Starting next week, same-sex marriage will be legal here in California. Despite the reluctance of a few registrars in inland, more conservative areas, each of California’s 58 counties will be issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples next week. I know several couples who will be getting married soon, including some who were wed in San Francisco four years ago during the brief period in which same-sex licenses were issued in that city.
And of course, I’m thinking about the fascinating conservative argument that allowing gays and lesbians to marry is somehow bad for marriage as an institution. I’m quite confident that my marriage — to a woman — will be just as strong next week as it is today, and most honest heterosexual married folks would say the same.
I work a lot with young people. I got married to my third wife in May 2001, and we separated just over a year later. The kids in my youth group threw a shower for us before we were married, and they — especially the girls — wanted stories about the proposal, the ceremony, the honeymoon, the dress, and so forth. My third wife and I indulged them. When I announced our separation in October 2002, many of these same kids were devastated. I remember that night in youth group vividly: several teens wept. Two of the girls were furious with me, one choosing not to speak to me for several months. When she finally did want to talk, she told me that my divorce had made her feel hopeless and bereft. She told me she was much more cynical about marriage as a consequence.
What this painful experience taught me is this: heterosexual divorce disillusions a hell of a lot more kids than will homosexual marriage. I’ve seen how my divorce(s) hurt the young people in my life; I’ve never seen any evidence of a young person being “damaged” by their awareness of a same-sex union. Yet no religious conservative tried to stop me from marrying again (and again, and again.) The divorce rate among evangelical Protestants in this country is famously as high as it is for their secular brethren, of course, so most pastors are keenly aware that the condemnation of remarriage after divorce will lose them their congregation lickety-split. Gays and lesbians are a safer target. In this sense, those within the Catholic tradition who refuse remarriage after divorce are on more consistent ground when they oppose gay marriage than those within most branches of American Protestantism, who allow multiple “do-overs”.
Of course, I’m a fan of multiple do-overs. And so too is the God I worship, a God whose grace and whose table are open to all who have stumbled again, and again, and again, and again. That grace is alive and well in this, my fourth and final marriage. If I can be wed four times, despite the chaos inflicted by three earlier divorces, surely my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters deserve a chance to treat the institution of marriage with more care than I until recently evinced.
I’m a fan of multiple do-overs. And so too is the God I worship
You mean this God? And this one? (And on and on — you know the passages better than I, I’m sure.)
Personally, I think divorce is an important institution, and in some cases clearly the moral choice. But then, I’m neither a theist nor a Christian. And from an outsider’s perspective, it has always looked to me like the Catholics have by far the better argument on this issue.
SF
Stephen, you’re “proof-texting”. Scripture says many things, many of them (to our fallible eyes and minds) contradictory, and all of them in need of wise exegesis. You and I both know we can get the Scripture to say what we want anytime we like.
When, in John 4, Jesus meets the woman at the well who has been married many times, he doesn’t tell her: be celibate forever, or go and marry the man with whom you are living out of wedlock at the moment. He simply tells her “everything she ever did”, in radical recognition of her complete humanness. There is no additional rebuke needed.
You and I both know we can get the Scripture to say what we want anytime we like.
No doubt. We Jews, in fact, are old hands at this sort of thing.
Still, it strikes me that when something is said explicitly multiple times, a different level of argument is required to get around it… *if*, that is, you think that A) Jesus is God and B) Scripture accurately quotes him. If you’re willing to waffle on either of those, obviously, it’s no problem (if Jesus was just a very wise Rabbi, then he clearly could be wrong about something; if the synoptic gospels got him wrong on this, then it’s equally unproblematic.) But if you’re not…
I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s a difference between “proof-texting” which takes things out of context, twists their plain meaning, or relies heavily on interpretation, and straightforward injunctions repeated often. In fact, I’m quite sure that you see this difference yourself.
Again, I’ve no personal stake in this myself. But it sure sounds like special pleading to me to avoid those passages, and the various other parallel ones (it’s in all the synoptic gospels, I think — twice in one of them, IIRC — plus Corinthians, which makes sure to add a “not I, but the Lord” just to clear up any misunderstandings… that’s a lot to go up against a story where it’s simply *not* mentioned). If you’re trying to be a lawyer about it, make the best case possible, yeah, you can say stuff. But if you’re sincerely trying to find out what the text means and not what you want it to mean… I find it hard to see how you can believe both A & B above and not reach the Catholic position.
(As an atheist, of course, it doesn’t surprise me to see people read things into a biblical text. But I’m interested in how it feels from the inside.)
SF
I think most of the churches that accept divorce today do so with the understanding that the condemnations of divorce in Jesus’ day were for a world in which divorce meant economic ruin for women. Paul condemns long hair on men, and we take it as a cultural statement that no longer applies; it’s safe to say that while divorce is surely not an a priori good, it is so different in modern America from what it was in the 1st century Jewish world that it isn’t really the same thing at all. (The same is said of homosexuality, of course.)
I have always said that I support gay marriage. Why should straights be the only ones to suffer? :)
Hmm. Well, interesting that that’s the reason. It makes sense.
(And, of course, whatever the reasoning, I’m glad churches apply it, since I think that the no-divorce rule causes a lot of hardship and harm… for that matter, my impression is that a lot of Catholics get around it with annulments that serve as de facto divorces.)
