but allowing the children to select their own spouses within an array of socioreligiously acceptable choices. If one explores the Internet-based dating services that cater to Asian Americans looking for religiously compatible mates, one will see that mate self-selection can work together with attention to the criteria of socioreligious compatibility such as caste identity, mutually agreeable horoscopes, and other factors important to the parents and larger community.

Thus, it is probably not helpful to draw a firm line between societies that practice marriages based on mutual affection and those that practice arranged marriages. Much depends on whether one is looking at elite or working-class individuals in a particular society, as well as whether one is interested in the marriages of rural or urban populations. In allowing for a gradation of possibilities falling between the poles of marriages based on romantic love and arranged marriages, due consideration is also given to the bulk of historical practice among the elite of Europe. The ideal of romantic love made its first appearance among the elite with the songs of the troubadours of southwest France, who sang in praise of adulterous love. Scholars dispute when the ideal of companionate marriage based on romantic love emerged in culturally legitimated forms. Suffice it to say, for much of premodern European history, companionate marriage was not practiced by the elite in significant numbers. Matrimony was the primary means by which the elite family's wealth or patrimony was passed down to its legitimate heirs. For the premodern European elite with considerable assets and power to consider, companionate marriage was not considered the social good that it is in the early twenty-first century.

CLASS MATTERS, OR THE SOCIAL BURDENS OF THE ELITE

Elite women have historically done some of the heaviest lifting in terms of the social labor that their marriages have been expected to perform. The higher the social class or position of authority within the society, the more likely it is that her sexual activities have consequence not just for her, but also for others. The purity of descent lines that elite women's legitimate offspring support only matter if there is an inherited authority or wealth that depends on there being no illegitimate children to sully those pure lines of descent. Where their landed gentry cohorts in medieval Europe might have endured preadolescent betrothals and marriages, locked chastity belts, and constant surveillance by nannies and servants, non-elite girls and women of premodern Christianized European cultures often selected their own mates. Many were encouraged to follow their feelings and, having made their selection, would be betrothed to a mate in a simple ceremony such as handfasting. Sexual activity was permitted after the betrothal as long as the couple presented themselves at the altar for marriage before any offspring were born.

Whereas many women throughout history have been asked to dedicate more resources to the private sphere of home and family than have men, elite men nevertheless have done their share of heavy lifting in terms of sacrificing personal desires for the collective good of the family. Societies that practiced primogeniture—as was common in premodern Christianized Europe—singled out the oldest legitimate male offspring to inherit the family estate. Because the entire patrimony went to the eldest son, the matrimonial destiny of this sole heir was far too crucial to leave up to him. In the arranged or semi-arranged marriages common among the premodern elite of Europe, mates were selected for the most aristocratic males when the boys were as young as six or seven. The social labor that the younger sons' marriages were expected to perform was much lighter. Thus, younger brothers were generally free to select their own mates (they were also free to seek their own fortunes, not being eligible to inherit the family wealth).

SAME-SEX MARRIAGES AND CIVIL UNIONS FOR SAME-SEX PARTNERS

Whether same-sex partnerships should be recognized by the state and accorded the same benefits as heterosexual marriage is a hotly debated social issue being adjudicated in courts and in legislative chambers around the world in the early twenty-first century. The social reality of increasingly visible same-sex partnerships and future prospects of expanded legal protections for those partnerships have generated a great deal of controversy since the late 1990s. Within the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) community as well as within straight circles, there is as much disagreement as consensus. In North America, there has not been so much contention over the question of who is married and who is not since the nineteenth-century debates over polygamy in the Utah territory and the mid-twentieth-century social upheavals over interracial marriage. On February 24, 2004, U.S. President George W. Bush (b. 1946) declared his support for a constitutional amendment that would permanently bar gays and lesbians from enjoying the 1,049 rights and responsibilities of marriage that are currently recognized by the federal government (this enumeration comes from a 1997 U.S. General Accounting Office report). Bush's show of support for a ban on GLBTQ marriage came in the wake of a decision by the Supreme Judicial Court for Massachusetts in the case of Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (2003) that held that GLBTQ couples should be granted the benefits and protections of marriage for the good of the families that they form and the protection of the children whom they raise.

What has emerged in many nations is a collection of legal categories ranging from same-sex marriages to same-sex civil unions to same-sex domestic partnerships. The Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Spain, and South Africa are the only nations that, by the early twenty-first century, granted civil marriage to same-sex couples. This is the most extensive legal category in that civil marriage for GLBTQ people offers portability to the married couple; they can expect to receive the same benefits and legal protections should they move to another location within the nation that married them. Much of Europe (including Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, France, Germany, Portugal, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia) now acknowledges the existence of same-sex partnerships for such purposes as inheritance law, property law, and the conferral of social benefits. The extent to which nations that do not marry same-sex couples will recognize the marriages of those who do is a fascinating arena of legal speculation and adjudication that may take decades to sort out. "How this trend will play out in countries that have not yet recognized same-sex relationships is still up in the air," observes Paula Ettelbrick, "Will the United States, for instance, accommodate a major corporation's desire to have one of its top executives from Canada move here with her legal spouse?" (2006, p. 21).

