ABSTRACT
Imagine a situation in which two people live together in a joint household over a period of years, are widely acknowledged as a couple and may even refer to each other as spouses, and have children together, yet they are unable to get formally married even if they wish to. Since the law does not recognize the union as a marriage, the partners do not have the same rights as spouses; for instance, they have no right upon death or the dissolution of the union to any property they may have shared, and their children may be legally related to only one of the parents. This describes same-sex unions in most of the contemporary United States, where only a handful of states allow same-sex couples to marry or register civil unions, while the majority of states have laws that explicitly prohibit marriage between two people of the same sex. It also describes clerical unions in the middle ages. Legally invalid as marriages after the Second Lateran Council of 1139, these unions were nonetheless common throughout the middle ages. In the late middle ages, clergy living with partners were so common in some regions as to be unremarkable. The women were most often called concubines, but they could also be called hearthmates (focariae) or, by opponents of the practice, priests’ whores. Other types of unmarried couples, whether in the middle ages or today, might run into some of the same legal problems, but same-sex couples today and clerical couples in the middle ages represent two sizeable groups who were structurally excluded from marriage.
