Marriage According to Church and State
In my discussions of marriage law (which are frequent) it amazes me to hear gays tell me how conservative they are. You want to hear an irony? Socially, gay-marriage advocates tend to be conservatives who are romanticizing the stone age. By no means is marriage the only thing that can give love dignity. It is not the only way to create a home.
I will include this paragraph to illustrate, and just so that you know where I'm coming from, but you can skip it and get to the church/state argument. I used to be married. We didn't get divorced because of not being able to get along, we got along fine. But my ex and I view the videotape of our highly religious wedding and cringe. We ask ourselves, since we don't have any kids and we aren't going to, what's the point of living together? Of having finances in common? Of making extravagant promises to be the "one and only"? Since marriage involved demanding she be with me forever, I considered marriage to be clingy, insecure and possessive. Not to mention it's suffocating from the high expectations, which she discovered first-hand as her feelings stultified under obligation and entitlement. The best thing we ever did to improve our "ho-hum" relationship was get a divorce. Personally, I wouldn't mind getting a domestic partnership with her if it had a built-in expiration renewal date similar to a driver's license. If she wanted another guy, I'd be comfortable about including him in it if I get along with him and if the two of them were fine with that. (Not that she would consent to any of this in a million years, which makes it all academic.) Let me just add here to cover my behind: I'm not saying I'm interested in an adolescent polygamist fantasy about having a harem of babes. I've just never felt jealousy about other men, and I don't harbor disrespect for alternative relationship structures.
Side note, some clarification of how I use terms. A "domestic partnership" is the real, de-facto existing relationship and exists in the hearts of the participants no matter what a state or a church say about it. It is sometimes cemented in a ceremony, sometimes religious, which makes it "marriage." The 1,001 legal obligations, rights and recognitions that the state applies to that after the fact I refer to as "civil union" (CU). These are three different things. You can have any, all or none of them. Aren't the parameters of the actual relationship, although mostly consistent in the mainstream, whatever the participants in each domestic partnership make it?
Expiration-date threesomes are not currently legally recognized, and leads to the point of all this. The state has made a pre-packaged civil union arrangement which they name marriage in a "take-it-or-leave-it" fashion: the genders have to be different, the number has to be no more than two, and the duration has to be (supposedly) permanent (ha ha). This is religion in government. That's why we should not allow the state to acknowledge ANY relationships with the special designation of "legal marriage," meaning "this relationship is acceptable to the State but that one is not." Instead they should all be "civil unions" in the eyes of the state, and whether or not you're "married" depends entirely on what your church/synagogue/coven says, if any. The state shouldn't even ask about that. In this I include Christian heterosexual weddings and their "gay-inclusive" update. What business is if of government who you want to be your family member? Marriage, being a ceremonial cementing, should be left to the churches to do privately rather than legally. If that were accomplished, Focus on the Family and the Concerned Housewives of America will call this "the abolition of marriage" (or some such rhetoric) but nobody would be prevented from arranging their civil union as a traditional marriage. It's just that CUs, where the law is concerned, would be custom-designed by each set of partners.
It's disappointing that the only response to this from advocates of gay marriage that I've talked to so far, is to say, "we don't support your rights to be domestic partners with multiple people, expiring in three years unless renewed; because equal rights for you is more radical than equal rights for us." I expected GLBTs in general would be sympathetic to the non-religious because they know what the alienation is like. But not so. The reality is that many in the GLBT community right now have lost sight of how the position of gay rights is logically connected to social progressiveness in general. In a bizarre twist, the very traditionalism under which they suffer is somehow perceived as their friend. They tell me they only want what their parents had, as if they expect it to evoke a Kinkade painting. They want to imitate the culture that hates and abuses them. I recall the column in the GLBT newspaper Between the Lines that the gay atheist wrote, lamenting how he gets just as much intolerance from gays for his atheism, as they receive intolerance from the society at large. The sad, bitter irony is that many GLBTs in this country currently don't seem to be taking the lesson we learn from their plight and applying it to the benefit of other despised groups. "Hold on," they say, "all I want is to be married, which is a right you already have."
"Not exactly," I reply. "You can't get a domestic partnership on your terms and I can't get it on mine. This is because even if you get it from a judge in civil court, rather than in a church, the terms are still inflexibly set. Who do you think set the tradition? Religionists (and non-religionists who choose THE TRADITIONAL, ONE WAY of domestic partnership) have an easy ride in America when it comes to c.u. You and I have a difference of conscience which should protected under freedom of religion, and want it another way, not THEIR WAY. So don't I also fall outside the privileged class? Don't I, just like you, have to spend a gazillion bucks and months in legal proceedings to set up a non-traditional legal relationship? Making THEIR WAY into this cheap-and-easy class of civil union is the same as placing them in a privileged class over you and I. A privileged class you want entrance to." But I hear gay-marriage activists saying I'm not discriminated against because I can have the 1,001 legal rights of married couples just like the religionists do... if I do civil unions THEIR WAY, the traditional marriage way. The advocates of gay marriage are here using the same argument I've heard from opponents of gay marriage. "Gays currently have equal rights to get married-- to the opposite sex." But you don't have equal rights if you have to do it THEIR ONE WAY or the highway.
So, the law does need to change. All domestic partnerships that desire it need to be given access to the 1,001 legal rights of civil union formerly known as marriage. But it needs to change to take traditional marriage down from its exclusive place as an expression of domestic partnership. Even if gays were admitted to the ranks of the marriage-eligible, this club of elitist privilege would still exclude those of us, both gay and straight, who object to traditional marriage as our form of domestic partnership. Gays should still be given legal rights as anyone else, but if we offer only civil unions to everyone, both gay and straight, then we'll have equality.
