This week I have heard so many homemade explanations of what a marriage is and why we have them, it is not even funny. This is because of today’s scheduled up and down vote on gay marriage in the Senate.

The yes-crowd have reached new levels of ecstasy by declaring themselves the keepers of truth and everybody else to be bigoted, narrow-minded, racist, misogynist, sexist, -well you know that rant. The no-crowd on the other hand has held eloquent speeches on traditional marriage. Most of them lack any contextual knowledge of the history and function of marriage and family, but unfortunately this is not a requirement for getting exposure in mass media.

Let‘s talk about traditional marriage, because the way they use the term is, well, it is actually a fairly modern concept. A traditional marriage is not a contract between a man and a woman, it is not even a solemn pact of faithfulness or however Fred Barnes put it last night on Special Report

A traditional marriage, until fairly recent was a contract between two families. The benefits of this contract included offspring and protection of property; more specifically property in the form of worldly power and real-estate assets like farmland, grazing lands, housing and manual labor. Eligible sons and daughters did seldom have a choice, because in a feudal society they where considered to be part of the “properties” that the head of the household could dispose of to the benefit of the entire clan. This practice was kept alive in the Western parts of Europe well into the twentieth century, although the emergence of the industrial society and the nuclear family helped romantic love get a lot of headway to combat this way of thinking. This is still the rule for a large part of the world, those who where not aware of this should travel some more. It is good for your intelectual horizons

Humans are ritualistic animals and we tend to surround important transitions and commitments in our life with rituals to enforce that everybody takes the commitments seriously. It was only natural that the Christian church forced itself into this cultural tradition by claiming that a priest and two witnesses had to be present for the contracts to be valid. It was part of the church‘s survival strategy. The fact is that marriage was widely practiced for thousands of years before the emergence of Christendom

So what is the role of the government in all of this, and why do the neocons feel that they are the keepers of the one and only truth in this situation? First of all, one of the core functions of governments is to protect and enforce contracts, but that does not mean that they get to decide the content of the contract. It just means that they will be the final frontier of making sure that all parties keep up their end of the bargain

The problem for the neocons began when government decided to favor one form of family contract over others. Through tax incentives, welfare entitlements and other legal rights, the government started subsidizing the monogamous heterosexual family unit. I do not blame non heterosexual, non monogamous family units for wanting to get a piece of the cake, but I do question why we have this cake in the fist place. It is not the government‘s proper function to give preferred treatment to any kind of family contract over another. If the government did not do this, we would not have any need to limit the access to this benefit either.

I come from a very special family and I love my family dearly. For all the pain and misery we have caused each other over the years, we have given each other tenfold back in support, love, joy and nurturing. I will even go so far as to say that the pain and misery have made me appreciate all the good things even more. My best memories are of our family gatherings in our family homestead in Norway where most anybody we chose to bring where welcome.

I share the neocons lamentation over the loss of this safety network in our society today. Much of today‘s social problems have their roots in the lack of solid family structures. It is important for any human to grow up in a loving and nurturing family. But I happen to think that the heterosexual, monogamous nuclear family is ill suited for this task. I must also say shame on the liberals for trying to replace this network with a benevolent welfare state. None of them are adequate replacement for the extended family that include friends, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, cousins twice, thrice and even further removed.

If the neocons really, really like to bring the family back into the limelight again, and if they truly, truly want to prevent reckless promiscuity; they should consider giving preferential treatment to as many forms of family as possible. Or eliminate preferential treatments at all. If you think gay promiscuity is damaging to society, why not espouse gay family units? There is actually the same difference between gay moderation and gay promiscuity as there is between heterosexual moderation and heterosexual promiscuity. It is the promiscuity that we want to avoid, not one particular form or another. I would think that social networks in the form of family units are prefered regardless of the partners gender is. I might be wrong, but then the whole argument of protecting the family is bogus.

I can‘t say I agree with Hillary Clinton’s village method of raising children, although she did indeed practice what she preached by including most of the Arkansas government system in raising Chelsea at some point. I am confident that children benefit from having many different adults around them that they can trust and interact with. I am also confident that more marriages would survive if we encouraged extended families, blood relatives or not, because one person can hardly satisfy every need of another the way the mythos of romantic love claims.

It is about time that we took a broader look at how we achieve the social stability that the American welfare state has broken down with such fervor the last decades. Clinging to religious dogma that came from a clan society with extended family in a society where the extended family is a rarity will not bring it back. The question is really how we do recreate the extended family, and why we should exclude any consenting adult that are willing to participate in one, blood relative or not.