Reasonable Differences
So. Let's talk about marriage.
(Not mine, specifically, although, have I mentioned that I have a fantastic wife? Because I do!)
I think marriage exists. More clearly: I think marriage exists at a very fundamental level, that it is built into the foundations of our reality in the same way that, say, moral law is. (I understand Christianity to teach that moral law is baked into reality at such a fundamental level that the first act of sin broke the universe - such that the very principles of physics and biology that result in death only function as they do because of evil moral actions.) I present this, here, as an axiom; if you disagree with my underpinning thoughts - particularly if you don't believe in the teachings of Christianity - you're going to disagree with the rest of what follows. And that's fine, if so - but I want to show here some of what reasonably follows, if we begin with that axiom.
So: I assume that marriage exists. One of the immediate consequences of this is to eliminate certain answers to the question, "When does marriage begin?" I cannot, for instance, hold that marriage is an act of governmental authority - because the government can no more create or destroy something that fundamental than it can legislate a man back to life. To me, this suggests that we've made a fundamental mistake in allowing government to give (or withhold!) approval of marriages - if marriage is something older, purer, truer than government, how can an act of law make or unmake it?
I think this is, fundamentally, satisfying to the way many of us think about marriage as-is - if some new act of law abolished all existing marriages, would you feel that yours had evaporated? If it declared that marriages had never been legitimate, would every previously-married couple be retroactively guilty of fornicatin'? These seem like ridiculous possibilities!
And, until relatively recently, most of western civilization recognized this! Up through the 1300s or so, all that was required to marry was a simple declaration: "We are married to each other." The bride and groom didn't require clergy, government, witnesses - nothing but each other. The unfortunate consequence of this freedom was that men tended to pledge everlasting love in the evening - in private - and deny anything of the sort the following morning. To rein in abuses, the church declared that the presence of clergy was required to sanctify a marriage; in time, this authority, like much of that of the medieval church, devolved to the secular government. There were good reasons for these changes, at the time - but they were never justifications of principle, only of practical benefit.
So I'd argue that we should move back to that sort of system: marriage exists or it doesn't. The legal benefits of marriage - tax breaks, hospital visitation rights, etc. - would then either be eliminated or folded into formal legal contracts (which would often accompany marriage, but would be distinct from it - perhaps in the same way that a birth certificate does not actually cause one to be born, but is still useful to have once one is). The resultant change-over would be initially complicated and vanishingly unlikely - but I don't see that it would entail any loss of rights.
It also has the pleasant side-effect of entirely resolving homosexual marriage as an issue. If you're a same sex couple, and you want to sign a hospital-visitation-rights contract, and you can find someone to fill out the paperwork, great! Congrats, you have visitation rights. If you also want to refer to yourself as married, well, freedom of speech - people may disagree, but they've got no grounds to stop you. The government is well and truly out of the bedroom. This also has the benefit of being, mm, less easily misunderstood than some of the more traditional Marriage Amendment-style solutions.
I don't support Marriage Amendment-style solutions. I think they're well intentioned but fighting in the wrong direction - and probably, ultimately, doomed. I think they make the fundamental mistake of trying to fix the problems of government with more government, with the assumption that we can just assert governmental rights to manage situations and (as long as we keep the right people in charge!) that will never come back to bite us. I expect that to work about as well as it ever has.
However...
I also think, as noted above, that marriage exists. And, to clarify a little further, I think marriage can only exist given certain preconditions. One cannot, for instance, marry a tree stump; one cannot marry a whale. The fundamental principles of reality that make marriage simply don't apply in these cases - while you can certainly say you're married to a trees stump, saying it doesn't make it so.
And, I think, you can't marry someone of the same gender.
Again, I think this is a fairly straightforward consequence of some basic Christian teachings - and as not everyone accepts those teachings as the truth, not everyone is going to agree with me. That's fine! The position I argue for means that my opinions on the subject don't actually restrict anyone else - they have all the rights they could want, regardless of whether I'm correct.
But I think, for many Christians who do favor Marriage Amendment-style solutions, this is one of the roots of that conviction. If marriage is real, and if marriage really is limited to certain pairings, then the government can't recognize marriage between other folks. It can claim to (and use the word "marriage when it does), just as it could (in theory) pass a law claiming that the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is 3 - but the truth isn't altered by legislation.
And if that's your fundamental belief, I can understand where it's problematic to have the government claiming things exist when they don't - just as it would be bothersome if it tried to involve itself in mathematical law, as above. It's... silly. It lessens both the body of the law and those affected by it.
These are, I think, legitimate reasons to want to codify marriage in government. They aren't reasons I agree with, but I think they make sense - and they re-ground the debate, not in fear or hate, but in the natural outworking of basic beliefs.
