Despite the yawning divide between the supporters and opponents of gay marriage, there may be common ground here. Consider this: Doesn’t the U.S. Constitution separate church and state? In most ancient societies, it appears that the institution of marriage was conceived by religious communities, not the state. Even the ancient Code of Hammurabi suggests this. For the western world, it is Genesis (not the Magna Carta) that first declared that for this cause a man “shall leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”
The state’s interest in marriage derives from marriage’s obvious benefits to the broader society. Marriage creates more stable relationships and families, more financial security and a better environment for the rearing of children. All of these are desirable things in which the state has a legitimate interest. Thus, married couples must enter into a binding civil contract that can only be dissolved by order of the court. But again, these are merely civil concerns. They do not go to the heart of whether or not a marriage exists in the truest (i.e. religious) sense of the word. Even today, some religious communities such as Orthodox Jews require a religious document called a “get” in order to dissolve a marriage. A civil divorce, albeit legally required, is insufficient and will not enable the couple to remarry within traditional Jewish law.
Given the state’s legitimate, though limited, interest here, shouldn’t all couples ”” be they gay or straight ”” be given the same civil contract with all the attendant legal rights and obligations? After all, legally committed couples provide the same financial and familial stability, be they gay or straight. In short, everyone who wishes to marry could be given a civil union agreement from the state. Whether a couple goes on to have a wedding ceremony would be up to them and their church. But the thing that would be enforced (or dissolved) by the state would be the civil agreement.
Theologically, this puts marriage back where it belongs. Constitutionally, it protects churches from having the government dictate to them which relationships they should or should not sanction. Finally, this sort of arrangement would be much easier to handle administratively, as couples could simply go to the County Clerk’s office and sign their civil union agreements in a matter of minutes. Current practice strains the patience of the parties and blurs the church-state line. Couples must purchase their marriage license, take it to a minister, rabbi or other official recognized by the state who must then perform their ceremony, fill out the license and return it to the courthouse for filing.
After all, legally committed couples provide the same financial and familial stability, be they gay or straight.
There is no evidence that they produce healthy children. The simple fact that they can’t produce children at all ought to be a giveaway. Children must be brought in from other relationship, which necessitate broken homes, something we know produces unhealthy children, or they must be produced through artificial semination, which has a host of other ethical problems involved. Plus, in gay couples there are not both male and female role models presnt to guide the child in understand how to relate to himself or herself and to the opposite sex. How are boys going to understnad what it is to be a man and how to relate to women if he’s raised by lesbians, who I have always noted through personal experience to be rather ambivalent toward masculinity? And vice versa, and every other combination. Does this author think our emotional and sexual development is purely a matter of instinct, that it doesn’t matter how we are raised? Anyone who thinks that has never studied human psychology.
No, the US Constitution says nothing about the separation between Church and State.
This is about immoral behavior that is identified as sin and harmful to our relationship with God and each other.
And once again marriage is more that a life enhancing, mutual, and monogamous relationship.
The mantra, i.e. talking points, of the EC continue to be the new gospel of TEC.
I wonder if anyone has asked Mr. Obama whether his forceful comments about the significant damage done to children by the lack of a father in black homes … also applies to lesbian homes.
More to the point, this chap’s position is merely a silly stalking-horse for same-sex ‘marriage.’ There is nothing now preventing a couple from obtaining civil marriage plus or minus any subsequent religious service. Pastors function as a proxy for civil authorities in that the religious marriage is acknowledged to have simultaneous civil validity.
We don’t compromise because we understand that compromise is only temporary for the left until we are worn down enough by the compromise to go further where the left wants us to go. See California’s State Supreme Court’s recent ruling. There is absolutely no reason to compromise with them. We understand how they work now. No hard feelings.
Fortunately, we can just look to Northern Europe. Those countries’ fertility rates that they apparently are past the point of no return (if it falls to somewhere below 1.2). State collective suicide.
The very fact that GLBT persons and their advocates spend so much time telling everyone how perfectly normal they are, seems to speak to a deep, unsettling feeling within them that are not perfectly normal and are not living in harmony with God’s purpose for their lives.
