Two Posts on SSM For the Price of One!

Post One: An Un’civil’ View of Marriage

I was married twenty-eight years ago in a Protestant church. At the conclusion of the service, the minister cleared his throat and in an unctuous baritone declared, “By the authority vested in me by the State of Rhode Island, I declare you husband and wife.” As a born-and-bred Evangelical, I thought nothing of it at the time. It was only a decade later, as I prepared for reconciliation with the Catholic Church, that I reflected on the odd tradition of a Christian minister invoking the authority of the state to seal a union ostensibly just blessed by God.

Chalk it up to Martin Luther, who believed that marriage was strictly a temporal affair, like real estate transactions or probate: “Marriage is a civic matter. It is really not, together with all its circumstances, the business of the church,” said Luther. Under the powerful secularizing influences of the Reformation and the Enlightement, marriage gradually became largely a state institution over the next half millenia. In the 1870’s, “civil marriage” was introduced in Germany, Wales and England (where it had already been tried and abandoned by Oliver Cromwell two centuries earlier). Today, of course, every nation in the world has some form of civil marriage, and the debate over same-sex marriage is largely settled in  Europe and now, the United States.

To me, state involvement in “marriage” in any form – whether as originator, authenticator, or even as regulator – makes about as much sense as “civil baptism” or “secular Eucharist.” The Catholic Church holds matrimony to be one of the seven sacraments, and for most of the centuries during which the Church was dominant in Europe and elsewhere, marriage was only tangentially a civil matter. Couples would marry in or have their de facto marriages blessed by the Church, and inform their secular rulers only after the fact. Public laws affecting marriage were limited in scope, mostly negative in construction, and dealt mainly with who could or could not marry or how couples were to be taxed. But today, we are routinely treated to the spectacle of Catholics “defending” (heterosexual) civil marriage as … well, as “marriage,” which it is not. The problem is that when we concede the power of the state to stamp its imprimatur on what ought to be – what IS! – a Christian sacrament, we get what we deserve.

The same-sex marriage (SSM) debate has brought this weird state of affairs into stark relief. It seems to me that the way out of the predicament created by that debate (and in anticipation of inevitable future debates over group, consanguinous and other forms of “marriage”) is to end the practice of state sponsorship of something called “marriage” once and for all. No marriage licenses. No reference to “marriage” in the tax code. No special privileges for those who have taken part in a religious ceremony recognizing their mutual commitment. The role of the state is not to administer or authenticate sacraments, artificial or otherwise. It is to seal and adjudicate contracts between parties legally permitted to enter into them. If two or more people, of any gender, wish to enter into a civil contract that governs their mutual rights and responsibilities toward each other, they should be free to do so. If a religious body wishes to perform a ceremony invoking divine blessing on the mutual commitment of two people of any gender and call it “marriage,” that body should be free to do so.

Look, Catholics don’t recognize the validity of the Methodist “eucharist,” and we don’t consider Unitarian ordination to carry any sacramental weight. A confession made to a Lutheran pastor by a member of his flock may be good for the soul, but Catholics don’t believe it confers sanctifying grace, except in the most general sense. Why, then, do we grant any status to declarations or licensures of “marriage” made by the state? Proponents of SSM will charge that I’m changing the rules of the game now that they’re on the playing field, and they will be right. But I propose changing the rules for everyone, precisely in order to eliminate what I concede is unfair discrimination in the law. Any two people ought to have the right to conclude a civil contract exchanging mutual rights and responsibilities. The state has (or should have) no power to declare or infer that such contracts have a transcendent character, a significance deeper than the signatures at the bottom of the page, which it does when it uses the term “marriage.”

Post Two: Redefining Redefinition

Shortly after New York State’s legalization of SSM, I listened to a gentle debate on the subject on NPR. The spokeswoman for Marriage Equality New York insisted that SSM doesn’t “redefine” marriage at all. In fact, according to this commenter, SSM only reinforces what is essential about marriage – mutual commitment – and is therefore deeply faithful to the core definition of marriage. Well, yes, but …

If the bare-bones secular definition of “marriage” is the union of one man and one woman who are not closely related, then SSM does indeed “redefine” marriage.  This traditional definition has three critical elements: number, gender, and relation (or non-relation, as the case may be). SSM proponents have in effect said that one of those elements, gender, doesn’t and shouldn’t matter; that it is not essential to what marriage is. They have reconfigured the definition to read “the union of two people who are not closely related.” Fine. But if one element of the formula can be dismissed so easily, why not the others? Why should number be preserved, for instance? Or relation. On what basis would proponents of SSM oppose group marriage or the marriage of father and his adult son, so long as those entering into the union are mutually committed to one another?  It seems to me that by doing away with one element in the traditional formula, they have critically undermined the other two. Having accepted the logic of SSM, I don’t see how one can avoid permitting group marriage, consanguineous marriage, and other arrangements that radically redefine what marriage is.

For the sake of honest debate, I would like SSM advocates to simply admit that they are redefining  marriage, much as Naomi Wolf once conceded in a now-famous New Republic article that abortion is in fact a form of homicide. By continuing to insist on something everyone knows is false , they prevent an honest discussion among people of goodwill, and thereby play into the hands of the homophobic Christian Right.