Gay Marriage 1 What Is Marriage For? W hen I was six years old, I went with my family from Phoenix, where I was born and raised, to visit New York. I remember only a little about that trip, apart from a visit to the Statue of Liberty, but seeing Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway remains vivid. It was my first play and a great play to boot, and Tevye''s dream frightened me half to death, but another, more tender scene also stayed with me. Tevye is a poor milkman in a Jewish shtetl (village) in czarist Russia. Life there is hardscrabble and traditional, and he is at first scandalized and then grudgingly helpful when his children break with custom by rejecting arranged marriages and insisting on marrying for love. Shaken, Tevye one day asks his wife, Golde: "Do you love me?" The question strikes Golde as bizarre. "Do I what? " she sings. "Go inside, go lie down.

Maybe it''s indigestion." Tevye is undeterred and presses the question. "You''re a fool!" his wife replies. "But do you love me?" "After twenty-five years," she grumbles, "why talk about love right now?" Still he insists: "Do you love me?" "I''m your wife." For Golde this is the answer. Or as much of an answer as she needs. She has done her job as a spouse; why would he want more? But Tevye sings on: "But do you love me?" "Do I love him?" And now, at last, she gives her answer: For twenty-five years I''ve lived with him, Fought with him, starved with him, Twenty-five years my bed is his. If that''s not love, what is? "Then you love me!" says Tevye.

"I suppose I do." "And I suppose I love you, too." The 1960s were the dawn of the era of love. Love was in the air, love was all around, all we needed was love, what the world needed now was love sweet love, love would keep us together, we should make love not war, we emblazoned LOVE on postage stamps and honored it with statues in public squares. Probably not coincidentally, it was also the age when the American divorce rate soared, to levels never before seen. Love was up, marriage was down. If the light of love dimmed in your marriage, or if it shined in new directions, then follow your heart. You and your partner and your children and everyone would be happier.

That was the air I breathed as I grew up, and yet even a six-year-old was capable of recognizing, in Do You Love Me ?, a different and in some respects wiser view of love. Later on in my life, some years after my parents divorced (when I was twelve), it occurred to me to wonder: Did Tevye and Golde know something that many of us might have forgotten?     W hat is marriage for? That ought to be the easiest question in the world to answer. So many people get married, so much culturalexperience has accumulated, and so many novels and dramas and counselors and manuals and "Dear Abby" columns crowd the world. Yet, until recently, when the gay-marriage debate forced the issue, hardly anyone gave much thought to the question. Such answers as were given were shallow or incoherent, especially at first. Gay activists said: Marriage is for love and we love each other, therefore we should be able to marry. Traditionalists said: Marriage is for procreation, and homosexuals do not procreate, therefore you should not be able to marry. That pretty well covered the spectrum.

Secular thinking on the matter has been shockingly sketchy. In its religious dress, marriage has a straightforward justification. It is as it is because that is how God wants it. As the Vatican said in 2003, "Marriage is not just any relationship between human beings. It was established by the Creator with its own nature, essential properties and purpose." Depending on the religion, God has various things to say about the nature and purpose of marriage. Modern marriage is, of course, based on traditions which religion helped to codify and enforce. But religious doctrine has no special standing in the world of secular law and policy, although it certainly holds and deserves influence.

Moreover, a lot of what various religions say about marriage is inconsistent with or downright opposed to the consensus view of marriage today. The biblical patriarchs were polygamous and effectively owned their wives; in any number of religious traditions today, equality within marriage remains anathema. The law allows routine divorce and remarriage, something Jesus unequivocally condemned. If we want to know what marriage is for in modern America, we need a sensible secular doctrine. You could try the dictionary. If you did, you might find something like: " marriage (n). The formal union of a man and woman, typically recognized by law, by which they become husband and wife" (Oxford American College Dictionary ). Not much help there.

Or: " marriage (n). The state of being married; a legal contract,entered into by a man and a woman, to live together as husband and wife" ( Funk & Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary ). Maybe your dictionary does better. You could turn to the statute books. Law is, after all, dense with legal prerogatives enjoyed by married couples and dense with cases (often divorces) allocating assets and resolving conflicts. But you will find surprisingly little about what marriage is for and what must or must not, or should or should not, go on within it. Instead, you will find definitions like the one a Washington State court provided in a 1974 case in which two men tried to get a marriage license. Marriage, said the court, is defined as "the legal union of one man and one woman.

" The case revealed marriage, writes the philosopher Richard Mohr, "at least as legally understood, to be nothing but an empty space, delimited only by what it excludes--gay couples." One way to get a handle on what marriage is for would be to ask what married people must do. Or, at a bare minimum, what it is they must not do in order to remain married. Here, astonishingly, the answer turns out to be, more or less: nothing. Nearly all civic institutions require you to do or not do at least something. If you want to be a voter, you need to register, re-register when you move, go to the polls, prove your identity, and vote in a specified manner. In many places, if you are convicted of a felony, you lose your vote. If you want to own property, you have to buy it legally (often a complicated process) and pay applicable taxes, or it will cease to be yours.

If you want to be a driver, you must prove you can drive safely and see adequately; if you disobey the rules or lose your sight, your license may be revoked. By contrast, few if any behaviors automatically end a marriage. If a man beats his wife--about the worst thing he can do to her--he may be convicted of assault, but the marriage is not automatically dissolved. Couples can be adulterous (or "open") yet still be married, as long as that is what they choose to be. They can be celibate, too; consummationis not required. They can live together or apart, in the same house or in different countries: there is no residency or cohabitation requirement. There is no upper age limit. Spouses need not know each other or even meet before receiving a marriage license.

They need not regularly see each other; a prisoner of war or a sailor or an adventurer can be separated from his wife for years and be no less married. They can have children or not. Not only can felons marry, they can do so on their way to the electric chair. Secular law nowadays makes all sorts of provisions for people who are married, but it sets only a few rules for people who want to get married. Marriage happens only with the consent of the parties. The parties are not children. The number of parties is two. The parties are not closely related.

One is a man and the other is a woman. Within those rules, a marriage is whatever the spouses agree it is. So the laws say almost nothing about what marriage is for: just who can be married. All in all, it is an impressive and also rather astonishing victory for modern individualism that so important an institution should be bereft of any formal social instruction as to what should go on inside it.     W hat is marriage for? If the dictionaries and the law are of little help, perhaps we can find clues by asking: What was marriage for? A backward glance, however, sheds less light than one might hope. Mostly what it establishes is that, in the past century and more, marriage has changed nearly beyond recognition. Most cultures, throughout history, have been polygamous. One man marries several women, at least in society''s upper echelons.

(The converse, one woman marrying several men, is rare, almost unheard of.) Polygamy was largely about hierarchy: it helped men to dominate women, and it helped high-status men, with theirmultiplicity of highly desirable wives, dominate low-status men. The higher a man''s status, the more wives he typically had. Among human societies, as among animals, it is monogamy that is the rarity. "A huge majority--980 of the 1,154 past or present societies for which anthropologists have data--have permitted a man to have more than one wife," says Robert Wright in The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (1994). "And that number includes most of the world''s hunter-gatherer societies, societies that are the closest thing we have to a living example of the context of human evolution." The imposition of monogamy was an important step toward the development of modern liberalism, a point I will c.