The tide is turning here in the U.S., but there's plenty of resistance to it. DOMA and Prop 8 were overturned by the Supreme Court, but the vote was 5-4. In most states where marriage equality has passed there are protesters outside arguing that I am an abomination. In no state so far has marriage equality passed as a landslide -- it's always very close and the conversations are heated and passionate in both directions. When I step back from the personal implications of the situation I can see a much bigger historical picture, and it occurs to me that railing against Putin and Russians for being against gays is like getting upset about bathroom fixtures of a house when the foundation still hasn't been built. Don't get me wrong -- my right to marry isn't an unimportant thing to me, and I'm sure some of you appreciate the critical importance of functional yet aesthetically pleasing bathroom fixtures, so I am not trivializing this aspect of social evolution. But for now let's start at the foundation and look at the institution of marriage through the ages...
Things used to be so different. No one married who they wanted to, and marriage was never about love. It was an economic necessity that protected members of both sides of the family. So the parents of a boy (or sometimes a grown man representing himself) would meet with the parents of a girl and decide if the union between the two would be in everyone's best interest. Would the man be able to support his wife and children? Would the woman be able to make a good home and eventually care for the elders of her husband's family? Everyone hoped they had sons, because it was his wife who would care for the elders when they grew weak. Our early teen religious rituals like Confirmation and Bar Mitzvah are wonderful celebrations for our 13-14 year-old children. But they used to mark one's entry into adulthood. If a girl was old enough to have a period she was old enough to bear children, and at that point she was an adult. There was no dependable birth control, so from her early teens until menopause (or more likely death) the wife would probably be pregnant. Life expectancy was between 20-30 years old (which is why death was more likely than menopause). The thought of a woman leaving the home to pursue a career never entered anyone's mind because it was a physiological impossibility for most women, who were pregnant their entire adult lives. The entire culture was built upon men earning money and women caring for the home and offspring. This led to a clear distinction between the Public Sphere, where the men could exist and do business, and the private sphere, which was the realm of women.
This division between Public Sphere and Private Sphere has lasted for 10,000 years, and it had some obvious but unintentional consequences. If a man was abusive to his wife she couldn't leave, because she was completely dependent on him to provide money for food and shelter for herself and their children. A man, therefore, could be unfaithful to his wife, pursuing a relationship with the woman he actually loved, but a woman was never able to be unfaithful to her husband with the man she actually loved and who may have loved her back. ...at least not that anyone could ever know about...
We can look at a famous Bible story that reveals a lot about marriage, and it makes sense to look to the Bible because this is where so much of the argument against marriage equality comes from. Jacob fell head-over-heels in love with Rachel the first time he saw her, and immediately asked her father's permission to marry her. Rachel's father Laban agreed, but only if Jacob provided seven years of hard labor on the family property. Jacob agreed to the terms and worked 7 long years. Then he married Laban's daughter, only realizing the next day that it was Leah he had married. Rachel's older sister Leah hadn't been married in those seven years, so Laban needed to marry her off. It was an economic necessity and she was older, so Jacob got the wife he earned, but not the one he wanted. Laban told him if he still wanted to marry Rachel he could work another 7 years. So one week after marrying Leah, Jacob married Leah's sister Rachel, and then worked another 7 years after that marriage. But he never loved Leah, so it is said God comforted her by making her fertile and Rachel barren. What would it be like to live in a marriage where you knew you were reviled? What would it be like to see your husband fawning over your younger sister all the time? And what would it be like to see him giving Rachel's son Joseph far more love and attention than he showed to the other 10 sons he had (with Leah and two servants)? There are few stories in the Bible about true love, because love wasn't the point of marriage in those times. To use the Bible to defend "marriage between one man and one woman" is a farce, because modern marriage isn't the same as ancient marriage. David had dozens of wives, but he only really loved one in a "true love" kind of way. He sent Bathsheba's husband to the front lines of battle to be killed so he could then have her as his wife. David's son Solomon had hundreds of wives and hundreds of concubines. Abraham had a son Ishmael with his wife's servant Hagar so his line wouldn't die out. Judah ordered his second son to marry his deceased oldest son's widow, but later Judah had sex with her when he mistook her for a temple prostitute. (Having sex with a temple prostitute would have been completely acceptable if it weren't his daughter-in-law.)... I'll stop there, but I could go on and on because this is what marriage in the Bible really looks like.
