Then her partner, Madeline, proposed that they exchange rings.  Graff said, “Not unless we have a ceremony.”  And so they did, in 1991, at their best friend’s house in a Boston suburb.  While Madeline used the words marriage and wedding freely in connection with the event, Graff was determined to avoid them--she says she was reluctant to go down the “heterosexual, patriarchal road.” 

Graff clearly had some conflicting feelings.  She kept asking herself, “What have we done exactly?  Did we get married?”  To figure it all out, she began to write.  “The more I looked, the more I realized that I couldn’t answer the question of whether I was in favor of us being able to get married without asking the question ‘What is marriage for?’” she says.  “The more I looked, the less I could separate it from my mother’s marriage, from my grandparents’ marriages.  What was it they had done?  And what was its meaning?  Finding the answer to that question was the only way I could figure out whether same-sex couples belonged, and if it was an institution I wanted to enter.”  So began “an obsession,” as she puts it, that ended with the book What Is Marriage For?, which Beacon Press will publish this spring. 

What Is Marriage For? locates the same-sex marriage of the 1990s in the history of marriage, tracing the institution from the Old Testament Hebrews through medieval Catholic theologians to 19th century Utopians.  As she read widely on the subject, Graff found an ever-changing institution that has always been a battleground, with same-sex marriage only the most recent skirmish in the battle.  She discovered that in asking, “What is marriage for?” she was actually asking, “What does it mean to be fully human.” 

The World spoke with Graff about her book at Radcliffe College’s Schlesinger Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is currently an affiliated scholar. 

World:  How did your book on marriage come to get written? 

EJG:  I was writing very basic articles on the subject, including one in Ms.  At that time, there was almost no one writing about it.  Then a number of gay neoconservative men started writing about marriage as if it were suddenly going to make all gay men settle down and confine their sex lives to one husband and start wearing suits and get jobs as lawyers.  They didn’t take into account that men are very different from one another and that marriage certainly has not domesticated promiscuous heterosexual men.  They also didn’t take into account that many women, including lesbian feminists, have heated debates about whether the institution of marriage has been good or bad for women. 

And by contrast with these writers, there were neoconservative heterosexual men who kept saying same-sex marriage would end civilization.  I thought, I have to keep writing!  I wrote a series of articles, and the more I wrote, the more I realized I had to know more in order both to answer my questions and enter the debate. 

World:  Yet, you didn’t write a conventional polemic on the subject.  Instead, you put it in a larger context and come at it from various angles. 

EJG:  I knew same-sex marriage hadn’t even been open for discussion before the 1990s.  So why was it open for discussion now?  To answer that is to answer the larger question “What is marriage for?”  What I came to believe is that marriage and Western society changed pretty dramatically in the mid-19th century. 

World:  How so? 

EJG:  Capitalism changed the western world.  Once people can make their own living, they have to be free to make their own beds.  Once you no longer depend on both tradition and five or ten other people for your financial survival, you can make a lot of choices--to have children or not; to stay together or not, based on your own inner lives.  And soon it comes to seem immoral to deny those heart choices--such as to marry or unmarry, based on your heart--to those who want to marry within their own sex. 

World:  Your book does make it clear that marriage has always had a fluid definition. 

EJG:  Yes.  The early Christians, for instance, with their emphasis on celibacy, really took on the existing Roman and Hebrew ideas of marriage.  They attacked the notion of marriage as social and civic obligation, an obligation to produce heirs and increase the tribe.  And at different times in history, people with entirely contrary views of marriage lived literally side by side under different marriage rules.  So you have Jews allowing divorce and Christians forbidding it; Jews allowing an uncle and niece to marry, while Christians forbade you to marry your godmother’s third cousin.  I’m not exaggerating!  Or you have the English aristocracy saying you could never legitimate a child born before a marriage, while the village juries agreed that a child born after throthplight (engagement) but before the wedding ceremony was legitimate and could inherit.  So the history of marriage is the history of debate and change and disagreement. 

World:  What about the emergence of civil, as opposed to religious, marriage?  How did that come about? 

