Wedding Vows

I want to be married. I want to make a vow. I want to go where someone else goes, to dwell where they dwell, to have my bones buried, finally, where their bones are buried. When Ruth said these words to Naomi 3,000 years ago, they meant essentially the same thing they do today, when Ruth's utterly unconventional, daring vows are used in many Jewish and Christian wedding ceremonies. Her vows were socially outrageous then not because they were made by one woman to another but because the promise was extended by a person of a relatively privileged ethnicity and nation, who proposed taking on dire poverty and stateless status to be with the other. But in fact, there's a sense in which all marriages, gay and straight, partake of this radical proposition. Marriage is about making a beloved alien one of mine, flesh of my flesh. Marriage means taking someone unrelated by blood into our family, for good.

The paradox, both for Ruth in 1000 BC and for me, a lesbian who would dearly love to get married, is that family itself is a profoundly atavistic concept. In fact, socialists and feminists through the centuries have had simply terrific reasons for wanting to get rid of it. (1) It's brutal. All over the world, families are violent and abusive--at least an extraordinary percentage of them are--and family status is used from Manhattan to Montevideo as permission for violence. (2) Throughout history, family has been the linchpin of a pervasive social view that encourages favoring one's own bloodline, tribe, race and nation above all others. There's clearly something muddle-headed about apportioning rights, wealth and the promise of care for children, sick people and elders based on shared genetic heritage alone. (3) Family, even today, tethers women to childcare, and in some places to sexual slavery.

Family sucks, in loads of ways. No question. But fortunately or unfortunately, we have never found anything to take its place. Nothing has ever been tried as an alternative that has caused less misery than the family. Many of the alternatives--for raising children at least--seem to have caused substantially more. (Consider the history of most orphanages, institutions for physically or mentally disabled children and group homes for New Jersey foster care or Cultural Revolution-transplanted children in China.) We seem to be stuck with the family, at least for a long while. And granted this, I want to invite somebody I love into mine.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.