On the gender equality issue, here I think there are sharp differences between marriage as the union of husband and wife and bans on interracial marriage (Loving v. Virginia). Marriage plays an integrative function with regard to gender: its a mixed sex institution. Moreover unlike bans on miscegenation (which were formally equal but substantively served to help keep the races separate so that one race can oppress the other), marriage not only formally, but substantively furthers gender equality, by helping reduce the likelihood that women as a class will bear the high and gendered costs of parenting alone.
The above link takes Ms. Gallagher to task for switching between two definitions of marriage: the traditional kind, which basically meant a transfer of property (the bride) between families; and the modern kind, which is, as someone else I quoted in a post below said, "about two human adults ... being joined together in equality until death, for the further well-being of them both".
But what stands out to me is the reason for her dismissal of the miscegenation analogy: "Race doesn't matter in marriage, but sex does because we only allow people of different sexes to marry."
Uh. Right.
And what about when people of different races weren't allowed to marry? Was race irrelevant then, or did it only become irrelevant in 1967?
These efforts to dismiss the precedent of anti-miscegenation laws are widespread--"race is irrelevant to marriage but sex is not". But nobody ever explains how sex is relevant, just that it is. The only way this could be true, of course, is if marriage is all about spitting out babies, which it isn't. And hasn't been for some time.
Originally marriage was all about procreation and political unions, which leads me to another quote from a different post:
Many, perhaps even most, men in earlier times avidly sought sexual pleasure prior to and outside of marriage.
Uh, yeah. It was common for men to have mistresses--even expected. The wife was for bearing your children, not for love or affection. If a man wanted love, he got a mistress; if he wanted sex, he got a whore; if he wanted children, he got a wife.
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