EJG: Until the emergence of the capitalist nation-states, most marriages were conducted under one or another religious regime.  So a 13th-century Catholic couple would be married in the eyes of the Catholic church, while their Jewish neighbors would be married under Jewish law.  Their marriages would be governed by the separate laws also. Civil marriage came about only when the nation states emerged and said, “We are going to have a separate set of laws and no longer destroy societies in terrible, bloody ways over religion.” 

At that point, starting with the Protestant Reformation, most states took over their dominant religion’s marriage laws.  But when the nation-states’ marriage laws began to deviate from what religious laws had been, you had really dramatic debates--like the debates over divorce in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Divorce went against what for a couple of millenniums had been the very definition of marriage--that it linked you unto death.  That was Jesus’ definition! 

World:  Are children still an important part of our conception of marriage?  And does this play a role in our thinking about same-sex marriage? 

EJG:  Today’s debate over same-sex marriage has three parts.  One is the moral and pragmatic recognition that two people of the same sex can make their lives together.  That took us a long time to establish--that we exist!  The second is, given that we exist, should our basic financial rights and duties be recognized in the same way they have been recognized for a different-sex couple who have agreed to care for each other for their entire lives?  The third part is the children part.  That is the most contentious.  A lot of people think marriage should belong only to procreative couples.  But we changed that in the US with Griswold vs. Connecticut in 1965, in which the Supreme Court codified the idea that a married couple may block conception.  And if conception is voluntary, it can’t at the same time be mandatory. 

World:  Yet the subject elicits so much emotion.  How much does that have to do with the use of the word marriage? 

EJG:  Most of the resistance really comes from that.  People don’t want to give us the word marriage because it has a lot of personal, religious, and symbolic meaning. Though I’m surprised by how strong that resistance is.  People are a lot more willing to cede the individual component parts.  For example, in the Netherlands, the country that is probably the furthest along, we have every right of marriage except the word marriage.  It’s called something else there. 

World:  Opponents of same-sex marriage like the conservative writer William Bennett argue that opening up marriage to gay and lesbian couples will lead to the acceptance of polygamy. 

EJG:  That is pretty standard:  Polygamy, bestiality, incest.  All through history, any change in the marriage rules--changing the divorce laws, allowing married women to own property separate from their husbands, contraception, interracial marriage--has brought out the same apocalyptic cries:  “God will punish you and your children, and civilization will collapse.” 
 I have a whole file of jeremiads!  In 1816, when Connecticut was debating divorce, Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, equated divorcés with prostitutes--they were “impure, loathsome, abandoned wretches … the offspring of Sodom and Gomorrah.” 

World:  But you haven’t addressed Bennett’s argument.  Does it have any validity? 

EJG:  Essentially, same-sex marriage can only happen in a society that considers men and women to be not the same but equal.  Polygamy, on the other hand, thrives only in societies where men are in charge and consider their wives part of their property.  So philosophically, polygamy and same-sex marriage are completely opposed.  One is feminist and one is patriarchal in the root sense of the word. 

World:  Still, marrying someone of the same sex involves a major departure from the way that marriage has been viewed.  A lot of people--and not just religious conservatives--find it hard to accept. 

EJG:  What I argue is that marriage has historically been for money, sex, babies, kin, order, and heart.  Those have always been violent battlegrounds, but the world has never fallen in when the marriage rules have changed. 

The direction of those changes since the 19th century has been consistent, and same-sex marriage is in the same direction.  If you say, “Yes, couples can prevent conception, and it is still a marriage; yes, couples can come together and come apart, and what they had was still a marriage”; and if you say, “They can choose it for themselves, and it is still a marriage”--those are incredibly radical changes.  And they all endorse the integrity of the individual spirit.  As society moves toward individual dignity, you have to respect individual choice, and that is how you get to same-sex marriage. 

World:  As you know, UU congregations have done gay unions for years, and a few years ago, the General Assembly endorsed the legalization of same-sex marriage.  What other things can a liberal religious denomination do? 

EJG:  It would be arrogant for me to prescribe what religious denominations should be doing.  But churches that care about this issue can do several things.  For instance, announce to your congregation that you’d like to recognize committed partners.  Make it clear that if a couple wants to get married, your congregation would be delighted to marry them.  Church members can still be afraid, regardless of the overall policy of their denomination.  They have a lot to lose; they might not be sure.  So make an explicit statement.  And get involved in the local marriage politics, whatever they are.  This issue is being fought jurisdiction by jurisdiction, state by state, and every state needs more people to work for same-sex marriage. 
 

