Recently in Marriage Category

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.

Addressing Washington archbishop Donald Wuerl's campaign against legalizing same-sex marriage in the nation's capital over on America's In All Things blog, prolific contributor Sean Michael Winters (hi, Sean Michael!) writes:

The Church does not owe anyone an apology for stating our belief in the importance of traditional marriage, nor for the argument that our society should continue to privilege this unique, life-giving form of human friendship and loving that is marriage.

Sure, don't apologize for stating that belief. But American Catholics who embrace it might consider apologizing for the feeble and increasingly implausible natural law argument that the Church uses to justify its pushing the belief on a society that is rapidly coming to recognize civil marriage for same-sex couples as a simple civil right.

USA Today's Cathy Grossman at Faith & Reason and the Boston Globe's Michael Paulson at Articles of Faith have been pondering my little correlation between the proportion of Catholics in a state and the state's support for same-sex marriage, so let me offer a possible explanation.

It's fair to point out (as Michael does) that Catholics tend to be concentrated in liberal states like Massachusetts, New York, and California, where there are a lot of non-Catholics (Jews, say) who we know support same-sex marriage. But what needs to be looked at are the actual rates of Catholic support for gay marriage. According to a recent WaPo-ABC News poll, white Catholics were evenly split (as opposed to white evangelicals, only 20 percent of whom supported it). That may understate Catholic support, however, at least in some places. For example, in 2003, a poll taken in working class, heavily Catholic Hudson County, New Jersey, found that over 60 percent of Catholics supported gay marriage, as compared to 30 percent of Protestants.

Cathy offers the suggestion that what's going on here is Catholic social justice principles outweighing the magisterium's natural law arguments against non-heterosexual unions. We here at the Greenberg Center tend to argue (see One Nation, Divisible, chapter 3) that New England, anyway, is a place where Catholics remember their own minority status well and so don't want to inflict their current majority views on those who feel otherwise. But I'd like to propose a third idea: that it is because Catholics value the idea marriage so highly that they don't want to deny it to those who want to embrace it.

It's important to recognize that in the Catholic thought-world, marriage is the most potent of terms for describing relationships other than the conjugal union of one man and one woman. A bishop has for centuries been considered to be "married" to his diocese. And religious women wear rings to signify their marriage to Christ. What "marriage" signifies in the Catholic imagination, in other words, is the most powerful of spiritual bonds. Under the circumstances, it's just plain obvious that that two people who want to commit themselves to each other, regardless of gender, should be married, isn't it?

Last night, the Episcopal House of Bishops voted 99-45 to approve a slightly revised version of D025, a resolution that affirms the legitimacy of partnered gays and lesbians to be ordained. The key paragraph now reads:

Resolved, That the 76th General Convention affirm that God has called and may call such individuals, to any ordained ministry in The Episcopal Church,; and that God's call to the ordained ministry in The Episcopal Church is a mystery which the Church attempts to discern for all people which call is testednone through our discernment processes acting in accordance with the Constitution and Canons of The Episcopal Church; and be it further

The new version of the resolution must go back for approval to the relevant committee of the House of Delegates, and then, if approved to the full house--but there seems little reason to think that it won't sail through.

What the resolution certainly does is make clear that the 2003 election of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire was no regretted action, no one-time thing. But does it also remove the effective moratorium that has been observed on such a choice over the past three years? No doubt, the Anglican schismatics in the U.S. and the worldwide Anglican Communion will take that to be the case. And, sooner or later, they'll be right.

Almost unanimously the Conference's Prayer Book, Liturgy and Music committee yesterday approved a resolution to put together "theological resources and liturgies" for same-sex unions, particularly "within civil jurisdictions where same-gender marriage, civil unions, or domestic partnerships are legal, may provide generous pastoral response to meet the needs of members of this Church." And another resolution is coming down the pike giving bishops wider than usual latitude in blessing same-sex unions in those jurisdictions.

In a word, the Episcopalians are moving with all deliberate speed to fully normalize the status of gays and lesbians within their church. More conservative religious bodies will of course regard this as surrendering to the culture, but the truth is that all religious bodies must slow march to the beat of the culture if they expect to remain relevant to the lives of their members--that is, unless they want to relegate themselves to sectarian status. The Episcopalians are more willing to own up to this than most; indeed, they are doing so precisely by citing the changes in civil law respecting same-sex marriage.

But this establishmentarian inclination can even be found among its conservative schismatics. The new-minted Archbishop of the Anglican Church of North America, Robert Duncan (Trinity College '70!), favors the ordination of women--a once controversial left-wing position in North America that raises hackles among Anglicans in other parts of the world and some of his own flock. Give the Duncanites a couple of decades, and they'll be fighting over the ordination of gays and lesbians too.

Sen. Chris Dodd, fighting for his political life here in Connecticut, has announced a change of heart on same-sex marriage: He now supports it. Anti-SSM professional Peter Wolfgang of the Family Institute of Connecticut calls Dodd out for political expediency:

"He took a position against same-sex marriage when he was running for president because that was the most politically palpable position," Wolfgang said. "Now suddenly he's in favor of same-sex marriage because he is in a very tight campaign for re-election. ... He needs every dollar he can get and he cannot afford to alienate the very well-heeled cultural left."

Political expediency there may be, but it doesn't have to do with dollars. Dodd's got plenty of them--over $5 million, as compared to less than $45,000 and $20 (!) for possible GOP challengers Sam Caliuguri and Rob Simmons respectively. He's going where the voters are. Just after the Connecticut Supreme Court ordered the state to recognize SSM last October, Nutmeggers supported SSM by 53 percent to 42 percent; two months later, another poll showed 52 percent in favor and 39 percent opposed. With SSM having, in the intervening months, become the law of the land in Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire, it's likely that those numbers have bumped up.

Don't look for Wolfgang to be charging Dodd with pandering to a pro-SSM electorate. But the five-term senator may well relish the opportunity to hold his Republican opponent's feet to the fire on the issue.

Three years ago, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, then archbishop of Washington, gave Wolf Blitzer  to understand that he was OK with same-sex civil unions (though he quickly issued a "clarification" making it clear that he did not actually support them). Are the Dolan-led New York bishops, in their notably mild statement against New York's SSM bill, sending the same signal?

If there are injustices against those in relationships other than marriage, those injustices can certainly be reformed and corrected in a way other than by drastically redefining marriage.

I's say so.

With New England now five-sixths on board with same-sex marriage, you figure those planning for campaigns in other states would be embracing what worked up here by way of devising their own strategies. But judging by a new report from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's National Religious Leadership Roundtable, I'm not so sure. The report, by Rev. Rebecca Voelkel, argues at great length for the need to include religious partners in future pro-SSM efforts in California. (Same goes for another new report, on Michigan.) Fine.

But what's clear from the New England experience is that it was not having pro-SMM religious folks around that made the difference. It was providing assurances that religious institutions opposed to SSM would not be forced to act against their convictions. In short, "marriage equality" wins when coupled with "religious liberty." If I were organizing an SSM campaign, I'd be looking especially for people who oppose SSM on religious grounds but back it on equality grounds, provided there are religious protections.

Update: At a conference call held by the Center for American Progress to discuss the reports today, Gene Robinson (the gay Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire) independently brought up the importance of religious reassurances in the New Hampshire campaign. From the discussion among the reports' authors, it seemed clear that this was 1) too new for the reports to have taken account of; and 2) likely to be part of future efforts.