Gay Marriage in the State of Washington


4 thoughts on “Gay Marriage in the State of Washington”

  1. A popular course was given by the Classics Department of the Univ. of Texas in Austin for many years called Roman Civilization, one part of which was the subject of Roman Marriage. One learned that there were three legal modes or customs of marriage between Roman citizens (marriage of a Roman citizen and any non-citizen was not legal or recognized; foreigners were expected to marry one another by their own customs, and no marrige between a slave-of either gender-and any free person, whether citizen or not, was valid.)The 3 citizen marriages were called \”confarreatio\”, a religious ceremony at the home with a priestess of Juno and sometimes a priest presiding, very difficult to get a divorce afterward! A second type was \”mancipium\” where the families of the bride and groom came together and the groom took the hand (manus+cipium, taking)of the bride from her father and she became his property. The father had \”emancipated\” his daughter, given up his property right to her, but the husband had also received her dowry, which he had to give back if he ever divorced her. This made marriage very much a financial arrangement, reflected in modern alimony. A third form of marriage or \”matrimonium\” was called \”usus\” or \”usage\”, and this became the most popular form in the later Roman Republic, and the easiest to get out of by divorce. No property exchanged, the wife had become an \”emancipated woman\” from her father and NOT her husband's property! All a divorce took was for the husband to say, with witnesses, \”I divorce thee\” 3 times to the wife. Once catch: Any children born of any of these marriage types became, upon divorce, the property of their father! But any dowry agreed on in this type still had to paid back upon divorce. The many poor or foreign inhabitants of Rome either married by their national customs or by just \”usus\”-living to gether, and this was the case with all the many Christians living in the empire! Dr B

  2. Henry Chadwick,the Anglican priest and Cambridge professor of history tells an amusing anecdote about early Christian marriage in his book, The Early Church pp.87-88: the Church Father, St. Hippolytus was angry at the newly elected bishop of Rome (already sometimes called \”Pope\”), who was an ex-slave,a freedman, who was also an ex-convict who had done time in the prison mines in Sardinia for embezzlement of funds from the deposits in a church bank of which he had been manager! St. Hippolytus refused to have communion with or acknowledge this Callistus (or Calixtus) as his bishop because Callistus held that it was proper to forgive the sins of those who had fallen in sin after their baptism, and also recognized the marriage of a Christian woman in his diocese with a man of \”inferior social status\” (probably an ex-slave,like Callistua himself!), a marriage not recognized in Roman Civil Law! Both men were Greek speaking, as were all the Christians still in the Roman Church at the time (217-222 AD). Rome did not start to use Latin in the liturgy until the next century! Dr.B

  3. When the famous orator and politician Cicero decided, in his middle age, to divorce his long time wife, Terentia, and marry a much younger woman,he had to repay her dowry. Since Roman women had become very independent and \”emancipated\”, this often, in practice, meant paying the money to the wife, and Cicero had to borrow a large sum of money to do that. (Cicero was as poor a money manager as he was good as a public speaker!). The young woman he now married was actually his ward, and her money he now took as her dowry. Not long after, he discovered that he was not happy or adequate to being a bridegroom at his age, and divorced his new wife and had to repay her dowry money! This double scandal caused many jokes among the Roman public. Once it was said that all this scandal would have meant the end of Cicero's political career in a conservative American setting once, but in 2012 AD Republican politics, maybe not!! Dr B

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