I will include this paragraph to illustrate, and just so that you know where I'm coming from, but you can skip it and get to the church/state argument. I used to be married. We didn't get divorced because of not being able to get along, we got along fine. But my ex and I view the videotape of our highly religious wedding and cringe. We ask ourselves, since we don't have any kids and we aren't going to, what's the point of living together? Of having finances in common? Of making extravagant promises to be the "one and only"? Since marriage involved demanding she be with me forever, I considered marriage to be clingy, insecure and possessive. Not to mention it's suffocating from the high expectations, which she discovered first-hand as her feelings stultified under obligation and entitlement. The best thing we ever did to improve our "ho-hum" relationship was get a divorce. Personally, I wouldn't mind getting a domestic partnership with her if it had a built-in expiration renewal date similar to a driver's license. If she wanted another guy, I'd be comfortable about including him in it if I get along with him and if the two of them were fine with that. (Not that she would consent to any of this in a million years, which makes it all academic.) Let me just add here to cover my behind: I'm not saying I'm interested in an adolescent polygamist fantasy about having a harem of babes. I've just never felt jealousy about other men, and I don't harbor disrespect for alternative relationship structures.
Side note, some clarification of how I use terms. A "domestic partnership" is the real, de-facto existing relationship and exists in the hearts of the participants no matter what a state or a church say about it. It is sometimes cemented in a ceremony, sometimes religious, which makes it "marriage." The 1,001 legal obligations, rights and recognitions that the state applies to that after the fact I refer to as "civil union" (CU). These are three different things. You can have any, all or none of them. Aren't the parameters of the actual relationship, although mostly consistent in the mainstream, whatever the participants in each domestic partnership make it?
Expiration-date threesomes are not currently legally recognized, and leads to the point of all this. The state has made a pre-packaged civil union arrangement which they name marriage in a "take-it-or-leave-it" fashion: the genders have to be different, the number has to be no more than two, and the duration has to be (supposedly) permanent (ha ha). This is religion in government. That's why we should not allow the state to acknowledge ANY relationships with the special designation of "legal marriage," meaning "this relationship is acceptable to the State but that one is not." Instead they should all be "civil unions" in the eyes of the state, and whether or not you're "married" depends entirely on what your church/synagogue/coven says, if any. The state shouldn't even ask about that. In this I include Christian heterosexual weddings and their "gay-inclusive" update. What business is if of government who you want to be your family member? Marriage, being a ceremonial cementing, should be left to the churches to do privately rather than legally. If that were accomplished, Focus on the Family and the Concerned Housewives of America will call this "the abolition of marriage" (or some such rhetoric) but nobody would be prevented from arranging their civil union as a traditional marriage. It's just that CUs, where the law is concerned, would be custom-designed by each set of partners.
It's disappointing that the only response to this from advocates of gay marriage that I've talked to so far, is to say, "we don't support your rights to be domestic partners with multiple people, expiring in three years unless renewed; because equal rights for you is more radical than equal rights for us." I expected GLBTs in general would be sympathetic to the non-religious because they know what the alienation is like. But not so. The reality is that many in the GLBT community right now have lost sight of how the position of gay rights is logically connected to social progressiveness in general. In a bizarre twist, the very traditionalism under which they suffer is somehow perceived as their friend. They tell me they only want what their parents had, as if they expect it to evoke a Kinkade painting. They want to imitate the culture that hates and abuses them. I recall the column in the GLBT newspaper Between the Lines that the gay atheist wrote, lamenting how he gets just as much intolerance from gays for his atheism, as they receive intolerance from the society at large. The sad, bitter irony is that many GLBTs in this country currently don't seem to be taking the lesson we learn from their plight and applying it to the benefit of other despised groups. "Hold on," they say, "all I want is to be married, which is a right you already have."
"Not exactly," I reply. "You can't get a domestic partnership on your terms and I can't get it on mine. This is because even if you get it from a judge in civil court, rather than in a church, the terms are still inflexibly set. Who do you think set the tradition? Religionists (and non-religionists who choose THE TRADITIONAL, ONE WAY of domestic partnership) have an easy ride in America when it comes to c.u. You and I have a difference of conscience which should protected under freedom of religion, and want it another way, not THEIR WAY. So don't I also fall outside the privileged class? Don't I, just like you, have to spend a gazillion bucks and months in legal proceedings to set up a non-traditional legal relationship? Making THEIR WAY into this cheap-and-easy class of civil union is the same as placing them in a privileged class over you and I. A privileged class you want entrance to." But I hear gay-marriage activists saying I'm not discriminated against because I can have the 1,001 legal rights of married couples just like the religionists do... if I do civil unions THEIR WAY, the traditional marriage way. The advocates of gay marriage are here using the same argument I've heard from opponents of gay marriage. "Gays currently have equal rights to get married-- to the opposite sex." But you don't have equal rights if you have to do it THEIR ONE WAY or the highway.
So, the law does need to change. All domestic partnerships that desire it need to be given access to the 1,001 legal rights of civil union formerly known as marriage. But it needs to change to take traditional marriage down from its exclusive place as an expression of domestic partnership. Even if gays were admitted to the ranks of the marriage-eligible, this club of elitist privilege would still exclude those of us, both gay and straight, who object to traditional marriage as our form of domestic partnership. Gays should still be given legal rights as anyone else, but if we offer only civil unions to everyone, both gay and straight, then we'll have equality.