Same-sex marriage has virtually displaced several other contentious social issues, such as abortion, in America's early twenty-first-century culture wars between social conservatives and social progressives. Social conservatives often argue against same-sex marriage by asserting that marriage is already ailing as an institution. Social progressives who support same-sex marriage challenge social conservatives who hold these views to show how recognizing the vows of same-sex partners committed to lifelong partnership will harm the institution of marriage. If anything is to blame for the failure of marriages and families in contemporary society, social progressives argue, it would be the choices made by the heterosexuals who currently have the right to marry. If late twentieth-century statistical trends continue, approximately every other person who enters into marriage in America today will later seek divorce (Schoen and Weinick 1993).

Social conservatives often say that research shows that children only thrive in families headed by a father and a mother. It may well be true that two parents are better than one, social progressives argue, but there are many reasons why this would be the case—reasons other than the inherent rightness of having a mother and a father in the home. Given the feminization of poverty in America and given the fact that many single-parented homes are headed by women who on average earn less than men, many social progressives would consider a household's marital status less significant than financial difficulties that single-parented households face in raising children. The Massachusetts judges who ruled that the state must allow same-sex marriages argued that denying GLBTQ people the right to partner and parent only reinforces the problem of single-parent poverty by denying same-sex parents access to the legal mechanisms to care for their partner's children. (In Ohio and other states, for example, the surviving lesbian partner is not assured of custody of the children if the birth mother dies; inheritance law also presents much ambiguity for same-sex couples.)

Major religious traditions are as divided as the general public about the issue of solemnizing same-sex partners as married couples. Some Christian denominations, already strained over the issue of ordaining GLBTQ people as clerics, have come to verge of schism over the issue. Religious people in their community forums are shaping the future of marriage just as decisively as civil authorities are (with the conferral of various benefits, legal rights, and social status as families to GLBTQ people) in that religious leaders will play a gatekeeping role in sanctioning some partnerships and denying the legitimacy of others. Many religious leaders acknowledge that their congregations are in the midst of debates about issues of sexuality and sexual orientation that are not yet resolved and predict that it will be some time before religious congregations speak with one mind on the issue of marriage for same-sex couples.

Some religious leaders and scholars of religion insist that decisions about who should marry must be made on the basis of appeals to civil rights and not appeals to religious authority, scripture, or moral codes. On this civil basis, for example, Peter Gomes (2004), an American Baptist minister and Harvard University professor of Christian morals, argues for same-sex unions as a social good, regardless of how the New Testament is read or what American Baptist authorities might say about the moral status of homosexual partnerships. In this, Gomes exemplifies the approach of many progressive ecclesiastical leaders who feel that same-sex unions ought to be granted to GLBTQ couples as a matter of civil rights and social justice. Marriage as a civil affair presided over by civil and not religious officials, Gomes argues, is in fact very much in conformity with the historical tradition established by the first Puritans in New England. The Puritans rejected the English practice of clerical marriage as without scriptural precedent. For some seventy years the only marriages that the Puritans recognized were civil affairs (based on the Dutch custom of civil marriage) and not church affairs. Gomes sees continuity between the decision of the judges in Massachusetts affirming same-sex marriage on civil grounds and the historical practices of the early Puritan colonists.

Other scholars of religion and religious leaders are more interested in basing their arguments for same-sex marriage on appeals to the authority of scripture. For example, Eugene Rogers (2006) seeks to defend marriage for same-sex couples on the basis of nuptial metaphors in the Bible (for example, the community of the Bible is God's spouse, joined to God through mutual, nuptial obligations). He takes issue with those scholars who feel the New Testament's critique of existing social structures obviates the possibility for marriage as a social good and argues that the Bible has resources for establishing the sanctity of same-sex unions.

Just as the scholarly community is divided about what marriage might have meant in antiquity, what their religious traditions say about historical forms of marriage, and what marriage norms should prevail in the light of the demand that same-sex partnerships be recognized as marriages, so too, do GLBTQ people present a spectrum of opinions on what marriage has been and could be and whether they want to be part of the institution at all. Some same-sex couples and defenders of same-sex coupling are not interested in achieving the right to marry because they regard marriage as hopelessly sexist, patriarchal, and bourgeois.

In this, they join the ranks of progressive feminist critics of marriage who work to counter idealized portraits of marriage, such as those critics of federal campaigns of marriage promotion who argue that, whereas marriage has provided some women the cushion of emotional and economic security, it has also locked many women in unsatisfying, exploitative, abusive and even violent relationships. Progressive commentators such as Lisa Duggan (2004) regard federal marriage promotion campaigns as indicative of a decreased willingness to provide a social safety net for those citizens without resources. If the family unit is held up, through such federal initiatives, as the primary source of caretaking, Duggan asks, does this signal the ideological demise of the domestic programs advocated by proponents of the great society? Does federal support for marriage imply the privatization of welfare?

