The same-sex marriage backstory: it’s been around a very long time

I read “Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe” by the late John Boswell many years ago, so it’s not news to me that same-sex unions have been with us much, much longer than our opponents would have us believe. It’s important to keep that in mind when we have people like Archbishop Dolan calling this a radical social change. Radical implies sudden, unexpected and recent. Our marriages are none of those. From Reason.com:

“I can’t go that far; that’s the year 2000! Negroes [and whites], okay. But that’s too far!”
—President Richard Nixon on gay marriage, speaking in August 1970; quoted in John Ehrlichman, Witness to Power No one knows the names of the first gay couple to exchange wedding vows. You should keep that in mind as same-sex marriage becomes law in New York: The earliest milestones on the road to marital equality were made quietly, privately, and far from any civil authority. The public recognition of gay unions emerged gradually, reaching wider and wider circles until finally even governments started climbing aboard. Contrary to the rhetoric you still hear from some of the idea’s opponents, gay marriage was not cooked up in some D.C. laboratory and imposed on America by social engineers. It was built from the bottom up, and it was alive at a time when the typical social engineer thought homosexuality was a disease. Members of the same gender have been coupling off for centuries, sometimes with ceremonies that look rather marital to modern eyes. Here in America, gay marriages predate the modern gay rights movement. Six years before Stonewall, the 1963 book The Homosexual and his Society described informal gay weddings where “all the formalities of [a] legally certified and religiously sanctioned ceremony are aped with the greatest of care.” Those unions didn’t always last (the authors noted that it “sometimes takes no more than a week or two” before the lovers “recall that their marriage has no legal, religious, or moral sanctions” and take off), but as the resilience of the euphemism longtime companion suggests, a match between two men or two women could be as lasting and loving as any heterosexual coupling. ]]>