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When asked about her husband's reputation for "womanizing," the painter, Freida Kahlo responded, "Does a riverbank suffer for letting the river run?"
It is now well known that both Freida and Diego had lovers outside of their marriage. It was a challenge to their union, but the pair remained faithful to each other, in their own way, until the end.
While married to Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf was involved for many years with the writer Vita Sackville-West. In Orlando--the novel often regarded as Woolf's love letter to Vita-- Woolf wrote, “She was married, true; but if one’s husband was always sailing around Cape Horn, was it a marriage? If one liked him, was it a marriage? If one liked other people, was it a marriage?…She had her doubts.”
With the California Supreme Court's refusal yesterday to delay its decision on same-sex marriage, the very definition of "marriage," is again in doubt. Opponents to same-sex marriage-- or even the recognition of it--those who narrowly define marriage as, "one man, one woman," are ignorant of their history. Same-sex marriage, one of marriage's many forms, is actually an ancient practice-- legal in Rome, for example, until Christian emperors made it illegal in 342. Same-sex "marriage," was also honored in ancient Greece. Greek mythology--a reflection of their cultural values-- is replete with examples of same-sex bonds: Achilles and Patroclus, Zeus and Ganymede, Apollo and Hyacinth, Narcissus and Ameinias. And then, of course, there is Plato's Symposium, and Sappho's poetry. Ancient cultures have long honored the berdache or those with "two spirits."
I have already sited the Biblical examples of David and Jonathan and Ruth and Naomi.
Marriage has always taken many forms: monogamous, polygamous, polyandrous, polyamorous, heterosexual and homosexual. Ancient cultures recognized and respected this.
Currently, only 5 countries offer marriage to same-sex couples: The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, and South Africa, in spite of findings from the American Anthropological Association that found, "The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies." We are more behind the times than we think. http://rayrandomly.blogspot.com/
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