Deepak Lal: Marriage and union

By making love the basis of marriage, the resistance to 'animal passions' is somewhat wearing off in western societies.

At a recent Christmas party in London I sat next to a distinguished medical practitioner. She told me she was looking forward to spending Christmas with her grandchild and her lesbian mothers. The child had been fathered by IVF from the sperm of a doctor friend who was also gay and in a civil partnership with another man. Meanwhile, the newspapers report the first divorce in the recently legalised civil partnerships for homosexuals. They also report the case of two spinster sisters who have taken the British government to the European Court of Justice for discrimination. They argue that they will be subject to swingeing inheritance taxes to be paid by the surviving sister on the death of the other, leading to the forced sale of the house both have lived in together since childhood. If they had been lesbians, they argue, they could have entered into a civil partnership, which would have allowed the surviving sister to inherit the house without tax""as is allowed by law in the UK for both heterosexual and homosexual couples. Being spinsters dependent on each other and jointly owning the house they are not allowed to avail themselves of this tax concession.

In the US there is a case, currently in progress, in which a Mormon with a large number of wives has been charged with polygamy. His lawyers have argued that as homosexuality is now legal, and gays can have civil partnerships, why is it legal for little Elizabeth to have two Mummies but not two Mummies and a Daddy. No doubt there will soon be someone arguing for the legalisation of polyandry on the grounds that if little Johnny can legally have two gay fathers why not two fathers and a mother. Clearly something novel and confusing is happening in the domestic domain of sex and marriage in these Christian societies. This column briefly explores this emerging trend in what I call the "cosmological beliefs" of the West (see my Unintended Consequences).

The two major Christian churches""the Catholic and Anglican""are being tormented by these questions of sex and marriage. The Catholic Church is still recovering from the damage to its finances and reputation caused by the numerous cases of paedophilia committed by its purportedly celibate priests. The Anglican Church is close to schism, with its US branch's consecration of a gay bishop. Some US Episcopilian dioceses have now opted to accept the authority of the staunchly anti-gay Archbishop of Nigeria instead of the seemingly wobbly Archbishop of Canterbury. The thriving Evangelical branch, committed to traditional mores, has threatened to cut off funding to the mainstream Anglican Church""which could be its death knell. Meanwhile, a recent UK survey found that married women are outnumbered by single, divorced and widowed women. Many couples co-habit without marrying. In Catholic Europe there is an acute shortage of priests""required to be celibate. There were no new priests in Dublin in 2005, for the first time since the archdiocese was created in 1152.

The roots of this crisis of the domestic domain in the established Churches go back to the time when Christianity was just one of many messianic cults seeking to convert the pagans of classical antiquity. In the pagan world, as the classical historian Robin Lane Fox vividly illustrates (in his Pagan and Christians), "accepted sexual practice...had a range and variety it has never attained since". In Egypt and the Near East, brothers married sisters. Bisexuality was taken for granted in many regions. Though marriages were arranged, extra- and pre-marital sex was tolerated. Widows were encouraged to remarry. Marriage was only one form of cohabitation, valued because it legitimised children and the transmission of property. "The practice of 'living together' had been greatly expanded by aspects of Roman law". Many men lived with a wife and a concubine at the same time. Divorce was essentially a matter of consent. Abortion was widely practised. But this varied tapestry of sexual practices did not mean that "pagans lived in unfettered sexuality". The sexual variety in the pagan world "did not amount to shamelessness or lack of restraint". Often these practices in the domestic domain were part of "heirship strategies" to pass on property to male heirs when, in the natural course, 20 per cent of parents will not have boys and 20 per cent will be infertile.

By contrast, "from its very beginning Christianity has considered an orderly sex life to be a clear second best to no sex life at all. It has been the protector of an endangered Western species: people who remain virgins from birth to death". With St. Augustine's formulation of the notion of "original sin", sexual desire and its fulfilment were seen as contaminating. Marriage is only tolerable in view of procreation. This austere asexual Christian doctrine was furthered by the fierce guilt culture, created from the 6th century, to counter the "animal passions" that the Church's promotion of love marriages had unleashed (see my Unintended Consequences).But, when""with the Darwinian and Freudian Revolutions""the West increasingly forsook both its God and Guilt, the reversal to the pagan sexual practices of the past was inevitable. However, unlike other Eurasian civilisations, its marriages are still based on that volatile and ephemeral emotion""Love.

By contrast, another Semitic religion""Islam""though sharing the common story of the Fall with the Christians, avoided a guilt-based society trying to expiate original sin. For in the Koranic version after eating the forbidden fruit, "Adam and Eve discover their nakedness""to find in sexual activity a pleasurable compensation for their banishment" (Ruthven: Islam and the World). Thus, Islam remained close to the common Eurasian pattern of sex and marriage. The West, having opened the Pandora's Box of Love as the basis for its marriages, now finds that with the erosion of its guilt culture, the reversion of its denizens to pagan sexual practices is no longer constrained by traditional marital institutions""which still survive in the other Eurasian civilisations.