Sorry, I keep coming back to this topic, and am still working things out, so I’m not as coherent as my incisive commentary on pension- and healthcare-related topics (ha!).
But I wrote yesterday on the traditional (= present-day Catholic, and somewhat abandoned Protestant) view on marriage: uniting a couple in a “two become one flesh” manner, permanent, and open to children. As a culture, we’ve abandoned the openness to children. The permanence has been impaired by no-fault divorce, and the “two become one flesh” is faltering, too.
My first thought is this: how far has the “non-permanence” gone? Obviously, we’ve got a high divorce rate (though it seems to be that it’s dropping, attributed to fewer people marrying in the first place), but, more than that, to what extent do couples, when marrying, even intend for the relationship to be lifelong? It may just be coincidence, but the first time I read of the “modern” vow of “as long as love shall live” was in a book writing (favorably) about gay marriage. I’ve read pundits and others suggesting that marriage be a series of short-term renewable contracts (lowering the divorce rate by redefining the term), to accommodate couples where one or both of the partners change their behavior, their religion, their outlook on life, during the marriage.
And how far as this concept of “union” disappeared? Of course, the notion that marriage is the only suitable institution for sex (thus, the literal “becoming one flesh”) has been abandoned by most in the West. And, of course, the notion that there is some deeper meaning in the sexual complementarity of a man and a woman has also been abandoned by everyone who supports gay marriage. But among gay men, there is, from what I understand, an increasingly public acknowledgement that in their view marriage is not about sex, or sexual exclusivity at all, and CNN and other media sites now also periodically report on swinging and polyamory as a perfectly legitimate way of life.
If marriage is nothing more than a legal means of becoming next of kin and being obliged (to varying degrees) to share the other’s financial obligations, is it still marriage?
If we remove laws that oblige spouses, in various ways, to share jointly in financial obligations, so that it’s purely a declaration of “next-of-kin-ness” for medical decision-making and inheritance (with state laws, employers, and others choosing to treat married couples different in other ways that are not fundamental to the meaning of marriage), is it still marriage?
When is marriage not marriage any longer?
And when do we adopt a different term entirely than the clumsy “traditional marriage” when we want to invoke notions of permanence, sexual exclusivity, and openness to children? And what is that term, anyway?
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