Has this kind of freedom happened before in history?

[xiphias]

Here's a question for my more historically-informed friends: do we have a chance to enter into an unprecedented era, in which gays are treated equally to straights, AND women are treated equally to men?

I mean, when I think of times in history when homosexual relationships were considered acceptable, I think of places like Athens, which didn't allow women to be citizens. Indeed, I have trouble thinking of times and places where gay marriages were treated as the same as straight marriages -- of course they EXISTED, but I can't think of times where they had the same official recognition. And in the places where gay relationships had SOME form of recognition, they were often seen as BETTER than straight relationships, because women were considered to be less than men.

I have this gut feeling that treating straight and gay relationships as the same requires a culture in which all sexes are treated as the same. In order to consider a woman marrying a woman to be the same as a woman marrying a man, you have to consider a woman to be the same as a man.

Is this the first time in history where we've had the chance for this to happen?

Comments

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

we may be closer to that than we have been, historically, but as a woman working in it, i am just going to sit over here and laugh tiredly about women being treated equally to men.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yup. Yeah, that's why I said "have a CHANCE," rather than "ARE."

[wcg.livejournal.com]

The only place I can think of where there was similar equality was Sparta, though there wasn't a whole lot of diversity there. (And of course there was no equality at all for the helots, who were slaves.)

So yes, we are in the vanguard of progress. But we still have a way to go, and there are lots of folks who don't want us to get there.

[(Anonymous)]

Not totally sure if this is a legitimate question or a "straw man" argument. Your question assumes that marriage (as we currently define it) has parallels thru history. While I am not an expert on the subject by any means, I would posit that marriage as we know it is a relatively current development. I would posit instead that "marriage" (generic m) is nothing more than a formalization of living arrangements whereby the participants share in household property, etc. As such, marriage as practiced in many non-Christian societies even today consists of the buying & selling of the (female) partner whereby the female partner in the marriage performs domestic roles for the primary (male) partner. Thruout much of recorded history the female partner was typically chattel (property) and marriage was a formalization of that chattel relationship, sometimes for political gain (eg marrying your enemies daughter, sister, etc). Equality of the partners where they agree to "love, honour, and obey" each other is largely a Christian formality of relatively recent vintage.

So, to take your core question - about equality of gays in history. I would suggest you look to the Greeks, Romans, and Eqyptians for the answer to your question. In all 3 societies homo-eroticism and homo-sexuality were openly accepted and did not have the stigma put on it by the Christian church. I would posit that the answer to your question is probably that in societies were homo-eroticism were openly accepted, it would not be a forgone conclusion to assume that 2 men living together and sharing their "households" would not be an aberation. Whether or not it would be considered a "marriage" would have to be evaluated in the context of what was considered a "marriage" in that civilization.

dod

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

And now you're catching up to my one bit of sympathy for the opponents of gay marriage: proponents are hand-waving how revolutionary and unprecedented this is.

You mention Ancient Greece? Here's the thing about that example. Most Greek city-states, up through and including the iron age, had no separate words for heterosexual and homosexual, because the idea that you would only have sex with people from one gender, ever in your life, was only barely imaginable to them. When Alcibiades accused Socrates of never having had a boyfriend, it was a vicious and salacious accusation. But even in ancient Athens, where it was only barely not mandatory for men to have sex with teenage boys, at least occasionally, the idea of two men marrying each other never came up -- it was every bit as unimaginable as being purely heterosexual or purely homosexual was.

People like to rattle off examples of various cultures occasionally solemnizing same-sex marriages, but if you look into the details, they're not dealing with same-sex marriage, they're dealing with transgender. They're not dealing with two men who get married, they're dealing with a man marrying someone who is biologically male, born male, who is legally declared to be a woman. And vice versa. Most of the world's cultures and religions had provisions for transgender marriage long before gender reassignment surgery was invented; there's nothing particularly controversial about that outside of modern-day Redneckistan.

But gay marriage really is something completely new, unprecedented anywhere before the 20th century.

That doesn't mean that it's wrong. Indeed, once we stopped automatically taking people's kids away when they're openly gay or caught being gay, we made gay marriage inevitable; our legal system has no provision whatsoever for two (or more) unmarried adults raising a child together. But you unfairly dismiss people's discomfort if you attack them for feeling nervous about taking our culture in a direction that no prior culture has ever gone before.

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

Some tribal cultures allowed for same-sex marriages without making a fuss about it. Some of them were much less obsessed about sex/gender enforcement than modern European-derived cultures.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Even in Sparta, same-sex relationships and opposite-sex relationships weren't considered the same. You had same-sex relationships for friendship, pleasure, and camaraderie; opposite-sex relationships for procreation. I wouldn't say that there was equality, exactly, in Sparta -- perhaps "equivalence" might be a better word? Men and women both had power, but different and distinct power. Sparta was unusual in that men and women's power overlapped, though.

