Grace & Peace!
I do not think defense of traditional marriage would be mandated to roll back to the period you mention of arranged marriage, any more that it mandates going back even further to marriage by kidnapping or clubbing over the head, to use the caveman imagery. Marriage can come to exist by a variety of methods and still remain true traditional marriage.
But that’s precisely the problem, pnewton: the definition of marriage that “traditional” marriage defenders have and the one which same-sex marriage advocates have is essentially the same–marriage is making a life-long commitment and building a household with someone you romantically love. It’s a definition that is ordered to the good of the couple, not to the good of the society in which the couple is embedded.
Because this is the point that livingwordunity is also missing: saying that marriage means a man and a woman refers not to marriage’s function, but to its form. And yes, the form of marriage for a very long time in the West has been a man and a woman. Generally, though not always, an institution’s form will follow its function, not the other way around–and indeed, the form of marriage was well-suited to it’s function, which had to do with uniting families for favorable political/economic reasons, establishing legacies and inheritance rights, etc. Children were never the actual point of marriage–they were a means by which the social purposes of marriage (family alliance, legacy, inheritance, etc.) could be realized. It’s only since the Victorian sentimentalization of childhood that we’ve begun to think differently–until then, children were always near the bottom of the ladder in terms of social value. Parenting in mommy-daddy units was also never actually the point of marriage–childcare was generally the social task of mothers and other women, not of fathers; and in households that could afford it, childcare was often farmed out to nannies, tutors and other caregivers (in other Western cultures, fosterage was an important system of child-rearing, while in other cultures entirely, childcare tends to be more communal). Parents were important in terms of name and honor, but not necessarily important in terms of care. Until recently, that is.
So the traditional function of marriage is entirely socially ordered–families come together, children are produced in order to cement familial ties and establish legacies, etc. And the man-woman form of marriage is well-suited to such an idea of marriage.
In our day, though (and for the last couple centuries in which the enlightenment value of individual self-determination has been increasingly on the rise) marriage is entirely couple-oriented–two people who romantically love each other come together to make a home, children may or may not be produced, the state doesn’t care what they get up to as long as it’s legal. In this understanding of marriage, a specifically man-woman form is
immaterial to accomplishing the purposes of marriage…which are entirely couple-dependent.
If you want the man-woman
form of marriage to be essential again, you need to change marriage’s
function back to something more socially oriented. And that means making a number of changes to the society and the culture which, unfortunately at this point, are unworkable. Because marriage, whether it is socially oriented or couple oriented receives its function/orientation from the culture/society in which it plays a part. If society/culture changes then marriage changes.
To argue for “traditional” marriage without taking all of this into consideration is to basically admit to being a fantasist–which is to say, in the end, that “tradition” becomes divorced from the traditional and is reduced to being just another identity-marker in a cultural sea of ego-centrism. It is, in short, to unconsciously betray tradition to the zeitgeist–you get the trappings of tradition, but not the essence; you find yourself advocating for the form of a thing, but ignore its actual function or substance.
Under the Mercy,
Mark
All is Grace and Mercy! Deo Gratias!
