Beyond the Marriage Amendment

Beyond the Marriage Amendment
by James Carvin 7/14/04

It's because there's an election coming up. The ideology of the right clashes with the ideology of the left. On the right, cherished morals, including absolutes and an ethic that points to self-sufficiency. On the left, compassion for the oppressed - for the gays who have been denied rights, for the underemployed and underinsured. It is an honest desire to understand those who suffer and people who are different, minorities and even our enemies.

Most people actually hold both sets of values but emphasize one set over the other. Neither ideology is better than the other. One is not good and the other bad. That is, so long as it is not exclusive. An ideology is "exclusive" when it is one thing but not the other. It excludes the competing ideology. When I believe what you believe but also believe that something I believe is more important than what you believe then my ideology is not "exclusive." It is simply prioritized. To prefer one ideology over another does not mean that you believe the other ideology is wrong. You can still hold both sets of values.

Take the gay rights issue. Looking at the reality of gays wanting to have families and tax and insurance benefits I have compassion on a people who are angry because they see themselves as being deliberately excluded from privileges often called "rights." To believe that to engage in homosexual activity is a "sin" is a conviction that my rightward leaning ideology continues to hold true. It is not true, however, that to hold such a belief means that I have no compassion for gays. I can relate to what it must be like to want a family, to want to be with the person I love, to want to have an equal chance at success in life. I hold these values myself. So I should have no trouble having compassion on anyone else who would desire them. And I can certainly understand what it would feel like if for some arbitrary reason access to a family, to insurance, or any of these benefits were taken away from me. It would hit at the heart of what I strive for in life. I am not incapable of putting myself into the gay man's shoes and understanding the dynamics of discrimination.

Yet, as I said, there is an issue of "sin." There are two approaches that could be taken to this latter issue. Either I believe that homosexual activity is sin or I don't.

In the past few decades "new" methods of dealing with the sin issue have popped up. One method is to get relative. All sin is relative. Everyone sins. What difference does it make what kind of sin it is? Another method is to get personal. A behavior which might be a sin for me is not necessarily a sin for you, either because you believe there is nothing wrong with the behavior or because you lack the control needed over yourself to have a fair chance to flee from it. No doubt, in an era of ever-increasing tolerance, the urge not to judge is being strengthened, and it overflows onto our moral reasoning too.

How "new" these methods of thinking about sin are is debatable. But that doesn't matter. My point is exclusivity. The person who excludes the notion that homosexual behavior is a "sin" has entered into exclusivity. While in my ideology, rightwardly leaning as it is, I have not failed to comprehend and consider the truth contained in what the truth is the left puts forth, the left is not doing the same for me. My ideology is inclusive. Theirs is exclusive. They exclude my ideology by failing to admit that a sin is a sin. If they don't turn to personal or moral relativism they may turn to disbelief in traditional morality altogether, rejecting the religious system from whence the notion stems. It doesn't matter how they do it. The fact is they disagree with me. I don't disagree with them. But I haven't abandoned my own belief in the process.

I'm not complaining. This is America. And here we have freedom of religion. My hope here is to simply undo some misperceptions. The number of those on the left, especially the gay left, who still believe that homosexual behavior is a form of sin is small and rare. By contrast, the number of those on the right who have compassion on the plight of the minority of human beings caught up in the homosexual lifestyle is quite large. But those on the right tend to also still call sin "sin." And it still has its relevance. I don't have access to a poll. But my guess is that most of those on the right would describe themselves this way. Yes, there are a few hate-filled wackos on the right and on the left. But these don't represent the whole of conservatism or liberalism.

Still I wonder how those on the left perceive us. How often do you hear someone on the left describing conservatives as compassionate? And here it is election season. It is not easy to see compassion when a battle is raging. The attempt by our President to win over 2/3 of the Senate and Congress to approve a Marriage Amendment communicates hatred. Whether George W. has compassion or not is irrelevant because no explanation accompanies the effort. For the record, I believe he is an introvert rather than a dummy - meaning he thinks before he speaks rather than the other way around. His political opponents seem to be quicker to speak. The advantages and disadvantages are plain enough.