(Not mine, specifically, although, have I mentioned that I have a fantastic wife? Because I do!)
I think marriage exists. More clearly: I think marriage exists at a very fundamental level, that it is built into the foundations of our reality in the same way that, say, moral law is. (I understand Christianity to teach that moral law is baked into reality at such a fundamental level that the first act of sin broke the universe - such that the very principles of physics and biology that result in death only function as they do because of evil moral actions.) I present this, here, as an axiom; if you disagree with my underpinning thoughts - particularly if you don't believe in the teachings of Christianity - you're going to disagree with the rest of what follows. And that's fine, if so - but I want to show here some of what reasonably follows, if we begin with that axiom.
So: I assume that marriage exists. One of the immediate consequences of this is to eliminate certain answers to the question, "When does marriage begin?" I cannot, for instance, hold that marriage is an act of governmental authority - because the government can no more create or destroy something that fundamental than it can legislate a man back to life. To me, this suggests that we've made a fundamental mistake in allowing government to give (or withhold!) approval of marriages - if marriage is something older, purer, truer than government, how can an act of law make or unmake it?
I think this is, fundamentally, satisfying to the way many of us think about marriage as-is - if some new act of law abolished all existing marriages, would you feel that yours had evaporated? If it declared that marriages had never been legitimate, would every previously-married couple be retroactively guilty of fornicatin'? These seem like ridiculous possibilities!
And, until relatively recently, most of western civilization recognized this! Up through the 1300s or so, all that was required to marry was a simple declaration: "We are married to each other." The bride and groom didn't require clergy, government, witnesses - nothing but each other. The unfortunate consequence of this freedom was that men tended to pledge everlasting love in the evening - in private - and deny anything of the sort the following morning. To rein in abuses, the church declared that the presence of clergy was required to sanctify a marriage; in time, this authority, like much of that of the medieval church, devolved to the secular government. There were good reasons for these changes, at the time - but they were never justifications of principle, only of practical benefit.
So I'd argue that we should move back to that sort of system: marriage exists or it doesn't. The legal benefits of marriage - tax breaks, hospital visitation rights, etc. - would then either be eliminated or folded into formal legal contracts (which would often accompany marriage, but would be distinct from it - perhaps in the same way that a birth certificate does not actually cause one to be born, but is still useful to have once one is). The resultant change-over would be initially complicated and vanishingly unlikely - but I don't see that it would entail any loss of rights.
It also has the pleasant side-effect of entirely resolving homosexual marriage as an issue. If you're a same sex couple, and you want to sign a hospital-visitation-rights contract, and you can find someone to fill out the paperwork, great! Congrats, you have visitation rights. If you also want to refer to yourself as married, well, freedom of speech - people may disagree, but they've got no grounds to stop you. The government is well and truly out of the bedroom. This also has the benefit of being, mm, less easily misunderstood than some of the more traditional Marriage Amendment-style solutions.
I don't support Marriage Amendment-style solutions. I think they're well intentioned but fighting in the wrong direction - and probably, ultimately, doomed. I think they make the fundamental mistake of trying to fix the problems of government with more government, with the assumption that we can just assert governmental rights to manage situations and (as long as we keep the right people in charge!) that will never come back to bite us. I expect that to work about as well as it ever has.
However...
I also think, as noted above, that marriage exists. And, to clarify a little further, I think marriage can only exist given certain preconditions. One cannot, for instance, marry a tree stump; one cannot marry a whale. The fundamental principles of reality that make marriage simply don't apply in these cases - while you can certainly say you're married to a trees stump, saying it doesn't make it so.
And, I think, you can't marry someone of the same gender.
Again, I think this is a fairly straightforward consequence of some basic Christian teachings - and as not everyone accepts those teachings as the truth, not everyone is going to agree with me. That's fine! The position I argue for means that my opinions on the subject don't actually restrict anyone else - they have all the rights they could want, regardless of whether I'm correct.
But I think, for many Christians who do favor Marriage Amendment-style solutions, this is one of the roots of that conviction. If marriage is real, and if marriage really is limited to certain pairings, then the government can't recognize marriage between other folks. It can claim to (and use the word "marriage when it does), just as it could (in theory) pass a law claiming that the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is 3 - but the truth isn't altered by legislation.
And if that's your fundamental belief, I can understand where it's problematic to have the government claiming things exist when they don't - just as it would be bothersome if it tried to involve itself in mathematical law, as above. It's... silly. It lessens both the body of the law and those affected by it.
These are, I think, legitimate reasons to want to codify marriage in government. They aren't reasons I agree with, but I think they make sense - and they re-ground the debate, not in fear or hate, but in the natural outworking of basic beliefs.