Harry R. Jackson Jr
Months have now passed since the Islamist
terrorist organization Boko Haram sparked
international outrage by kidnapping at least
270 Nigerian school girls. In a rambling one
hour video, the group’s supposed leader
explained their actions to the world:
"I abducted your girls…I will sell them in the
market, by Allah. I will sell them off and marry
them off. There is a market for selling
humans…Women are slaves. I want to
reassure my Muslim brothers that Allah says
slaves are permitted in Islam…I will marry off
a woman at the age of 12. I will marry off a
girl at the age of nine…”
Most of the media coverage has
understandably focused on the apparent
inability of the Nigerian government to
rescue the girls, who were students at a
Western-style boarding school. But the evil
act also shined the light on two horrifying
practices: child marriage and polygamy. For
those of us who have lived our entire lives in
societies that do not tolerate such things, the
fact that they are still commonly practiced in
some parts of the world is almost
unimaginable.
In ancient times, including eras described in
the Bible, both polygamy and child marriage
were widely accepted. The practices were
largely influenced by the shorter human
lifespan (depending on one’s location, life
expectancy may have been between 20 and
40 years), as well as the high incidence of
women dying during childbirth. However, as
the centuries passed medical technology and
better nutrition extended the human life span
and made childbirth much safer. And so the
overwhelming majority of societies
(particularly those influenced by Judaism and
Christianity) outlawed marriage before
puberty and marriage to more than one wife.
Such practices remain widespread, however,
in some Muslim countries as well as the Sahel
region of Africa (the semi-arid strip just
below the Sahara), where experts estimate
half of all women live in polygamous
households. Furthermore, according to the
relief organization UNICEF, many African
countries still have shockingly high rates of
child marriage. In Niger, 75 percent of girls
are married before the age of 18. In Chad, it’s
72 percent and in Mali 71 percent, while well
over half of girls marry as children in the
Central African Republic and Mozambique.
UNICEF estimates that at least 70,000 child
brides die each year due to childbearing
complications.
Nor are such practices necessarily fading
away. This year, Kenyan President Uhuru
Kenyatta signed the Marriage Act of 2104,
which stated, “Marriage is the voluntary
union of a man and a woman whether in a
monogamous or polygamous union registered
under the Act.” The legislature removed a
clause from the bill which would have
required that the first wife approve of any
subsequent wives her husband took.
Although the debate in the United States is
currently focused on whether the institution
of marriage properly includes homosexual
relationships, the practices of polygamy and
child marriage in other parts of the world
highlight that a society’s definition of
marriage forms the foundation for its values.
Societies that accept polygamy and child
marriage dehumanize women and children.
Societies with “flexible” definitions of
marriage also have very malleable definitions
of “right” and “wrong.” As Jillian Keenan
argued last year in Slate, “The definition of
marriage is plastic. Just like heterosexual
marriage is no better or worse than
homosexual marriage, marriage between two
consenting adults is not inherently more or
less “correct” than marriage among three (or
four, or six) consenting adults.”
Some critics have scoffed at the notion that
redefining marriage will lead to polygamy in
the West, noting that places like Kenya still
carry strong legal penalties for
homosexuality. Since polygamy and child
marriage are “traditional” in some parts of
Africa, they feel they would be justifiable
under the same reasoning that we
“traditional marriage” advocates use to
defend our cause. But the wonderful thing
about denying moral relativism is that I don’t
have to pretend that all traditions are equally
valid. I can embrace the (largely Western)
tradition of marriage as the lifelong union of
one man and one woman, while rejecting the
traditions of foot binding, female genital
mutilation and polygamy.
The reason I have spent so much of my time
and energy fighting for traditional marriage
is that I know it to be the best possible way to
arrange society. For five thousand years of
human civilization, it did not provide the
only model for family structure, but it
consistently provided the best environment to
raise children as well as the most just and
humane arrangement for women, which
brings out the best in men. That may sound
to some like cultural imperialism, but I
believe if more societies defined marriage
exclusively as the union of one man and one
woman, then men, women and children
would all be better off.
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