Recently in Marriage Category

In last evening's GOP presidential debate, Mitt Romney was asked by Byron York of the Washington Examiner whether he thought state legislators (as in New York) had the right to make same-sex marriage legal in their states. Romney answered:

I'd far prefer having the [representatives of the] people make that decision than justices. But I believe the issue of marriage should be decided at the federal level.

You might wonder why is that? Why wouldn't you just let each state make their own decision? And the reason is because people move from state to state of course in a society like ours, they have children. As to go to different states, if one state recognizes a marriage and the other does not, what's the right of that child? What kind of divorce proceeding potential would there be in a state that didn't recognize a marriage in the first place?

There are--marriage is a status. It's not an activity that goes on within the walls of a state. And a result our marriage status relationship should be constant across the country.

I believe we should have a federal amendment in the constitution that defines marriage as a relationship between a man and woman, because I believe the ideal place to raise a child is in a home with a mom and a dad.

The follow-up question I'd like to have asked is: "So, governor, do you believe than that the Supreme Court was right to uphold federal anti-polygamy laws in its 1890 Reynolds decision?" That may be a "gotcha" question, but Romney knows as well as any American religious historian that in 19th-century inter-mountain Mormonism the doctrine of plural marriage was as deeply held as a religious doctrine can be. Are the complexities of interstate family law and a belief in a one-mom-one-dad ideal sufficient to trump a central tenet of a faith tradition--not least, your own?

With same-sex marriage imminent in New York a couple of months ago, Timothy Dolan compared the Empire State to China and North Korea. In ascending to the See of Philadelphia a month ago, Charles Chaput pronounced SSM to be "the issue of our time." Subsequently, Baltimore's Edwin F. O'Brien wrote Gov. Martin O'Malley pleading that he not use the power of his office to promote a policy "that so deeply conflicts with your faith, not to mention the best interests of society."

So what is it about SSM that makes bishops' blood run cold? With all due respect to Dolan, Chaput, O'Brien, and their friends in the natural law biz, but I don't think it's fear for the future of society at large. It's fear of scandal in the church. Make that Scandal in the Church. Those guilty of committing such sins as artificial birth control, abortion, and even divorce can show up for Mass and participate in parish life without other parishioners being any the wiser. Same-sex married couples, not so much. In the eyes of the authorities, their very presence damages the virtue and integrity of the community, providing unashamed public witness to what doctrine condemns.

A hint of the problem surfaced last year in controversies in Denver and Boston, regarding attendance in parochial schools by children of same-sex couples. Chaput, as archbishop of Denver, made sure to keep them out. Boston's Cardinal Sean O'Malley presided over the development of a policy of non-exclusion. Chaput and O'Malley are, to be sure, entirely different characters, but it is not irrelevant that Massachusetts recognizes SSM and Colorado does not. Archbishop Sean was under real pressure from his own people to take the inclusive route.

In short, once a civil jurisdiction like Massachusetts makes SSM legal, the pressure on clergy and laity to make a place for same-sex couples (and their children) becomes well nigh irresistible, whatever the bishops say. And the bishops know it.

Call it the Mere Christian Marriage Creed (2MC). C.S. Lewis' contention that in a non-Christian society Christians should not seek to impose their anti-divorce ideology on those who do not share it is attracting the attention of some thoughtful conservative evangelicals. They recognize that Americans are moving to accept same-sex marriage, and believe that the responsibility of the church--their church--is to clearly differentiate its conception of marriage from that of civil society.

I've received a number of comments suggesting that I have been too bold in claiming that Lewis would have taken the same approach to same-sex marriage--and of course it's impossible to know with certainty what his view would have been. But Darlene Parsons (Dee) of Wartburg Watch and Wade Burleson, sometime president of the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma, recognize that the principle is the same for SSM as it was for divorce: When the social consensus moves away from something a religion teaches, the religion should focus on keeping its own house in order rather than trying to keep the rest of society in line. That's the position Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, took last week in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. It is part and parcel of his denunciation of homophobia from the pulpit at last month's SBC convention, for which he has caught considerable flak.

The Christian argument against 2MC was made long ago by J.R.R. Tolkien in the draft of a letter he wrote but never sent to Lewis, and I'm grateful to commenter Marta for calling my attention to it (and transcribing it--see the whole text after the jump).

