Thinking Clearly about Marriage

Once again, I owe a debt of gratitude to George Bush for helping me clarify my thinking about an issue.

On January 20, 2004, President Bush delivered his fourth State of the Union address to Congress. In that speech, he said, "Our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage."

So, I went and looked up what "sanctity" meant.

According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, "sanctity" means "the state or quality of being holy, sacred, or saintly."

Holy. Sacred. Saintly. Those are religious terms. Rightly so. Marriage is holy and sacred, and to live a life that produces a strong marriage is about as close to saintly as most humans are ever going to get.

These terms properly apply to marriage because marriage is, historically, at least, a religious ceremony and a state of existence which that ceremony creates. That our thinking about has weighed it with a whole set of secular baggage is beside the point. It is fundamentally religious.

There was a time when virtually no government on earth believed that it was or should be separate from the religion of the land it governed. Historically, the record is one of intermixing of religion and government, sometimes so inextricably that it became impossible to distinguish one from the other.

But, never, until the creation of the United States, did any government adopt the concept that it ought to be completely neutral with regard to religion, that it ought to keep its grubby little secular hands of things that were holy, sacred, and saintly, and leave that to the choice of individuals who either thought they were, thought they wanted to be, or wanted others to believe that they were holy, sacred, and saintly.

Tell me. What business does a government that is supposed to be separated from all religion have defending the holiness, sacredness, or saintliness of anything?

Besides being holy, sacred, and saintly, marriage as a ceremony is one of the sacraments of the church, like baptism, communion, and last rites. What would we think if one of our presidents announced that our nation must defend the sanctity of baptism? Hopefully, that would at least make us pause and consider that announcement carefully and critically.

Part of the problem, but just part, is that there are many different kinds of marriages, even among religions. The Christian religion, now, sanctions only marriage between one man and one woman. However, careful students of the Bible will note that that was not always the case. It is also true of Judaism, but hasn't always been. Islam countenances marriage between one man and four women, and then allows the man to have concubines in addition to his four wives. Old Mormonism (and some versions of modern Mormonism) didn't allow for concubines, but neither did it limit a man to marrying just four wives. The more the "marrier," apparently.

Once the concept of marriage began to escape the confines of religion, it took on an even greater variety of meanings. There has been at least one culture that allowed one woman to marry several men, though, of course, men have been careful not to let that idea spread. Divorce, once the province of the Church, escaped to become the province of the law, and in so doing, became widespread. Some people decided they wanted unions that involved several men and several women. Others have decided that, unlike the almost universal teaching of religions, marriage ought to be a co-equal partnership, rather than one ruled by the husband, to whom the wife was supposed to be obedient.

Within religion and without, marriage has already metamorphosed into an almost unlimited variety of concepts.

Now, homosexuals want to craft a new definition of marriage - two men or two women. And our president responds by saying that our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage. Um ... why now?

The problem is that the government, our government, has no business defending the holiness, the sacredness, or the saintliness of any religious ceremony or sacrament. We got ourselves way off track when we forgot that. That is the job of each individual religion, each individual Church or church, each individual religionist.

We got way off track when we forgot that.

Imagine a constitutional amendment defining baptism.

This does not mean that the family unit it unimportant to us as a national people, and, therefore, to the government that represents our will. There are very clearly aspects of the family unit that serve the society at large in completely secular ways and deserve our collective, even coercive, support.

However, we must think very clearly what these are. We must separate in our thinking those aspects of the familial relationship that serve some religiously-neutral public purpose from those that may be very important, but serve some purpose that is not fundamentally secular.

For example, providing a stable, secure environment in which children can be reared is probably a secular benefit which almost all Americans can agree is beneficial to the common weal. Controlling who someone has sex with and how they have that sex is probably something that most Americans would not consider really the government's business. If it is, then let's get those laws against adultery back on the books and start enforcing them. If I had to bet, I'd bet the grocery money that philandering opposite sex partner are a lot more damaging to the familial relationship than faithful same sex partners.

Once we decide what aspects of a familial relationship are appropriate for government support, and can define those in religiously neutral ways, then we ought to give a legal name to a relationship that incorporates those aspects. Call it "contractual fidelity," or "a family arrangement," or "bluteosis," or ... even ... "civil union."

Codify that relationship. Let judges, or some other government official, award that label and the obligations and rights that go with it, and only government officials. Let only government officials agree that someone is relieved of that label and its obligations. Then, provide whatever government support for those living in that governmentally sanctioned relationship that we deem appropriate.

If someone wants to get married, let them go to the church, which is in the business of administering sacraments, not to the government. If someone wants government support because they are in a certain kind of relationship, let the government determine if their relationship meets the governmentally-approved standard, not the church.

If a church wants to let two people of the same sex participate in one of its sacraments, or not, that's really not the government's business, is it? If the goverment wants to provide material support to two people who are providing a stable, secure environment for the rearing of children, that's really not the church's business, is it?

After all, who would suggest that the government can't approve a foster home for a child unless some church has approved it first?

We got confused. George Bush helped me get my thinking straight. Thank you, Mr. President.