But as to the subject of gay rights, as far as the left is concerned, neither the house nor the senate is likely to provide the number of votes required despite the fact that the majority of Americans support the Amendment. The whole issue would be moot, if it weren't for the fact that this is an election season, and what matters when it comes to elections is who people really are. Because that is what we do. We elect people.

General American support is something that deserves explanation just as the President's position does. Who we elect and what we vote on says something about who we are. When I say that the American people support a Marriage Amendment what exactly do I mean? Permit me to read between the lines. I do NOT mean that the majority of American people do not support gay rights. Quite clearly they do. Few people I speak to day-to-day have any doubt that the gay agenda is going to continue to move in the direction gay activists have been crying out for, and neither do I. We sense in gay rights a movement running parallel to previous currents of civil rights. In a few decades it will be considered politically embarrassing to have ever supported any such thing as a Marriage Amendment. It will be akin to having on record we had supported a Jim Crow law. It will be interpreted as pure hatred.

Ironically, for the average American, the attempt to bring about a Marriage Amendment is an expression of a desire to retain not only what we were when we created a Constitutional Republic, but moral absolutes. Far from hatred, it is actually a very good sign. It is a sign that they respect the institution of matrimony and the hearts of our founding fathers. They may even see in the Marriage Amendment a grasp at holiness. I suspect this is the way the President views it too. Having a non-exclusive perspective allows me to believe this about our President and about the majority of the American people. I not only imagine myself in the shoes of gays, but in the shoes of average Americans and in the shoes of the President. And what I see here is not hatred, but the love of sacred values.

To this religious influence is added a dose of family psychology. Most laymen, along with our President, believe that the traditional family, where there is one father and one mother, is the ideal environment for children to develop and mature. Where one parent or both are missing, statistics demonstrate problems. It's not just a matter of faith. It's lay anthropology. Religious notions have secular support. And this is critical. So much so that if there is to be a shift in the general American attitude it will come in the arena of education about the ability of two men or two women to raise healthy children. Americans will want to know the statistics. I note that so far they are lacking, largely due to the fact that gay marriage is still novel. If sufficient case studies and statistics exist, they are not well known.

Opponents of a Marriage Amendment are more prone to recognize the validity of such case studies than they are moral absolutes from holy writ. They come equipped with examples of healthy gay families and unhealthy heterosexual families to back their arguments. Even if statistics show heterosexuals fair better the fact that some gay families can do better than some heterosexual families earns them the right to the institution on the basis of fairness. If bad heterosexual marriages are legal then bad homosexual marriages ought to be risked, as well. We see that once we have moved away from the arena of moral absolutes stemming from religious ideals into the field of human social science there is no longer any ace in the hole argument the right can provide.

Many on the right wish the whole problem would just go away. Some, including myself, fear God may be getting very angry at this wicked generation. Folks like us have offered gay advocates the "Catholic divorce" model as a way of appeasing God's wrath. This has been eagerly received by the religion-savvy left. Since Congress can't create any laws promoting or imposing any one religion it is argued that those who oppose gay marriage on religious grounds have no constitutional support. In the "Catholic divorce" model we note that the Catholic Church has never believed in divorce or remarriage, yet divorce and remarriage are both civil realities. Catholics who get "divorced" wind up with a two tiered marital identity, one that is civil, the other that is religious. The two realities, or constructs if you prefer, operate independently. Whether the state calls a union "marriage" doesn't matter. What matters in the eyes of God is whether God recognizes the marriage. If the state has it all wrong that is the state's problem.

Paradoxically, it is in the area of divorce and death that we are confronted with how extremely difficult, if not impossible it is to separate the church from the state on the issue matrimony. If it weren't for the fact that the state, or perhaps a judge, invariably steps in to settle accounts when divorces take place, and when custody battles ensue, and when estates are settled after one or more spouses pass away, then there wouldn't be such a difficulty. Practically speaking, it is inevitable that disputes are going to take place. No matter what we call a "union" we have to have laws which deal with property rights. The Catholic model has no problem with calling something a "marriage" that is not actually a marriage in the sight of God. No one gets insulted. You can live and act with whoever the state will acknowledge you are married to. And you can dispute over your belongings all you want.