Somewhat parallel arguments about homosexuality are made by Rabbi Steve Greenberg in his book Wrestling with God and Man, i.e. that the prohibition in Leviticus had to do with what homosexuality meant then, not an absolute. (He makes other arguments too; all interesting, IMO.) Greenberg is an openly gay, Orthodox rabbi (not accepted as the later by many other Orthodox rabbis, though). He’s great. If you don’t know his work it might interest you.
SF
And of course, I’m thinking about the fascinating conservative argument that allowing gays and lesbians to marry is somehow bad for marriage as an institution.
That’s actually a pretty easy argument to understand, so long as you accept the caveat that homosexuals are inherently evil because they consciously choose to debase themselves in unholy practices. Of course, that caveat is kind of a big jagged pill…
…unless you assiduously maintain what I like to call the “fundie bubble.” Basically, you sequester yourself from anyone who could challenge your worldview*, whether by argument or simple existence. This, obviously, is why religious conservatives have such a hard-on for homeschooling and religious private schools/universities; it’s much easier to keep kids’ thoughts in line if you never let them outside, so to speak, to see what they’re missing and what their peers are lying about.
*One of the great ironies in life is in some of the most outspoken (or at least visible) evangelicals in the country utterly refusing to be anywhere near people who allegedly need witnessing, preferring to remain in the happy social homogeneity of their megachurches (or what have they). Odd, to say the least.
My parents got divorced when I was 7. It was a huge adjustment, and my older brother (13 at the time) was hugely influenced by the event. I have told people that I’ve been divorced once, and I don’t care to repeat the experience. I lived with my husband for a year before we got married, in large part because of a comment my mother made about her marriage to my father. She said that within 6 weeks of getting married, she knew she had made a horrible mistake. But divorce was not something people she knew did, so she didn’t consider it initially. But two kids and 17 years later, she initiated a divorce.
It is clear to me that the divorce improved my mother’s life, and probably my life, but may have harmed my brother. Of course, even at 7 I remember seeing my father shove my mother into a wall, and at 13 my brother remembers that life was perfect before my mother betrayed my father by divorcing him. I’ve never been able to figure out how my brother missed the anger and the violence that I could clearly see. My dad never slapped or punched my mother, but he did shove on occasion, and he yelled a lot. All the time. He’s 6′4″ tall, and big and loud. He scared the crap out of me on occasion.
Having met gay people, gotten to know some, and call some friends, I’ve never found a way that gay marriage has negatively impacted me, or ultimately my marriage. Well, except for the guilt I feel that my committed relationship passes muster to be called marriage, and theirs does not. I am an atheist, who prays to the universe that someday a charismatic political figure will rise up on a platform that says, ” I do not have ‘family values’. I value families in every form. That two or more people unite in a loving, supportive relationship to care for each other is an amazing thing, and worthy of the highest respect.”
Why?
Why the condemnation, or why do we assume it no longer applies?
Assuming that you ask the latter, most Christians interpret Paul’s letters as speaking on multiple levels — some of what he writes is specific to his audience, some of it is eternally applicable. We send people to seminary to learn the hermeneutic techniques for distinguishing the two. And then we argue about it, and have regualr schisms.
Given that most cultures have moved so far away from what marriage traditionally was (the trade of a woman between father and husband so that both families could improve economically), I can never really understand the idea that gay marriage threatens the institution. By turning marriage into a love match in which both partners enter voluntarily, we’ve already radically changed the institution to something more humane. And we can do it again.
Why assume it no longer applies? I understand that one learns Christian theology, but I’m not getting basis to outright reject some of Jesus’s or Paul’s teachings (no divorcing your wife unless she sleeps with another man).
It’s not an assumption, but rather a process. Traditional Protestant hermeneutic works on the so-called Wesleyan Quadrilateral (named, of course, for the great Methodist evangelical):
Reason, Experience, Scripture, Tradition. (REST). We use all four to inform an understanding of God’s call to us; Scripture is one post in that quad, but reason and experience are vital as well.
Paul’s teaching comes in the form of letters to particular congregations, often containing responses to particular questions that the congregations asked. For example, the bit about how men and women should wear their hair is in the middle of 1 Corinthians, a letter jam packed with responses to questions on a whole bunch of different topics, with two pieces of advice that are actually contradictory if you take each as a general rule. (That would be the famous “tell the woman not to talk in church” advice, which contradicts the “women should wear head coverings when they prophesy” advice.) So, the question of context automatically arises - what context was this addressing, what’s particular to a congregation’s situation, and what might apply more broadly, etc. There’s also the matter that more liberal Christians may see Paul as Just Another Guy who had access to Jesus’ teaching at a relatively small remove, while others see Paul as inerrantly inspired by God.
So, for example, the passage about telling the women not to talk in church gets regularly interpreted as applying to a particular situation in the unruly Corinthian congregation, where women were interrupting a service (and given that the same darn epistle says that women can prophesy publically, I think the “specific context” interpretation has the better case here). While those people who *want* women to shut up and never, never teach men have to explain away the passage where women prophesy, and the fact that Paul (both in his letters and in the historical accounts in Acts) acknowledges the leadership of certain women, who sometimes (e.g. Priscilla) teach men. Some interpretation of things as specific to a context is inherent to the process.
Whether it’s legit to interpret the prohibition on divorce that way is trickier - it’s repeated in two gospels and one early epistle, in terms that don’t suggest a lot of wiggle room. And at the same time the cultural context of marriage, and the likely consequences of divorce, have changed a lot over the centuries.
Hugo. If you saw damage from a SSM, would you allow yourself to be aware of it?