Read this paragraph from Sunday’s New York Times lead story on a poll about gay marriage:
Attitudes on the subject seem to be inextricably linked to how people view marriage itself. For a majority of Americans — 53 percent — marriage is largely a religious matter. Seventy-one percent of those people oppose gay marriage. Similarly, 33 percent of Americans say marriage is largely a legal matter and a majority of those people — 55 percent — say they support gay marriage. |
The problem begins here with the word “largely.” Because marriage in the U.S. is not “largely” religious or legal: It is — unfortunately, I think — defined equally as both. This has led us to the current paradoxical mess.
If you are someone who feels that marriage is “largely a religious matter,” then I can understand that, if your religious beliefs tell you that gays shouldn’t marry, you don’t want them marrying in your church/synagogue/mosque/house of worship.
That makes sense. But if you believe that marriage is “largely a religious matter,” shouldn’t you want the government out of the marriage business entirely? Why do you think the government should enforce your religion’s dictates? Wouldn’t you be a tiny bit worried that the government that enforces your religious beliefs today might turn around tomorrow and enforce someone else’s?
In all the overblown rhetoric about the “sacredness of marriage,” people seem to be forgetting the obvious: No American court has the right, and no court is going to be able, to dictate that any particular religious denomination must perform the service of marriage for gay couples. But just as the courts can’t tell your clergyman whom to marry, your clergyman shouldn’t be able to veto who your government can and can’t confer the legal benefits of partnership upon.
The only sensible way to balance religious freedom and civil rights here is to disentangle marriage’s spiritual and legal threads. Let every denomination define marriage according to its particular teachings and beliefs. Then invent another word to cover the legal aspects of marriage and make sure that the arrangement — its commitments and its benefits — is available to every citizen, gay or straight. That way, the religious traditionalist doesn’t have to feel that his sacred word “marriage” has been compromised by the state, while gays can have their due legal rights — and get married, too, in more liberal denominations that want to welcome them.
Of course, the religious right isn’t interested in achieving this sort of clarity. Its leaders understand just how much they stand to benefit from the continued blurring of legal and religious doctrine in the debate over gay marriage. In fact, the proponents of a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to male/female couples aim to blast a gigantic hole in the wall between church and state.
The good news is, in 30 years the whole issue will be moot, because so much of the hostility to gay marriage is concentrated at the aged end of the demographic spectrum. Today’s open-minded kids are tomorrow’s democratic majority. And even if it should pass now, today’s “sacredness of marriage” amendment is as doomed as yesteryear’s Prohibition.
Bonus link: Read Dahlia Lithwick’s hilarious Slate piece on “what’s really undermining the sanctity of marriage.”
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