George,

As a feminist and a family mediator I have spent over 30 years researching and ruminating on the institutions of marriage and the family, (in addition to experiencing them). At the same time that many of us value the traditions of family and may still carry an idealized version of marriage, we spend millions each year in therapy and/or in obtaining divorces, trying to recover from them.

If we are ever to sort out those aspects of family that are meeting our emotional needs, from those aspects that are destructive, we must first be able to acknowledge marriage and family as institutions. As institutions they evolve and change according to socio-cultural, geographical, chronological and religious factors. A wonderful book, "The Myth of Motherhood" by Shari Thurer lays out the "fashions" in motherhood throughout the ages, beginning with Sumeria.

Marriage as an institutionalized way of consolidating family power and wealth goes far back in human history. "Bride price" was one of the earliest forms of barter. For millenia marriage was the domain of the parents who chose their children's spouses based on the benefits to the entire family constellation. In the West, with the rise of Christianity, the church began to sanctify marriage as a way of maintaining control of sexuality. It was still primarily the upper classes concerned with property inheritance, that valued marriage. With the emergence of the middle class in the 16-19 centuries, marriage became a way to establish legitimacy and respectability.

Though there is still little attention paid by scholars to the family as a social institution, those that do, illuminate the state's interest in marriage as essentially the creation of stable household units that re-produce workers at no cost to the state or industry. The unpaid labor of women in the home after industrialization is still not acknowledged in the GNP of any country. The break-up of the clan and the transfer of loyalty from the clan to the nation-state was the goal of several centuries of nation-state consolidation. Nuclear families were the by-product of the breakdown of the clan, separating families into smaller isolated groups reduced the threat to the nation-state that the clan represented.

The problem as I see it is that the United States never should have had any business sanctioning marriage in the first place. This is one of the most pernicious relics of non-separation of church and state. Marriage is a ritual sanctioned through a religion in order to expand the original purpose of acquring property by attaching a spiritual significance to the union of two people. Thus, I propose that marriage should be a religious ritual in which individuals may choose to engage, based on their spiritual beliefs. Civil Union for the purpose of all other forms of economic and social entitlement should be available to all who wish to enter into such a contract. But, as long as marriage exists as a function of the state, under the Fourteenth Amendment it must be available to all citizens equally. I therefore think that it is very appropriate that candidates for city council should make clear their positions on this issue. It would be a very positive step to have domestic partner benefits for Charlottesville City employees, to introduce legislation on the state level, and to be able to vote for candidates who support these long overdue measures.

One other interesting wrinkle in the argument to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman is the newest scientific research indicating that there are more than two sexes* and even that individuals may have different sets of chromosomes within one body. The insistence that marriage should continue to be defined only by a heterosexual norm may eventually lead to invasive procedures to determine sex, that would be required of all applicants for a marriage license.

- Susan Oberman (electronic mail, February 26, 2004)

*National Library of Medicine (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/) Entrez PubMed journal search site http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi. This search site is very easy to use and accesses over 12 million scientific journal citations, going all the way back to the 1960s. Hundreds of scientific papers on intersex and sex-reversal in humans and other species can be read at this site.