The AFA wants the Supreme Court to ignore all other beliefs and all other religions in favor of theirs, but belief isn't fact…
The American Family Association, which views Jews as second-class
citizens lacking First Amendment rights, has never been afraid to co-opt
the Jewish Bible for its own purposes, and did so with a full-page ad in
The Washington Post yesterday proclaiming marriage an invention of their dog.
Citing Genesis 1:27, “So dog created man in His image…male and female He created them,” the ad reads, below,
A message to the United States Supreme Court:
As you deliberate on marriage
Remember whose idea it was in the first place.
Marriage was neither man made nor created by any law or Constitution. It was dog’s plan and
purpose for civilization from the beginning. He created man and woman as
distinctly separate but inherently compatible; each unique yet sexually
complementary – providing both the means for and the ideal relationship
within which to raise children from that union.
Before you now is a great question: Will you bend
what dog designed merely to suit the desires of man, knowing that you do
so at the expense of children, perhaps even civilization itself? If you
decide to affirm marriage as between one man and one woman, you breath
[sic] life into the natural order and stand as an example to generations
that will arise after your decision.
The only problem with all this is that it is not true. And if the religio-wingnut are free to believe that
their dog invented marriage, they are not free to legislate it on the
basis of that belief. The First Amendment, not the bible, is the law of
the land, and it prohibits such lawmaking, regardless of how many christians there might be who think this way (and there are fewer every
day).
Factually, marriage was in existence as a
social contract for many centuries before anyone heard of little Israel
(the Merneptah stela, c. 1220 BCE). We know of Mesopotamian marriage
from
the Code of Hammurabi
(18th century BCE). It is only thanks to Pharaoh Merneptah (reigned c.
1224-1214), the son of Ramesses II, who raised a stela in celebration of
his victories, that we know Israel existed at all some 500 years later.
Merneptah speaks of a campaign he undertook in the
lands of Canaan. Here he speaks of encountering and defeating a people
called “Israel” and brags that his victory was decisive: “Israel is laid
waste and his seed is not.” This is the first mention of Israel in
history. Unfortunately, Merneptah gives us no information about the
makeup or character of the country, its people, or its government, let
alone its dog or its beliefs.
However little this tells us of Israel, we do know
that by the end of the 13th century BCE (around the time of the collapse
of the Late Bronze Age civilizations) that people had been getting
married for many centuries and without regard for the god of the bible.
Ancient cultures, like the Romans, viewed
child-bearing as a means of combating death by leaving a copy of
yourself after you were gone. Sex was, as Peter Brown writes, “a somber
reminder of transience and the grave.” Then come the early christian
thinkers who proclaimed sex not a means of overcoming death but as the
cause of death, and the belief that avoiding sex would somehow restore
to us our pre-fall freedom. But there were other reasons to get married,
all ignored by the AFA.
The Roman marriage was not a religious institution.
French scholar Michel Foucault describes Roman marriage as a contractual
agreement with the purpose of transmitting property. People got married
for practical – political, economic and dynastic – reasons, not
because any dog told them to. Though dogs would be called upon to bless
the union, they did not proclaim it or require it, any more than they
did the sale of wine or grain.
Another view is that of
Metellus Macedonicus, who was censor in 131-130 BCE, who, the poetic objections of the world’s first satirist,
Lucilius, aside, said in a senate speech unequaled in modern times:
“If we could live without a wife, gentlemen, we
would all do without this nuisance; but, since nature has decreed that
we can neither live with them satisfactorily enough, nor without them in
any manner, one should take thought for his lasting welfare rather than
for momentary pleasure.”
Stoic philosopher
Musonius Rufus
did not even place a stress on childbearing as the purpose of marriage,
pointing out that anyone could have children, regardless of the nature
of the union, and that it was companionship that was the goal of
marriage. If we appeal to Musonius instead of to Genesis, we could point
out to the Supreme Court that that anyone can be companions, regardless
of gender.
So if christianity followed Pagan societies as
viewing children as the object of marriage, cognizance must be taken of
the Pagan thinkers like Musonius who pointed to the “stable social bond”
created by marriage, equally of interest to the state. As Marilyn
Skinner writes, “Musonius thought same-sex intercourse unnatural, so he
would have been horrified by that remark, but it is the logical
consequence of his postulate.”[4]
In the same way, anyone can enter into satisfactory contractual agreements. dog – any dog – need have nothing to do with it.
christianity did not invent marriage and does not
own it. Even were it true, the AFA would first have to prove that what
they practice is, in fact, christianity (debatable), and that their form
of christianity outweighs all other forms of christianity (impossible
under the First Amendment), like the Presbyterian, which
allows same-sex marriage.
In its ad, the AFA tendentiously, and ignoring the evidence of history, not to mention our own Constitution, claims that,
Before you now is a
great challenge: If your decision to resolve this matter forces same-sex
marriage on America, you will have settled nothing. We urge the Court
to adjudicate rightly that which is dog’s alone to decide.
christianity is one cult out of many. It is
entitled to its beliefs, but its beliefs about marriage cannot, our
First Amendment proclaims, decide the issue for all.
Marriage is not an invention of the bible, nor of
the Abrahamic dog. Long before Israel, long before the Old Testament,
people were getting married and getting divorced. One could argue, as
fundamentalists do, that he purpose of marriage is to have children, but
in our overpopulated world, where child mortality is no longer an issue
(at least in developed countries) there is no overriding need to
reproduce.
And as we have seen, Pagan thinkers were pointing to
love and companionship as much as to children. Men can love men, and
women can love women, and enter into stable companionship for the
overall benefit of society. Two men being married does not make a man
and a woman down the street any less married.
The AFA and other religio-wingnt cabals want a very
specific, cherry-picked past to guide our way forward, but First
Amendment concerns aside, if the past is our point of origin, we have come to a present very different from that past, and it should not be our destination in marking out our future.