The problem with the "Catholic model" is that most of us are not Catholic. And too many of us view marriage as a civil contract, rather than a truly religious sacrament. I am amazed at how often I hear people in the church say things like "marriage is an institution." And worse, "marriage is just a piece of paper." Ironically, this thinking had its roots in Europe, when there was a thing called Christendom, and popes and bishops ran the civil order. In those days marriage was not considered apart from the civil order at all. Church and state were quite united. A major bump in the road only happened when the pope refused to recognize the divorce and remarriage of Henry VIII. England wanted independence.

People who think in terms of possessions and divorce are thinking in a way that is not divine. Whatever is indissoluble in the marriage it isn't going to be measured out between survivors. When a couple is united in Christ they are dead to themselves already. They have given their lives away to one another and to God. They are no longer their own. This is what the sacrament signifies. The couple does what the Church is meant to do.

The problem with marriage, however, is that it is so much like baptism. We take the plunge which expresses the deepest possible commitment and then we forget we ever made it. We have received a high calling via the sacrament. But we have not necessarily arrived. In fact, none of us has. Marriage, Unity Candles, James & Lisa, 1990 like baptism, is not just a ceremony. It is a life-changing process. It is a divine work that is not completed until we have blossomed up into the next life, imperishable and cleansed from all wickedness.

So for those of us who think gay marriage inappropriate because it insults the institution, may I suggest that we take another look at the Catholic view. Marriage is a sign of the Church. It is given even to the unbeliever for the benefit of pointing the way to the sacrifice of Christ, who alone is worthy to be called our bridegroom. It is for us now to put on our fine linen, the righteous acts of the saints, in imitation of His service to us. And so may we serve the gays and the disheartened in this world. May they see and know us for who we are, not as those who hate, but those who cherish this banquet soon to come, confessing their own sins rather than judging the sins of others. And standing up for such an Amendment for this reason alone.

This outlines the right religious view, as I see it. But the battle for gay marriage takes place also among theologians in the church. It isn't just a church versus state issue. It's a church versus church issue. In the church, where we would hope to find a perfect font of unity, we find instead chaos and division that is a portrait of the apostasy predicted by the prophets. In the name of love, some brave thinkers in the church have been seeking to bless gay unions. Clichés like "I bless the sinner but not the sin" arise from this goodhearted tendency. Others overlook the sin too, saying, "It is how God made them. We must understand the cultural milieu." Some even speak of goddesses. Liberal and conservative theology thus clash and echo the partisan politics of the state. It is a sign of the times.

When we enter into the liberal world we tend to forget these signs and if we remember them we disdain them because they judge us. We reason that to feel judged is to feel unloved. To feel unloved couldn't possibly be divine. I have to respond to this type of thinking with a question. Doesn't the church's blessing, as well-intended as it is where it exists, simply usher in more of the activity? If there is truly anything wrong in homosexual behavior, then judgment is not just an usurpation of divine authority. It is a practical guide. So we come back to the basic issue of exclusivity. Those of us on the right understand the crisis, but we also still hold the notion that sin is sin. Yes, homosexual sin is far from the only kind of sin. But it is one of them. And it can't be condoned. No sin can be. When it is, it tends to happen. And when sin happens, the world decays. This is not a good thing. We create laws to prevent the world from decay. Don't we?

Thus, if we give in to our compassionate instincts we risk failing the world. And if we see in the crisis a sign of the times, particularly as the left wins the battle, we seem all the more judgmental. This is because the prophets didn't mince words and those who would revive and retain their words or follow in their traditions don't either. The prophets are mocked as backward individuals. They make themselves out to be holy but they are filled with judgmental hatred. No?

Here is an interesting ditty. It is an excerpt from a prophetic vision of St. Niphon the Ascetic, taken from the book, Discourses of Macarius the Egyptian, published in Paris in 1559. Just for some background, since the time of Adam something near 6000 years have now passed. By a literal Biblical count, with the 21st Century we are entering into the seventh millennium, also known as the "seventh age."