[burgundy.livejournal.com]

I hesitate to say "first time in history" because part of your basic premise is very US-centric. There are countries that already have legal same-sex marriages, and already have more progressive gender-related policies. So the fact that there is a growing sentiment in that direction in this country doesn't mean it's ground-breaking.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

That's part of what I include in "this time in history" -- the past, oh, thirty years or so.

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

Absolutely true. The fairest comparison, frankly, is to slavery. Humans had taken the existence of slavery for granted from somewhere around 2500 BCE until the mid 1700s CE, and no government banned it until the 1800s. Banning slavery was radical, in that it was unprecedented. That didn't make it the wrong thing to do, but people who said that they were uncomfortable with abolition because no society in history had ever banned slavery until their generation had a concern that deserved respect. Not obedience, but respect; it deserved to be heard, it deserved to be addressed with some humility. In many places, it was; here in the US, that concern was addressed with rudeness and, in some cases, with violence, and ultimately, because the two sides could not talk to each other, with over a million deaths.

When somebody says that there's never been gay marriage any time before the late 20th century, before this lifetime, you can, if you want, be rude and vicious to them for bringing that up. You can also, if you insist, change the subject to the long history of transgender marriage as if that countered their point (it doesn't). Neither one of these will do anything but increase the anger, increase the rage, increase the likelihood of violence in my opinion.

Or you can say, "You're right. But we learned almost two hundred years ago that some people just plain are gay. And because of that, we decided 40 years ago that it was just plain wrong to take their children away, and to take parents away from their children, because of something that's nobody's fault. Now we have unmarried families trying to raise their own children, and unmarried partners trying to care for each other in health and retirement, and what, if not marriage, do you suggest that we do about that? Yes, this is a novel solution. But it's what we have to try."

"A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger. The tongue of the wise useth knowledge aright: but the mouths of fools poureth out foolishness." Prov 15:1-2. Regardless of where it comes from, it's remarkably good advice. If somebody says something true, and that truth is why they're concerned, there's nothing to lose and everything to gain by admitting that what they said is true, then explaining why you don't think they need to be concerned.

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

And, of course, it's equally true that when it came to banning slavery, the US was late to the party, but not the dead last: behind the Europeans, ahead of the Muslims. Just like we're almost certain to be on gay marriage.

[submarine-bells.livejournal.com]

Yep. The idea that women are currently being treated equally to men (or any approximation to it) is quite tragically hilarious to this woman. Your gut feeling would make a nice premise for an interesting SF story, but doesn't really approximate to the reality I'm living in, sadly. A pity, because it'd be good if true. But I see no evidence of it. Xiphias, you might want to google the phrase "war on women" if you aren't already familiar with the phrase, and/or contemplate some of the recent shenanigans about curtailment of access to reproductive medicine and technology for female people. Honestly, as a woman, the US is one of the last places in the anglophone world I'd consider moving to in the current political climate. For there to be any real chance of an "unprecedented era" of equality, all that anti-woman hostility would have to not be present, before you even start with any of the subtler stuff.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

I don't know if we have a chance for complete true equality. We've been working on approaching it for more than a hundred years, and this is a meaningful step...but there is still quite a bit of resistance and backlash. As I see it, a big part of the destruction* of traditional marriage was the idea that marriage is mostly about an emotional connection between two individuals sharing their lives, rather than being mostly an economic connection between two families sharing their property. (With many families, of course, they were talking about very small amounts of property.)

*It is probably more prudent, and just as accurate, to call it the growth of modern marriage. It goes back to the idea of romantic courtship, and all the legal and social changes that make it easier for a woman to live independently of husband or parents just made it grow faster.

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

Interesting idea. I think Brad is right - gay marriage in America is both unprecedented and overdue. But we're nowhere near equality yet.

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

Barring a divorce from history and a change in human social modes -- or a major increase in longevity -- none of us on this blog will see such equality in our lifetimes in the US, and not worldwide either.

There are too many social, legal, economic and religious tropes cutting against it. It would take at least 100 years even assuming we make good strides now, and that's being particularly generous. It's been nearly 50 years since African-Americans got some measure of equality under the law. Even though things are markedly nowhere close to equal between African-Americans and Caucasians, some people want to end measures taken to try to level the playing field. It's been nearly 100 years since women got the vote, yet they are still drastically underrepresented in leadership roles at all levels of government and society, and often underpaid in jobs throughout the country (and the world) compared to men in the same jobs, even at the same companies.

This does not mean I don't personally want equality, or that I won't try to work toward such. However, these things take time to move. Inertia is hard to fight.