In nearly all early societies:
- Males dominated females.
- The mother of a child was certain.
- The father of a child was never certain.
Men usually controlled most of the property in civic society, and then these men died. Here is the fundamental question: who controlled a man’s property when he died? Which persons had the civic rights to a dead man’s property?
Apart from the mothers of his children, a man’s children were obvious candidates — but though we always know the mother, we cannot be certain about the father. Even though fathers throughout history have loved their children, and a father usually wanted his children (and their mother(s)) to inherit his property, in any society where there was ownership of property there needed to be rules of inheritance. When we read in the Old Testament that “Aleph begat Beth who begat Gimel ...” we may be talking about attribution of parentage, of resulting inheritance rights and powers, but we are not talking about genetics.
It is clear that any child’s maternity was always clear, whereas paternity is never certain. Attribution of parentage was was one reason paternity was turned into a civic relationship between a man and one or more women with civic rights and civic powers — we call modern forms of such a civic relationship “marriage”. Civic institutions of marriage were created to protect property rights. Though there those who say “Love is all you need”, biological paternity was hardly ever 100% certain and so civic paternity (established by marriage) defined inheritance. There have been so many different civic institutions we might class as marriage that it is clear that something termed “traditional” marriage cannot have a very long tradition — and contemporary proponents of traditional marriage often mean a civic institution involving one male and one female and their legitimate offspring.
Though two people in love is a nice idea, we can see that, in many societies, marriage-like civic institutions were not created for the purpose of procreation (procreation is easy) but were created for the attribution of parentage: not only was attribution of male parentage important for such things as inheritance, but also for a “father” to establish ownership of his civically-designated offspring, turning children into his property. Male (and female) parental “rights” can turn into parental dictatorship, of so many kinds (in 2014, 31 US states still do not have laws banning a rapist from having visitation rights with any child of the rape). With the death of a spouse, the civic laws concerning marriage were applied to inheritance and determined what property went to the surviving spouse and to the children of the two spouses.
Though many fathers loved those they accepted as their children, history and tradition has many examples of males manipulating their civically-designated offspring to further the father’s desire to expand his property — many wars in Europe were fought over property (lands) and succession to the ownership of those lands, and many US slave-owners fathered children with female slaves. Disputes between monarchs and putative monarchs over the control of lands were grist to many a playwright’s mill. When a man married a widow, the widow’s children became his property, and so the children’s inheritances became the basis of his claim to new properties (lands) — those new properties had been owned by the widow’s dead spouse. With the emphasis on property, succession, and inheritance in civic laws concerning marriage, it is fitting that the US Supreme Court in the case of United States v Windsor (2013) decided the inheritance of spousal property by the widow of a female spouse was unfairly taxed because the widow of a male spouse would not be taxed. The taxation of the lesbian spouse was due to the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defined marriage as being only between a man and woman. DOMA was held to be unconstitutional because it was a deprivation of the equal liberty of persons protected by the US Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.
All you need is love.
