Tony Abbott incorrect on the history of marriage

Updated Fri 1 Nov 2013

PHOTO: Tony Abbott incorrect on the history of marriage.(AAP: David Crosling)

MAP: Australia

As state and territory governments consider adding same-sex marriage laws to the books, Prime Minister Tony Abbott is resisting change, invoking what he says is a traditionalist view of the institution.

The New South Wales Parliament has begun debateon a same-sex marriage bill in its Upper House and the ACT has already passed a bill. In Tasmania, attempts earlier this week to revive a same-sex marriage bill failed because legislators there said it was a federal issue.

The Federal Government opposes states and territories legislating in the area, and has alreadylodged a challenge to the ACT law in the High Court.

The Prime Minister is known for his conservative stance on the issue, a position he recently said stems in part from his understanding of what marriage traditionally meant.

”From time immemorial, in every culture that’s been known, marriage or that kind of solemnised relationship has been between a man and a woman,” Mr Abbott said on October 25.

But have marriage, or marriage-like relationships, always followed that rule? The short answer is no.

The history

Roman Emperor Nero was married to not one man, but two. His nuptials were recorded and discussed at the time between subjects – friendly and hostile. The detail is recorded in the 1999 book Roman Homosexuality (updated in 2012) by Craig Williams, a classics professor of Brooklyn College, New York. The book includes a chapter on marriage between men, practiced throughout the empire, all the way to the top.

While perhaps one of the more high profile examples, it is not the only one. And the fluidity of the definition of marriage is not limited to Roman emperors.

PHOTO: A statue of Emperor Nero during an exhibition in Rome, 2011.  (AFP: Alberto Pizzoli )

Stephanie Coontz, a professor of history and family studies at Evergreen State College in the United States, told ABC Fact Check that the most obvious example of how marriage has differed from Mr Abbott’s definition is the long-standing practice of polygamy.

“The most culturally preferred kind of marriage through the ages was between one man and several women – and this is the kind of marriage that is most often referred to in the first five books of the Bible,” Professor Coontz said.

“Polygamy was prevalent throughout the world – and even occurred among the nobility of Christian Europe, requiring a long campaign by the Christian church to wipe it out.”

Specialists in the field of marriage and relationship history contacted by Fact Check all had examples of relationships that did not fit Mr Abbott’s definition, but were at some time in history an accepted form of marriage.

“There are ‘solemnised relationships’ that have not exactly fit that model. Polygamy of course is the most widely understood version,” journalist and author E.J. Graff says.

Ms Graff, of Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Centre, wrote a book that dealt with the topic in 1999. The book What Is Marriage For? looks at the social history of marriage. She says there are plenty of examples of different forms of marriage, from many cultures.

“There have been ‘female husbands‘ in Africa, where a man was not available to carry on the family and a woman was designated as an honorary man, taking ‘wives’ whose children carried on the family line (but) they were not supposed to have sex with those women,” Ms Graff said.

“Among native Americans, ‘two-spirit’ people – male-bodied people who identified as women, whom we might call transgender today – could sometimes marry men.

“In these cases it’s important to remember those people weren’t ‘gay’ in the same way we think of today – the emphasis was on gender roles and the obligation to reproduce the family.”

Marriage with a ghost

Professor Coontz also has examples that differ to the idea of a union between a man and a woman.

“In Tibet and a few other cultures, marriages were solemnised between one woman and several brothers,” she said. “In China and some other parts of South-East Asia, marriages were solemnised between a man or a woman and a ghost, though the ghost had originally been of the opposite sex.

“Most societies that allowed same-sex marriage had rather informal marriage ceremonies for everyone. But in those few cultures where it did exist, same-sex marriage had the same status as heterosexual marriage.”

In his 2009 book, The Origins And Role Of Same-Sex Relations In Human History, James Neill says the current western understanding of marriage and sexuality is far removed from the historical reality.

The book outlines numerous examples of non-western cultural customs that involve ceremonies linking two people of the same sex. In 16th century Central America, Spanish forces discovered that homosexual relationships and even unions between young men were common.

It gives other examples from Central and South America, including that of the Nambikwara of Brazil, where a groom is wedded not just to a bride, but also her brother. “The ceremony that unites the two youths is more festive, and given greater notice than the heterosexual union that will later follow,” Neill wrote.

While Ms Graff does say that heterosexual marriage has dominated because of its role at the centre of reproduction, she says “there have been many different ideas about what marriage is for”.

More controversially, Yale University’s John Boswell, a historian, released a book in 1994, the same year he died, called Same-Sex Unions In Premodern Europe. The book argues that early Christianity had a form of ecclesiastical blessing for homosexual unions in medieval times. But that’s been disputed by other scholars, and Ms Graff says it was probably more likely that the blessings were actually blessings over friendships.

Writing in the Virginia Law Revue in 1993,William Eskridge, a professor of jurisprudence at Yale Law School, found “same-sex unions have been a valuable institution for most of human history and in most known cultures”. Professor Eskridge has also written a book on the subject The Case For Same-Sex Marriage, published in 1996.

Fact Check asked Professor Eskridge what he made of Mr Abbott’s comments. “That statement is untrue. I’ve documented the history of marriages and other unions recognised between two women or two men in dozens of cultures throughout the world,” he said.

The verdict

A significant body of academic work shows that marriage and “other solemnised relationships” have not always been between “a man and a woman”. Mr Abbott is incorrect.

Sources

• Tony Abbott, Lateline, October 25, 2013
• Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideaologies Of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity

• James Neill, The Origins And Role Of Same-Sex Relations In Human History
• William Eskridge, A History of Same-sex Marriage, Virginia Law Review, Vol.79, No. 7, October 1993

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-01/tony-abbott-incorrect-history-marriage/5053844