Does restoring church primacy over marriage end people's hopes for SSM?  I don't think that it does, for one very simple reason:

There are churches that allow homosexual marriage right now.  I disagree with those churches, and I think they'll answer to God for turning from the path of righteousness.  But the last time I checked, God didn't ask me to stand in judgment on those churches, and he hasn't sent me any messages lately telling me to smite them.  So they get a pass from me.

On the civil side, Amp and many others have made a compelling case that the state ought not to be in the business of telling people who they can partner up with.  It simply isn't the business of the government to set prescriptive regulation on the conduct of people's emotional lives, regardless of the morality of the choices that are being made.  Accordingly, I do not believe that the state should have the right or the power to tell two men, or two women, or multiple men and women, that they cannot form a contractual partnership toward their own ends.

The state does have the right and the power to protect the weak from the strong; that's the reason we have a state in the first place.  The state can criminalize some kinds of sex, for example - it can legitimately say "no" to people who want sex with children or other persons not capable of consent.  However, it is clear that people who want to have sex with people of the same gender - however morally wrong I find the practice - are not engaging in behavior which the state should legitimately have the power to prescribe.  No force, no fraud, no coercion - no state interest.

I visualize a future in which there are multiple kinds of partnerships.  There will be civil unions, or civil marriages, or whatever label proponents end up selecting, in which gays and lesbians, secular heterosexuals, and such ilk, gain the sanction of civil society for their relationships, so that their domestic civil right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness is no longer infringed.  The details of those relationships will have to be hammered out in the political process, and there will probably be differences from state to state.  The laboratory of democracy will discover which exact rights should be conferred on civil partnerships; as a start, I would suggest that whichever explicit rights assign to marriage should also assign to civil partnerships. 

There will also be sacramental marriages, unions formalized by the church and following its teachings and principles.  To receive a sacramental marriage, of course you must first have the approval of the church in question.  Couples forming sacramental marriages will have the option of also filing a civil union since they (presumably) will still want the recognition of rights that those unions will confer.  A few churches will allow gays and perhaps polygamists downstream to sanctify their unions, just as they do now; the vast majority will probably move even further away from allowing that.

In essence, we will be renaming the institution of secular marriage, as currently practiced, to "civil unions", and removing the religiously-based restrictions on its composition.  We will also be strengthening the notion of religiously-organized marriage as being an entity separate from what happens down at the county courthouse. 

By refocusing the civil institution on the contract aspect, and refocusing the religious institution on the spiritual aspect, we will enable people to be freer, and one hopes, happier.

This will not be a panacea.  There are religious traditionalists more severe than myself who will find the notion of any civic recognition of homosexuality incredibly repugnant.  There are gay activists more radical than the mainstream who will find the notion that groups will still be able to exclude gays and lesbians from their institution to be shockingly offensive.  Removing marriage from the civil sphere will cause some discontent to the nominally religious who still want a cathedral wedding but aren't able to get one because the churches have moved away from rubber-stamping the ceremonies of the non-observant.  All of these emotions and preferences will have to sort themselves out.

Traditionalists have recently been pointing out that marriage has changed and that's the reason that gays want in; that what marriage meant has changed radically because of changes in our laws and customs.  They're probably right.  However, dichotomizing marriage between its religious and civil aspects will free those heterosexuals who want to return to an earlier time - it's between you and your spouse and your church.  Marriage in the civil arena has become a shadow of what its fiercest proponents claim to desire; yielding the civil arena to civil principles, I believe, will allow us to strengthen the principles we wish to follow in our own life.  Oftentimes the price of our own freedom is allowing others to do what they will.

This approach does leave some gay religionists in a bind.  Gay reform Jews or UCCers or Unitarians are fine; those adhering to more stringent faith traditions are out in the cold.  It's a whole 'nother long set of posts, but basically I think gay religionists like Andrew Sullivan have to either fish or cut bait.  The Catholic Church doesn't legitimize homosexuality, it never will, it will never let Andrew get married, the end.  If he wants to be a Christian, he needs to find a Christian sect that accepts his ongoing behavior as being non-sinful.  If he wants to be a Catholic, he needs to accept Catholic teaching and deal.  It's a hard dichotomy, and not one that can really be finessed.  Gay religionists of the homosexuality-accepting sects are also going to have to deal with the fact that the other churches do not recognize their marriages as sacramentally legitimate.  That's the case now, of course, but it might rankle more in the future.

This concludes my sojourn into the SSM wilderness.  I apologize for taking 10,000 words to say "civil unions for gays and secular straights, sacramental marriages for the religious, sorry it didn't work out for Andrew".  I welcome any further comments or questions, and will gladly discuss this issue with anyone who wishes to.

Followup:  Paul Cella astutely notes a hole in my argument; he says it better than I would have, so just go read his essay.

Robert @ 17:41 | | | . | E-Mail This Post