If Christian marriage were in the last analysis 'unnatural' (of the same type as say the prohibition of flesh-meat in certain monastic rules) it could only be imposed on a special 'chastity-order' of the Church, not on the universal Church. No item of compulsory Christian morals is valid only for Christians.

The great medievalist and fantasy writer was a devout Catholic, and here he is appealing to Catholic natural law doctrine: If a moral teaching of the church is determined to be dictated by natural law, then it applies to, and can legitimately be required of, everyone. Lewis, an Anglican, was taking a Protestant line. We should not be surprised that reconciling themselves to the legalization of SSM in American society should come more easily to heirs of the Reformation like Burleson and Mohler than to Catholic bishops. Built into Protestant DNA is the knowledge that the church is set apart from society at large, and that, when push comes to shove, it is the responsibility of Christian leaders to tend to their own flocks and let the great world spin on.

Update: Want to see how the Catholic apparat brings the hammer down on a Catholic intellectual who opts for 2MC? Check out Emily Stimpson's piece in the latest (July 17) Our Sunday Visitor. Complete with recantation.

Few books have influenced conservative Christianity in America more over the past half century than Mere Christianity, the little volume by C.S. Lewis that consists of a series of lecgtures he gave on the BBC during World War II. Its enunciation of a generic Christian faith and practice has held special appeal for evangelicals: Five years ago Christianity Today ranked it as the third most important book in shaping evangelicalism since the war.

So it is interesting to note (h/t The Wartburg Watch) how much more readily Lewis--an Anglican in a country with a state church--was prepared to differentiate a Christian conception of marriage (as he understood it) from that which the state establishes. The issue, in his day, was divorce.

Before leaving the question of divorce, I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused. The Christian conception of marriage is one: the other is the quite different question -- how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mahommedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.

A great many American Christians seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to forbid same-sex marriage for every one. Lewis, were he alive, would not think that. He would say that such Christians should not try to force their view of SSM on the rest of the community by embodying it in "defense of marriage" acts or (as Bill Donohue proposes) a marriage amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

As the country grows in acceptance of SSM, what's wrong with frankly recognizing that the majority of the American people cannot be expected to live Christian lives (presuming that eschewing SSM is the Christian way)? Why not, as Lewis proposed, just distinguish between marriage governed by your church and civil marriage? 

It was tempting to say "Welcome to the Big Apple" last Friday night after New York Archbishop Tim Dolan got his rear end handed to him by parishioner Andrew Cuomo in re: same-sex marriage. But not since the days of Nelson Rockefeller has the Empire State witnessed such astute management of the legislative process as Cuomo displayed, and so His Excellency can be forgiven for misunderestimating what he was up against. Not that he's likely to feel pleased with the performance of the apparatchiks in the state Catholic Conference or, for that matter, Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio and his monsigliere Kieran Harrington, to say nothing of those Evangelical and Orthodox Jewish auxiliaries. They were all outgunned and outmaneuvered, as Michael Barbaro makes clear in his fine behind-the-scenes account in the Times.

For a pure expression of impotent rage, it's hard to beat the tantrum that went out under DiMarzio's name after the SSM bill passed:

Today, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the state legislature have deconstructed the single most important institution in human history. Republicans and Democrats alike succumbed to powerful political elites and have passed legislation that will undermine our families and as a consequence, our society.

Wherefore anathemas were pronounced not only upon those who supported the bill but also upon those who opposed it: "I have asked all pastors and principals to not invite any state legislator to speak or be present at any parish or school celebration." A pox on both your Houses! Malocchio!

One hopes, however, that in the days to come New York's bishops will calm down and think more carefully about what happened and what lies ahead. Powerful elites may have done their part, but at bottom what carried the day were two of the most powerful principles in U.S. society: equality under the law and religious freedom. Americans, including New York legislators, find it difficult to resist a claim to the same rights as other citizens. At the same time, we are far more ready than, say, Europeans, to carve out exemptions on religious grounds, and once these were hammered into acceptable form in Albany, the necessary votes were there.

Yet as susceptible as we are to religious exemptions, we take a dim view of religious impositions. And here, Catholic hierarchs need to grasp that their "secular"--i.e. natural law--arguments against SSM aren't merely unpersuasive, they're not considered secular. Bishops can argue till they're blue in the face that one-man-one-woman marriage is the Way of Nature. The public considers the source and concludes that this is simply religious special pleading.