I believe the author is right. We should let the state
handle civil unions and the churches handle marriages. I think this might make those entering
marriage more aware that the civil courts can dissolve a civil union, but only God, thru the church, can dissolve a marriage. It has been handle that way in many european contries for decades, if not centuries. I remember Princess Grace and Prince Rainier going thru the civil registration the day before their marriage in the Catholic Church. (I was a young girl at the time and the fairytale story was important to me then.)
#1 – there are a diversity of parenting styles even among gay people. I admit, I’m amused that Chris thinks that straight people do a much better job – or even single mothers – than a couple who is intentional about caring for a child.
You say that kids who come from a broken home are most likely damaged anyway. Then how would one study that one’s adoptive parents do any damage?
A proper position would be one of agnosticism. I’m not sure what criteria there are for psychologically healthy children (and it seems that rich straight couples aren’t doing a very good job themselves). Dan Savage, the columnist, has an interesting reflection on how his adopted son didn’t think his parents should get married, and that marriage was strictly between men and women.
it seems that rich straight couples aren’t doing a very good job themselves
Why add the “rich” qualifier? Is it perhaps that it is their wealth that is the problem? How are poor straight couples or middle income straight couples faring? But why am I even arguing logic?
Exactly how many times is this going to be trotted out as some ground breaking solution?
Besides being wrong on it face by equating marriage and other “unions” we already know how well this works from Europe. Which is not at all.
Diminish marriage civilly and it goes away, plain and simple. All this for a few thousand gay couples. Marriage isn’t a right, never has been and never will be, so we are having the wrong conversation to begin with. The question is whether there is a cost/benefit ratio to the state for investing in gay couples anywhere even approaching that of regular couples. We already know the answer to that and it’s no. We don’t buy average tanks when the best are available just so every supplier feels good. The government isn’t about validation, find it elsewhere.
Object all you want, but you can’t stop this social change from happening, and the reason is simple: It’s not for *you* to say who gets married. Holding a referendum on this topic is absurd (since it’s none of your business), and more straight folks are coming to that conclusion. Check out the polls in California.
I remember my grandfather complaining that the end of miscegenation laws would mean that the “races would mix” and that “society” (whatever is meant by that term) would suffer as a result of keeping the racial lines “pure.” Funny how some things don’t change . . .
Oops, make that “not keeping” in the previous post.
Rocks – correlation does not mean causality. “”Gay people are getting married. Thus, straight people won’t.” Because…. why?
Although plenty of people get married for reasons that are spiritual and romantic, for most of human history people got married to better accumulate resources. Marriage is fundamentally – across cultures – about the household economy. That’s why it is important: it is the cheapest form of social welfare.
As economies allow individuals to live within the web of cooperation called the free market, without the bonds of marriage, marriage becomes an option. If the state takes care of children and women, there is less incentive for them to deal with men. Europe is wealthy.
Chris, forgive me if I have ever been insulting to you. God bless you. I note that you didn’t challenge the more central part of the argument. That’s fine.
Given the variety of child-rearing by straight people, I’m unsure if judging gay parents indicates much qualitative difference. I’m willing to examine the evidence of course. You might be correct, but I just wonder how the science would be done. I don’t share your gut antipathy towards gay people, so perhaps I’m more indifferent about it.
It’s not for *you* to say who gets married.
plinx, uhmm. that’s exactly what marrige is. It is a social arrangement between two people which society recognizes. And that’s exactly what homosexuals are asking for. They want society to recognize their relationships.
That makes it our business.
Two guys or gals want to live together and do whatever. That’s one thing. Asking society to call it a marriage and give it the status and protection that goes with that. That’s entirely different.
John, why? Because the statistics from Europe say so. This has been done. We have the stats, over a decades worth. Gays get “unioned” to the tune of 10% or less. Ridiculously small numbers, in the hundreds in some countries and it drops every year. In the mean time marriages of men and women have dropped drastically with most preferring civil partnerships to marriage as it’s much more easier to dissolve than marriage and carries no stigma. With the result that now these countries have out of wedlock or out of partnership birth rates rivaling American slums.
