Despite the view of the universe that Parmenides held, change is possible, and it does happen. The world is in constant flux, and the institution of marriage is no exception. I remember having a Christian as a high school teacher who said to an openly gay student in one of his classes, “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” I believe that he was quoting Jerry Falwell there, but regardless of exactly where the cute little rhyme originated, Conservatives have employed it in their campaign against gay marriage. They hold, quite literally in many cases, that marriage is ordained by God as a union between a man and a woman, not between a man and another man; they are further threatened by the possibility inherent in their slippery slope argument, by which they say that if homosexuals are allowed to marriage, then what’s to stop men from marrying beasts, or even inanimate objects?
I suspect that gays are none too pleased with being equated with farm animals, but be that as it may, the argument is sometimes taken to an even greater extreme by suggesting that marriage is a sacrament of God that is mean for procreation only, at which I wonder how that makes infertile yet straight women or straight sterile males feel, but again, be that as it may!
The truth is that marriage probably did originate as a way of ensuring, in a male-dominated society that arose after the agricultural revolution, that a man could in a sense “own” a woman and know that she was bearing his children and not some other man’s (an institutionalization of jealousy). Perhaps there were religious factors involved in this, but it likely predates Judaism and surely Christianity.
If we accept that marriage originated with God matching up Adam, a man, with Eve, a woman, then there are still a couple problems. One is that we really shouldn’t accept the myth because there is no God and the Bible is not such a “Good Book” after all. The other is that we run into the genetic fallacy. That is, just because marriage may have originated as a union exclusively between a man and a woman doesn’t mean that it has to always be between a man and a woman. Things change. Perhaps procreation really was the aim of marriage, but marriage may be something different now, with love supplanting procreation. Or maybe marriage has splintered into meaning different things to different people; for some, it may be about procreation through vaginal intercourse, while for others it may be more broadly defined as joining any two people who are in love; or maybe polygamous marriages are your thing. Marriage has to still be essentially the same thing, but it does not have to be exactly the same thing that it has always been.
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