(Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)





(Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)



“I believe that marriage is between a man and woman,” Gingrich said, the Des Moines Register reports. “It has been for all of recorded history and I think this is a temporary aberration that will dissipate. I think that it is just fundamentally goes against everything we know.”

Among the things I am most confident of: Newt Gingrich knows very little about marriage

What Gingrich believes aside, merely being married three times does not, apparently, make you an expert on marriage. Having an affair that eventually led you to ditch your ill wife to marry someone else similarly does not qualify you as someone who knows a thing about the institution, other than how to do it badly.

Gingrich is just plain wrong here. For most of recorded history, marriage has been a property arrangement, with the woman (or women, plural) having little to no say in the matter. Harems, commonplace. "Sanctioned" mistresses abounded. If anything, it is the current version of marriage that is the historical aberration.

Homosexuality, on the other hand, has been around far longer than what Newt Gingrich thinks of as a "marriage." (Dig them up, and some of those old philosophers could tell you plenty of stories about buggering young men, and how it was a perfectly accepted part of society.)

Specifically, though, modern marriage in the United States takes its primary purpose as a legal construct by which two people can enjoy certain legal and economic benefits. That's it. Those benefits have evolved quite recently, in the grand scheme of history, and change further all the time, with bits and pieces of new legislation. The government explicitly has no religious interest in the arrangement, nor do those benefits confer differently depending on the religion or supposed morality of those involved. (Thank goodness, eh Newt?)

While Newt may claim it "fundamentally goes against everything we know," then, he can only be talking about moral or religious disapprobation. Given the entirely legal/economic rights conferred, however, mere religious disapproval seems an entirely spurious argument against marriage by two men or two women.



I actually (shudder) agree in barest principle with Ron Paul on this one. Government would and should have no business in the institution of marriage at all—if we were to presume marriage as religious construct. That is not, however, what even Newt Gingrich means when he says marriage. He quite specifically means the legal, government version of the word. That civic version is what every anti-gay-marriage advocate means by the word: Otherwise, they would have no problem with the government accepting such arrangements as valid.

The public, legal meaning of the word has transcended any supposed religious underpinnings to the word. There is no religion that can claim to have invented it or which monopolizes it now. As every divorce attorney in America can attest, it is civic construct, not religious construct. It is furthermore an ever-changing construct that, in current form, is remarkably different from what it was through most of "recorded history."

I think we need not take Gingrich's premise that these gay rights are a "temporary aberration" seriously. If anything, it sounds more like a threat than a prediction, but even as a threat I find it lacking. In his own career Gingrich has proved no better as judge of public sentiment than he has been of history, and the number of modern Americans who feel their own religious views should trump other people's civic rights continues, thankfully, to shrink.