The problem is not gay “marriage” itself but the idea than you can redefine marriage at all. It becomes nothing if it has no consistent meaning.
Plinx you are kidding right? You don’t establish a “right” by saying it over and over. More people are coming to that conclusion. The trend in the US isn’t and hasn’t been in favor of redefining marriage.
California will uphold that trend. Not only is in not absurd to Hold a referendum it’s how this country was founded to begin with.
As to “miscegenation laws’ the only funny is how proponents of gay “marriage” will conflate any issue to attempt to hide the fact that people don’t want marriage redefined and gays don’t really want to get married anyway.
No I’m not kidding. You don’t (and won’t) get to deny me marriage. When the ballot initiative fails in California (and it will), it will be the end of this silly argument. Get ready: you’re about to be lose.
Sigh, forget that “be” in the last sentence.
The “more central” part of your artgument, John? How on earth am I to know what that is if you don’t identify it? I am left to deal with the point that occurs to me the most salient.
You claimed that agnosticism was the best position. This is but an idealogical stance resting on an assumtion that there isn’t sufficient evidence to come to a reasoned conclusion. Are you ignorant or simply apathetic of the numerous studies of the effects on child devolpment of the breakdown of the traditional family and the consequence of the absense of fathers?
But your choice of agnoticism is even mor eabsurd. Since human beings are by nature heterosuxual as a species, that is, we are propogated by the sexual intercourse of male and female, it seems the height of irrationality not to assume that such heterosexual pairing was the best natural method, and more than marginally superior to other forms. This is not just unChristian reasoning. It is unnatural reasoning.
So much modern thinking on this has been dominated by ideologies which deny the soul, or its importance, or which assume a complete independence of the soul from the body. The latter is classic gnosticism and leads to the thinking that it doesn’t matter what we do in and to the flesh. Well, that’s false as regards the human individual and false as regards human society on the most basic level.
plinx, no one is denying you anything. You can marry anyone you want of the opposite sex, always could. That’s what marriage is.
The question is do people get to decide what marriage IS as individuals.
The answer to that is clear, no.
I wouldn’t put too much faith in one Field Poll of 672 people either, it’s a long way to November.
Rocks – I’m really unclear what your argument is. Help me understand.
Is it: gay people want to marry. If we do this, marriage as an institution dissolves and becomes incomprehensible. For example, look at Europe. Gay people can get married, and now straight people aren’t. Besides, most gay people don’t get married anyway, so it shows they aren’t really interested in marriage.
I’m having a bit of trouble following this.
It seems that most straight people in Europe are deciding not to get married for reasons that have nothing to do with gay people. Do straight people consult with gay people? “Hey, you gay person. Are you getting married? No? OK – I guess I won’t either.”
It seems that if a small percentage of gay people take marriage seriously enough to want the institution (and look, lots of gay people say that marriage is oppressive and irrelevant), I’m not sure why we should deny it to them.
John Wilkins,
Why are you wasting your breath arguing your obvious point? Marriage rates in Western Europe have been on the decline for some time, but the anti-SSM crowd uses the recent introduction of legal SSM as “proof” that the latter phenomena causes the prior. It’s idiotic, but it’s the best they can do. Many of them pray for a meteor to strike Mass. or San Fran as evidence of God’s displeasure with gay marriage, but it ain’t gonna happen. They’re spitting in the Wind (please note the capital W).
Same-sex marriage is a social issue that goes far beyond what any
church or political group decides or thinks it can live with. The church has always had difficulty coming to grips with social and
scientific change. Although the Archbishop of Canterbury has decided that this is not a rights issue, to the gay population it is very much an issue of equal rights. Gay folk have indeed exper-
ienced vast discrimination and punishment for their natural sexual orientation; in many countries there are still very punitive
laws which may result in long prison sentences or execution (Iran, Saudi Arabia). In the western nations, which have in recent years largely repudiated the harshest treatment, gays are determined to acquire total equality with straights, having realized that all sexual orientations are equal, normal, and in no way inferior to heterosexuality, merely different. Churches and politicians will continue to quibble and protest,in but this is an issue whose time has come. Blibical literalists have spent far too much time in Sunday
school and not enough in the classroom.