Whereas some GLBTQ people worry about such ideological consequences of marriage promotion, other GLBTQ people want to be able to marry and see the potential of same-sex marriage as a force for social good that will not only improve the lives of GLBTQ people but also benefit the rest of society as well. Jonathan Rauch (2004) and Andrew Sullivan (1996) argue for same-sex marriage on moral grounds, suggesting that the legally marginalized status of queer couples discourages fidelity and that same-sex marriage will reward faithful couples and limit promiscuity in the queer community. Michael Warner (1999) objects to this line of reasoning that privileges same-sex marriage as a public good analogous to a deindividuated form of coming out of the closet. Warner suggests in his critique of same-sex marriage advocates, such as Sullivan, that these defenders of marriage have contributed to the making of a new sexual McCarthyism in their attempt to win mainstream approval by stigmatizing those GLBTQ people who choose not to live monogamously partnered lives as well as those heterosexuals who choose not to marry.

It will be interesting to see whether progressive critics of marriage who object to the primacy granted to marriage will find common ground with those GLBTQ-rights advocates who stress the need for access to marriage as a core privilege of citizenship. The former have accused the latter of painting a more idealized portrait of marriage than even the most unquestioning of social conservatives and in the process marginalizing unmarried people and neglecting the social value of other committed partnerships, such as elderly siblings who form domestic partnerships to care for each other financially and emotionally. The debates over same-sex marriage clearly generate much discussion about what social formations people value as cultures and why they value them. As of the early twenty-first century, it remains to be seen what modalities marriage will take. In the meantime marriage will go on as people deliberate about how to couple properly and handle property.

see also Adultery.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, Peter, and Robert Lamont. 1988. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press.

Brundage, James. 1987. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chidester, David. 1991. Salvation and Suicide: An Interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Clark, Elizabeth A., ed. 1996. St. Augustine on Marriage and Sexuality. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press.

Cohen, David. 1991. Law, Sexuality, and Society: The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Cole, Alan. 2006. "Buddhism." In Sex, Marriage, and Family in World. New York: Columbia University Press.

Coontz, Stephanie. 2005. Marriage, a History: from Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking.

Cott, Nancy F. 2000. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Duggan, Lisa. March 15, 2004. "Holy Matrimony." Nation.

Dunn, James D. G. 1996. "The Household Rules in the New Testament." In The Family in Theological Perspective, ed. Stephen C. Barton. Edinburgh, UK: T & T Clark.

Ettelbrick, Paula L. December 4, 2006. "A Global License to Marry; Same-sex Unions Are Being Recognized by Governments from Canada to South Africa." Los Angeles Times.

Foster, Lawrence. 1981. Religion and Sexuality: the Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community, Three American Communal Experiments of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gomes, Peter J. February 8, 2004. "For Massachusetts, a Chance and a Choice." Boston Globe.

Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, 798 N.E.2d 941 (2003).

Graff, E. J. 2000. What is Marriage For?: The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution. Boston, MA: Beacon.

Johnson, Luke, and Mark Jordan. 2006. "Christianity." In Sex, Marriage, and Family in World, ed. Don S. Browning, M. Christian Green, and John Witte, Jr. New York: Columbia University Press.

Kilbride, Philip Leroy. 1994. Plural Marriage for Our Times: A Reinvented Option? Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.

Lerner, Gerda. 1986. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Martin, Dale B. 1997. "Paul without Passion: On Paul's Rejection of Desire in Sex and Marriage." In Constructing Early Christian Families: Families as Social Reality and Metaphor, ed. Halvor Moxnes. London: Routledge.

Monger, George P. 2004. Marriage Customs of the World: From Henna to Honeymoons. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Muncy, Raymond Lee. 1973. "Complex Marriage at Oneida." In Sex and Marriage in Utopian Communities: Nineteenthth-Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Noyes, John Humphrey. 1853. "Biblical Argument Defining the Relations of the Sexes in the Kingdom of Heaven." In Bible Communism: A Compilation of the Annual Reports and Other Publications of the Oneida Association and Its Branches; Presenting, in Connection with Their History, a Summary View of Their Religious and Social Theories. Brooklyn, NY: Office of the Circular.

Rauch, Jonathan. 2004. Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America. New York: Times Books.

Rogers, Eugene F. 2006. "Trinity, Marriage, and Homosexuality." In Authorizing Marriage? Canon, Tradition, and Critique in the Blessing of Same-Sex Unions, ed. Mark Jordan, Meghan Sweeney, and David Mellott. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Schoen, Robert, and Robin Weinick. 1993. "The Slowing Metabolism of Marriage: Figures from 1988 U.S. Marital Status Life Tables." Demography 30 (4): 737-746.

Sullivan, Andrew. 1996. Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality. New York: Vintage.

Thatcher, Adrian. 1999. Marriage after Modernity: Christian Marriage in Postmodern Times. New York: New York University Press.

Vanita, Ruth. 2005 Love's Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Warner, Michael. 1999. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. New York: Free Press.

Wilson, Liz. 2003. "Buddhist Views on Gender and Desire." In Sexuality and the World's Religions, ed. David W. Machacek and Melissa M. Wilcox. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Yalom, Marilyn. 2001. A History of the Wife. New York: HarperCollins.

"The Same-sex Marriage Debate." boston.com News. Available from http://www.boston.com/news/specials/gay_marriage/sjc.

                                               Liz Wilson