UUs and Same-Sex Marriage

It was November 18, 1998, and, in the chambers of the Vermont Supreme Court, oral arguments were winding down in a landmark lawsuit to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples.   Nearby, at the Unitarian Church of Montpelier, supporters gathered for an interfaith service.   Ministers of various denominations spoke; audience members stepped forward to light candles of joy and concern and offer personal testimonies; the congregants sang the Holly Near-song-turned-UU-hymn “We Are a Gentle, Angry People.”  At the start of the service, attendance was sparse, but by the end--once arguments had finished over at the court--the church was filled with people, including the three couples who were the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.  As the numbers swelled, “you could feel the momentum building,” says the Rev. Jane Dwinell, minister of the First Universalist Parish of Derby Line, Vermont, who spoke at the service. 

After defeats in gay-marriage referendums in Hawaii and Alaska, gay-marriage advocates had turned to Vermont as their best hope for a legal breakthrough.   And UUs were instrumental in statewide organizing.  Of 94 Vermont clergy who signed on to an amicus brief supporting legalized same-sex marriages, 13 were UUs, an impressive total in a state with only 21 UU congregations, several of them lay led.  UU ministers have also been active in VOWS (Vermont Organization for Weddings of the Same Gender), the statewide clergy group that sponsored the Montpelier service. 

Of course, UU support for gay and lesbian marriages is nothing new.  In 1984, long before gay marriage had come to the fore as a political issue, the UUA General Assembly went on record supporting the right of UU ministers to perform gay unions.  In 1996, the GA, meeting in Indianapolis, approved a resolution advocating legal recognition of same-sex marriages  During the proceedings, UUA President the Rev. John Buehrens invited gay and lesbian married couples to come up on stage; they received a five-minute standing ovation. 

With the recent emergence of same-sex marriage as a national issue, UU congregations around the country have helped lead the support for legalization.  In Hawaii,  the Rev. Mike Young, minister of the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, who has been performing same-sex marriages for 20 years, served as vice president of Protect Our Constitution, the group that led opposition to last fall’s statewide ballot measure restricting marriage to a man and a woman.   The church  passed a congregational resolution supporting same-sex marriage, and members staffed phone banks during the campaign against the religious-right-sponsored ballot question.  The ballot measure passed overwhelmingly, however, dooming the prospect of legalized gay marriage in Hawaii for the foreseeable future. 

In Alaska, where a similar religious-right-sponsored measure was also on the ballot last fall, the UU congregation in Anchorage was very active in the “No on 2” campaign.   A congregational meeting in October voted to oppose the measure, the first time the congregation has taken a public stand on a political issue in the Rev. Art Curtis’s nine years as the church’s minister.  The church board held a party to raise funds for referendum opponents, and Curtis, with 38 other clergy, placed a full-page ad against the measure in the local newspaper.  But, as in Hawaii, UU efforts failed, and the referendum won with an overwhelming 68 percent of the vote. 

Meanwhile, in California, where a measure banning gay marriage will appear on the ballot in the year 2000,  pro-gay-marriage activists are already gearing up.  In San Francisco, Cheryl Deaner, a member of the alternative families social action committee of the First UU Church of San Francisco, is temporarily running the northern California section of the campaign against the ballot measure until a full-fledged organization can be established.  In September, the First UU Church held an interfaith service supporting ministers who perform same-sex marriages, and cominister the Rev. Margot Campbell Gross is one of several clergy refusing to sign heterosexual marriage certificates until gay marriages gain legal recognition. 

Despite all this activism, the Rev. Keith Kron, director of the UUA Office of Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Concerns, worries that most UUs, while supportive,  “don’t have a clue what to do.”   He suggests that they join the public discourse on the issue.  “We can argue that we have couples in congregations together for five, 10, 15 years, and it hasn’t been detrimental to our community in any way whatsoever,” he says.  “We need more stories to shift public opinion.  We need to let people know that having gay unions has been good for us.” 

Neil Miller is the author of Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present (Vintage, 1995).