Irish Wedding Prayer

Why history says gay people can't marry…nor can anyone else*

I happened to be in New York at the end of June this year when the State legislature passed the Marriage Equality Act to legalise same-sex marriage. By coincidence, it was Gay Pride weekend, and a million people waved rainbow flags in the streets of Manhattan, celebrating this landmark ruling in the campaign for gay rights, and I was one of them.

What struck me as a visitor from the UK – where civil partnerships for same-sex couples have been legal since 2004 – was the way in which gay marriage is still such a divisive issue in American politics. The subject continues to divide the nation, and has been revived, rather than resolved, by ongoing state-by-state rulings, Supreme Court challenges, and high-octane political rhetoric. To cite just one recent example, Proposition 8 (the “California Marriage Protection Act”) was an amendment to the California constitution passed in November 2008 defending heterosexual marriage as the only legitimate form of wedding. The amendment stated that “gays…do not have the right to redefine marriage for everyone else”. Following fierce and costly litigation suits filed for and against Proposition 8, the amendment was overturned in August 2010 in a United States District Court. Appeals are now pending. Same-sex marriage is not recognized in federal law, following the Defense of Marriage Act (1996) passed by the United States Congress, which limits the definition of marriage to “a legal union of one man and one woman”. Those organizations which represent the interests of the evangelical Christian right, a powerful and wealthy lobbying force in the United States, stress the scriptural precedent for heterosexual marriage, encapsulated in the tiresome slogan “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”. This same slogan is now parroted by bigots in Uganda who, with financial support from American evangelical missionaries, have sought to introduce the death penalty for homosexuals. Both scripture and historical precedent are used to argue that gay people cannot marry a) because God wants it that way, and b) because historically it’s always been that way. The religious right proposes that gay people can’t be allowed to marry on the grounds that marriage is, and has always been, for the purpose of procreation. As a historian, it’s this assumption that I’ve had cause to examine in greater depth through research that I’ve been pursuing over the past five years for my new book, The Castrato and His Wife .