June 7, 2006
 
COMMENTARY: ‘Pater Familias’ Bush: Father Knows Best
 
By Cicero
Special to Huntington News Network
 

Cicero

The United States has tried numerous times to legislate social norms. During early colonial times non-Protestants were fined for failures to attend a protestant church service on Sunday.
 
In the twentieth Century Congress and the state legislatures in their usual wisdom ratified an amendment to the Constitution to ban alcoholic beverages. Even up to twenty or thirty years ago states and localities still prohibited shopping on Sunday. It seems that there are always groups in this country trying to push their agendas through the use of the law.
 
Now the Imperial Bush Administration is making attempts to restrict the definition of marriage, and not even through a Constitutional amendment. Obviously, Emperor Bush does not understand or care about what marriage is from a historical perspective.
 
In ancient Rome, marriage was recognized as a sacred institution while divorce was absolutely unheard of. However, only patricians were allowed to be married (and only to patricians) in a stately and strictly speaking, the only legal form of marriage called confarreatio.
 
Meanwhile, plebeians (free non-citizens) also privately had their own form of marriage - usus, which in modern times would be similar to our common-law marriages represented by the living together of a man and a woman as husband and wife. Another form of marriage in Rome was known as coemptio, which was based on a fictitious sale by which the pater familias (head of the family, usually the father) of the woman, or her guardian if she had one, transferred her to the man in marriage.
 
Many of our political institutions today are derived from ancient Roman precedents. Under the earliest law addressing the issue of homosexuality, the Lex Scantinia, male or female homosexual unions were apparently not legislated against since consensual homosexual sex itself was not regarded as illegal.
 
Throughout many ages since then, various cultures have developed different views of what constitutes a marriage. In Western Christian societies, for example, marriage has traditionally been understood as a monogamous union between a man and a woman, while in other parts of the world polygamy has also been considered a commonly accepted form of marriage. In most cases, polygamy has taken the form of polygyny (one man having several wives) and very rarely except in a few places in Asia and Africa has polyandry (a woman having several husbands) been tolerated. The model of "one man with one woman" which is being widely practiced today was first advocated by Saint Augustine (354-439 AD) (who in his early life was far from being a Saint) with his published letter The Good of Marriage.
 
Still, all these variations combined would not have exhausted the different forms of marrital relations stemming from different forms of culture. For instance, the Nambudiri Brahmin caste in India traditionally practices henogamy, in which only the eldest son of the family is permitted to marry. Other unusual variations include marriages between a living human and a ghost (Taiwan), a living human and a recently-deceased human with whom the living is emotionally involved (France), and a human being and God (Catholic and Orthodox monasticism).
 
Moreover, the ethnic group Na in southern China’s Yunnan Province allowed sexual liaisons in the form of "visits" initiated by either men or women, who might each have two or three partners at any given time (and as many as two hundred throughout a lifetime). The absence of fathers in the Na family unit was consistent with their practice of matrilineality and matrilocality, in which siblings and their offspring lived with the maternal relatives.
 
Also in China, male love was once cultivated as part of a unique culture in the southern province of Fujian, where men would be wedded to youths in elaborate ceremonies. Typically, the marriages would last for a number of years before breaking up with the elder partner helping the younger find a (female) wife to settle down and raise a family. The Chinese government has encouraged the Na and other minority groups with peculiar marrital customs to acculturate to the monogamous norms of the rest of the nation.
 
The Kiev Art Museum in Ukraine keeps a curious icon originally from St. Catherine's monastery on Mt. Sinai in Egypt that shows two robed characters in what appears to be a normal wedding ceremony except that the "husband and wife" turned out to be St. Serge and St. Bacchus, two Roman male soldiers who became Christian martyrs . In the icon, Christ is the pronubus or best man. According to the chronicler Gerald of Wales (Geraldus Cambrensis), such homosexual unions also took place in Ireland in the late 12th and early 13th centuries.
 
A panoramic view of different cultures would indicate to us that there is more than one way that two humans can relate on a family basis, although in general, marriage has widely been considered as a relation that happens between two consenting adults of opposite sexes.
 
Apparently, the restrictions that make a marriage only valid or “legal” if between one male and one female have more of a religious basis than a human basis. Again we see Emperor Bush acting like the Pater Familias in recommending to the Congress that a Constitutional amendment be enacted to limit marriages to only those between a man and a women. While Bush as a citizen of this country certainly has the right to adhere to his Christian beliefs, so do the rest of us hold the right to our own religions – or no religions.
 
We must bear in mind that separation of Church and State is one of the basic principles set forth by our founding fathers, which basically demands that no religious beliefs be enacted in this Nation. Banning gay marriages based on religious beliefs is obviously in violation of this basic rule. A nation built on diversified systems of beliefs and cultures, we have derived our strength and power largely and fundamentally from our unrestrained freedom. It is imperative that this freedom remains intact from any manipulations.
 
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Editor’s Note: In the 1952 movie “Five Fingers,” James Mason played the valet of the British ambassador to neutral Turkey during World War II. He was a German spy who went by the code name “Cicero.” His intelligence information – including the date of D-Day – was excellent, but fortunately for the Allies, the Germans didn’t believe him, thinking him a double agent. The film was based on real events. The alternate title of the movie is “Operation Cicero.” The Roman political figure, orator and philosopher Cicero was a champion of the traditional institutions of the Roman Republic and the enemy of autocracy, including the politics of Julius Caesar and Pompey.