I am not unmindful of the challenge faced by religious leaders opposed to the incoming tide of SSM in American society. Same-sex couples are going to be showing up all over the place, wanting to belong to your churches and synagogues and mosques, expecting to send their children to your schools, and having no patience with your telling them that their relationships are immoral. But if you've got to make the case, make it on your own doctrinal terms. And spare the hyperbole and incivility.

That's been the approach of Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston, who since 2004 has had to operate his archdiocese with SSM as the law of the land. Even as he has defended the church's position on marriage, he has made it clear that he wants "all baptized Catholics to come to Mass and be part of our community," and has established a policy that his parochial schools must not  "discriminate or exclude any categories of students." He also does not refer to same-sex marriage as same-sex "marriage." The Catholic Church declines to recognize civil divorce. Should it therefore refer to your previously married spouse as your "wife" or "husband"?

On Friday, a second former official of Catholic Charities in Washington wrote a letter denouncing the agency's decision to stop offering insurance policies that cover its employees' spouses. Last week, meanwhile, over on In All Things, James Martin served up a link to then-Archbishop of San Francisco William Levada's letter justifying his 1997 policy that succeeded in 1) keeping spousal coverage; conforming to San Francisco's then new law requiring agencies doing business with the city to extend the same benefits to domestic partners as it did to spouses; and avoiding church approval of same-sex partnerships. The letter came in response to criticism from Michael Uhlmann of the Ethics and Public Policy Institute, and is must reading for anyone interested in the latest chapter in this saga.

Here's the crux of Levada's argument for extending health benefits to one other adult legally domiciled with a Catholic Charities employee:

Uhlmann appears to think that no benefits should be offered to live-in lovers. But surely he needs to rethink such a position. Is it really a matter for an employer to exclude a person from benefits on the basis of activities that are sinful? Even prostitutes, alcoholics, embezzlers -- I won't rehearse the whole catalogue -- need health insurance. The problem arises when we are asked to single out and recognize a category based on such activity as part of our employee benefits. This is what our agreement with the city of San Francisco has changed, and in a way that broadens the scope of health benefits for uninsured children, elderly persons, and so many others whose lack of health insurance is genuinely a national scandal.

I understand that in Washington, Archbishop Wuerl has claimed that the stakes are higher now than they were then in San Francisco, that no one then was talking about same-sex marriage. But in fact Levada does mention same-sex marriage in his letter; it was then on the table in Hawaii.

Levada is hardly a nobody. He now serves as prefect for the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith--which, like, oversees all church doctrine. Does he continue to uphold the policy he promulgated in San Francisco? Is any other bishop prepared to stand up for it? This looks like one more example of how much weaker the advocates of comprehensive health care have become within the hierarchy.

Yesterday's 11-2 vote on the first reading of the D.C. City Council's same-sex marriage bill makes same-sex marriage inside the Beltway all but inevitable. Neither Catholic Church nor black clergy nor Congress is going to stop this train, and everyone knows it.

Under the circumstances, it looks like Archbishop Wuerl has decided to dial back the threats to withdraw Catholic Charities from the District. The latest on the archdiocesan website is that the legislation "could require" faith-based organizations to compromise on their religious beliefs and teachings.

Susan Gibbs, a spokeswoman for the archdiocese, said that if a compromise is not reached, the Church will continue to provide services but with fewer resources, because it will no longer be able to bid on city contracts.

"We are just asking for a bill that would balance the city's interest in legalizing same-sex marriage and religious groups' interest in following their faith teachings," Gibbs said.

Discussions on tweaking the bill to make it more religiously palatable are ongoing, but they're not going to change the bill much if at all.

So far as I have been able to find out, Catholic Charities has managed to continue most of their good works just fine in jurisdictions that permit same-sex marriages but which provide nothing more by way of legal exemptions than the D.C. bill--namely in Massachusetts and Connecticut. A few years ago, Massachusetts' bishops did compel Catholic Charities of Boston (over the unanimous opposition of its board) to stop placing babies with gay and lesbian couples and to withdraw from the adoption business. But otherwise, the agency seems to be engaged in business as usual. I should say, however, that my own efforts to determine whether Catholic Charities in Boston and Hartford are paying health benefits to same-sex spouses (an alleged sticking point in D.C.) have thus far proved fruitless. Maybe some full-time reporters will have better luck getting answers.

