Who's Afraid of Polygamous Marriage - Lessons for Same-Sex Marriage Advocacy from the History of Polygamy Editors Symposium: The Meaning of Marriage 42 San Diego Law Review 2005

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42 San Diego L. Rev. 1023 (2005)
Who's Afraid of Polygamous Marriage - Lessons for Same-Sex Marriage Advocacy from the History of Polygamy

handle is hein.journals/sanlr42 and id is 1035 raw text is: Who's Afraid of Polygamous Marriage?
Lessons for Same-Sex Marriage
Advocacy from the History
of Polygamy
CHESHIRE CALHOUN*
I. INTRODUCTION
In United States history, there have been four important bars to civil
marriage. First, during the period of U.S. slavery, marriages between
slaves, though informally celebrated, were not legally recognized.' The
bar to civil marriage between slaves was part of slaves' general legal
incapacity to enter into contracts, and was not an expression of social
disapproval of slave marriages? Indeed, slaveholders sometimes promoted
informal marriage unions between slaves.3 The three other marriage
bars, however, specifically targeted relationships that were the subjects
of intense social disapproval and were treated by lawmakers as
dangerous to societal order.
Bars to marriage across racial lines-particularly between whites and
blacks, but in the West, also between whites and Asians or Native
Americans-were first erected in the eighteenth century and proliferated
* Charles A. Dana Professor of Philosophy, Colby College, Waterville, Maine.
1. Nancy F. Cott, Giving Character to Our Whole Civil Polity: Marriage and the
Public Order in the Late Nineteenth Century, in U.S. HISTORY AS WOMEN'S HISTORY:
NEW FEMINIST ESSAYS 111 (Linda K. Kerber et al. eds., 1995).
2. NANCY F. COTT, PUBLIC Vows: A HISTORY OF MARRIAGE AND THE NATION 35
(2000).
3. Cott, supra note 1, at 107, 111.

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