Fast-forward several centuries... Or no... several decades... or wait... in some parts of the world it's still completely like this! Most underdeveloped countries, for example, still have arranged marriages. Russia is considered a modern country, but it's nearly twice the size of the United States with half the population, many ethnic groups spread over vast regions, and it has gone through multiple oppressive regimes before arriving at today's autocracy. This has influenced their social evolution a great deal.
Let's look at our social transformation. In 21st Century America we are slowly coming to realize that being gay isn't something that a man does behind his wife's back. It's part of who he is. But there are still many in our 21st Century American society who still see being gay as a behavior instead of as a character trait, and they consider this behavior to be an abomination. When they talk about rehabilitating the homosexual to become straight we're not even speaking the same language. How can a person stop being gay -- in the U.S. or in Russia? If it's a character trait, the way I see it, they can't. That would be like asking a white person to stop being white, or a curly-haired person to stop having curly hair. But if it's a behavior, they simply need to marry and/or have sex with someone of the opposite sex and the problem solved! In societies with arranged marriage, everyone is being forced to marry and have sex with people they don't love, while denying themselves the life they wish they could have with whom they love. In this context it is no more of a hardship for a gay person than a straight one. Everyone is equally miserable in their arranged marriages, gazing across rooms at the person they truly love but won't get to go home with. But today, in our society, we mostly agree that marriage is a choice two people make together and is borne out of love. And if you can marry the person you love, then I'd like to marry who I love as well. And more of us than ever are realizing that if I marry a man it won't make me any less of a lesbian.
What happened to create this dramatic shift in American culture? I think a LOT of things have led to this shift, but I'd guess that first it was the widespread access to effective contraception. In 1916, right here in the United States, a woman named Margaret Sanger was jailed for 30 days just for distributing information on birth control! It wasn't until 1938 that the Supreme Court reversed the Comstock Laws and allowed people to discuss and use birth control without fear of incarceration. If a couple has the ability to determine when to have children and how many to have, this doesn't lock a woman into the endless cycle of birthing children year after year. She looks outside the house and wonders what else might be possible.
So if straight people can marry for love, why can't I?
From a historical perspective this is a VERY recent and radical step in this social metamorphosis.
Could we have gotten to this step without all the others that preceded it?
And where is Russia in terms of these steps?
The 20th Century saw a huge improvement in life for Americans. Two world wars overseas fueled our economy and improved our quality of life (life expectancy, availability of technology that improved health, improved infrastructure,...) without devastating our land and civilian population. Civil Rights movements illustrated the need for equality across race and gender. Widespread protests on college campuses and at political conventions led the American people to realize their power to influence legislation on Domestic and Foreign policy in this democracy.
The experience for Russia in the 20th century was the exact opposite. Russia lost more citizens in World War I and World War II than virtually all other countries combined. And that doesn't even include the Civil War that led to the rise of the Soviet Union. In fact, Russia lost more civilians than most other countries lost soldiers. Surrounding World War II Stalin's system of work camps in his Gulag incarcerated and caused the deaths of over 23 million people -- over twice the number lost in Hitler's Holocaust. Reasons for incarceration included "Marriage to a Spaniard" and other things Stalin couldn't bear. While Americans were finding their voices and power in a democracy, the people of the Soviet Union were learning that there is no use in protesting -- because those who speak up disappear, and they are probably being worked or tortured to death. What if Rosa Parks was arrested for not surrendering her seat, and then she was sent off to Alaska to be worked to death in a camp while our media painted her out to be an enemy of the state? Where would our country be in terms of racial segregation if that had been the outcome of her protest? Our country was embroiled in Civil Rights marches and Voting Rights marches at the same time as the Berlin Wall was going up. In the 1990s the post-Soviet era saw Democracy finally come to Russia under President Yeltsin, and regrettably the results were a disaster. Economic hardship hit the people hard, and the combination of Russian Mafia-type gangs and political corruption led Russia right back to the autocracy under Putin today.
Russians have a long history of learning that they are powerless against the government. As long as Russia is living in an autocracy where they aren't allowed to control much of what happens in the policies of their government, how likely is it that they will spring to defend the rights of LGBT people in their culture who are being persecuted? Will they even know if gays are being persecuted if Putin controls the media? If Putin uses the media to tell everyone that gays are pedophiles, how will the people be persuaded to fight for those they discover are gay? Why would anyone come forward in such an environment? Should we be protesting the anti-gay laws, or should we be protesting the non-Democratic culture that perpetuates it? Maybe we should fight for freedom of the press there? Should we be fighting for a woman's reproductive control and access to birth control and gainful employment? Should we be fighting for gender equality?
Shouldn't we address the foundation, walls and roof before arguing about the bathroom fixtures?