Within D.C.'s black community, there's been debate about whether same-sex marriage qualifies as a civil rights struggle. The challenge of whether to allow others a share in a critical dimension of one's own collective journey is not unique to African Americans. Jews have had to confront their "ownership" of the Holocaust--and over the years have come to acknowledge their common cause with other victims of genocide. The problem for African-Americans is more complicated, however, because of their high degree of disapproval of homosexuality. Still and all, in a majority black city, what's notable is the degree of support same-sex marriage has garnered.

As for Capitol Hill, Republicans seem resigned to waiting until they're back in the majority to overturn same-sex marriage in Our Nation's Capital. Now there's a campaign promise.

Before he became Pope Innocent III in 1198, Lotario dei Conti of Segni wrote De quadripartita specie nuptiarum, a treatise defining marriage as a four-part thing according to the four ways that Parisian scholastics of the day interpreted Scripture: historical, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical. According to Lotario,  the "historical" was the carnal marriage of man and woman, designed for the procreation of offspring and the avoidance of fornication. The "allegorical" referred to the sacramental marriage of Christ and the Church; the "tropological," the marriage of God and the individual soul; and the anagogical, the marriage between the Word of God and human nature in the Incarnation of Christ. For Lotario, the four types of marriages were equally "marriage." His point was to enable each to shed light on the others--to create an interpretive web for enriching his readers' understanding of all the relationships.

This excursus is prompted by a reading of the pastoral letter on marriage issued yesterday by the USCCB. It, too, makes reference to spiritual marriages--between Christ and the Church, within the Trinity. But unlike its medieval precursor, it tends to privilege the historical sense as the only "real" marriage. It's not a medieval document, but I'm not sure it's better for that. Carnal marriage--between a man and woman, sans contraception or divorce--becomes an object of transcendant significance, the bedrock of society and even of the Church. Marriage as an idol has been a Protestant temptation, and a Mormon one--but in recent years the Catholics have embraced it too.

If the Church wants to do that, it's not for us non-Catholics to object. But it also teaches that monogamous, heterosexual marriage is a natural phenomenon, created in obedience to Natural Law, and therefore that it can intervene to try to make society at large toe the line. In that regard, the pastoral's secular argumentation with respect to non-heterosexual marriage is notably weak--mostly just ex cathedra table-thumping like the following:

The legal recognition of same-sex unions poses a multifaceted threat to the very fabric of society, striking at the source from which society and culture come and which they are meant to serve. Such recognition affects all people, married and non-married: not only at the fundamental levels of the good of the spouses, the good of children, the intrinsic dignity of every human person, and the common good, but also at the levels of education, cultural imagination and influence, and religious freedom.

When it comes to plain old cohabitation, the pastoral refers its readers to empirical data:

Social science research, however, finds that cohabitation has no positive effects on a marriage....The findings of the social sciences confirm that the best environment for raising children is a stable home provided by the marriage of their parents.

Regarding same-sex marriage, the findings of social science are conspicuous by their absence.

Dan Gilgoff calls attention to a new ad supporting same-sex marriage in Maine that features Yolande Dumont sitting with her gay son, his partner, and their son. She says, in part:

 "I've been a Catholic all my life. My faith means a lot to me. Marriage to me is a great institution that works, and it's what I want for my children, too."

Brian Burch of CatholicVoteAction.org is calling for the ad to come down on the grounds that, because of this statement, it is "pretending that the Catholic faith supports" same-sex marriage. I can see how someone from Mars might draw that conclusion, but citizens of voting age in the Pine Tree State?

Still, for those Mainers who might be unaware of the Church's position, I would heartily recommend this draft of the Catholic bishops' forthcoming pastoral letter on marriage--which the National Catholic Reporter has succeeded in prying loose from headquarters. As the NCR's editorial on the draft suggests, it doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room in re: same-sex relationships in general, and same-sex marriage in particular:

One of the most troubling developments in contemporary culture is the proposition that persons of the same sex can "marry." This proposal redefines the nature of marriage and the family, and, as a result, harms both the intrinsic dignity of every human being and the common good of society.

I think they'll have some trouble convincing Yolande of this. And maybe a lot of other voters up there too.