The Framing of Same-Sex Marriage and Religion

by: Adam Bink

Sat Oct 17, 2009 at 12:00

This is part of a series of on-the-ground coverage with the No On 1 campaign in Maine, generously funded in part by you and with the support of the New Organizing Institute's National LGBT Blogger and Citizen Journalist Initiative. For other posts in this series, click here.

On Thursday, Bishop Gene Robinson- the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church- was here in Portland speaking about the marriage ballot initiative. I sat down with him beforehand to ask him about the religious aspect of this. Here's what he had to say:

There was a particular part of what he said that struck me as interesting.

I see marriage as becoming more and more of a civil institution as religious affiliation shrinks. The main reason two people become married is for the civil benefits- taxes, health care, transfer of property, and so forth- has become more prominent. Yet religion has become a stakeholder in the institution so much that religious institutions have a seat at the table in debates like this. And so when there is a movement to expand marriage rights to LGBT couples, churches cry foul and stoke fears that they will be required to marry such couples. The same fears were expressed regarding marriages between people of different religions and people of different races.

In reality, as Bishop Robinson said, this is the church imposing its will on the state. "Separation of church and state works both ways." The framing of what he meant is what really caught me: that churches, as he said, are deputized by the state for civil purposes. If you want to get married, you to a church and you get married. Or you can go get a justice of the peace. You can even have a friend become a Universal Life minister just for the occasion. There are lots of ways. And as Bishop Robinson pointed out, when you get a divorce, you don't go back to the church. You go to the courts. But because marriage originated as a religious concept, and because churches and other religious organizations are massive and organized, the church has a seat at the table, and the religious exceptions written into the New Hampshire and Maine legislation has a specific exception for that. So they get to cry foul and people listen to them.

A way to counter that is that religious institutions should not be allowed to say who should and who should not be married outside their doors. Stay out of state affairs. Thus, his frame: that religious institutions are deputized to perform marriages, just as a library is used for a blood drive. But that doesn't mean the library gets to have a say on who shall give and who shall not. Ergo, neither should a church, and separation of church and state run both ways.

The Pan Atlantic (state-based pollster) poll this past week showed 50.0% voting Yes, 42.7% voting No, and 7.3% undecided (albeit a sample size of 110 Catholic voters). Anecdotally, since I've gotten to Maine I have heard story after story of someone's Catholic mom or grandmother who is voting No, in a state where there is a strong Catholic Church presence and the Church has done two collections for the initiative. For me, the jury is out on whether Bishop Robinson's frame is resonating, but I think it's one to push.

Adam Bink :: The Framing of Same-Sex Marriage and Religion

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The Framing of Same-Sex Marriage and Religion | 4 comments

I wish Democrats had shamed Obama for this comment, which he made at Rick Warren's mega-church (4.00 / 2)

http://www.correntewire.com/im...

"I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman [big applause], now for me as a Christian, it's also a sacred union, now God's in the mix [applause].

When a Miss USA contestant said virtually the same thing, it was the biggest deal in the world. But when the leader of the Democratic Party talks that way... crickets.

Was it just three years ago I was so naive as to write this?

If we're not going to follow our conscience, what's the point of being a Democrat?

by: vastleft @ Sat Oct 17, 2009 at 16:57:06 PM UTC

Marriage and Religion in origin (4.00 / 1)

(firmly donning pedant cap)

Fustel de Coulanges in his seminal work "The Ancient City" argued that European marriage should be seen with a context of a set of concentric religious practices. In this framework each larger super-national group, the Greeks, the Latins, the Germans, the Irish had their own top level gods who they recognized as being in principal universal (i.e. Romans had no problem identifying their Jupiter with Greek Zeus), and then each sub-group whether that be organized by city or tribe (and with the Romans both) having its own characteristic gods, and then down to the gens (very extended family) right on down to the individual household who each had their own secret religion centering around the families Lars and Penates.

Fustel de Coulanges thus argued that trying to determine whether marriage is originally a civil matter between families or a religious one is to try to find a distinction without a difference, a marriage or adoption removed a member from one econo-religious family unit to another with the various ceremonies serving to mark the breakage of certain bonds and the creation of others as the wife or adoptee left his old family gods behind and were introduced into a new family cult. But in all this the higher state religions were more or less irrelevant.

And from what little I know the earliest Pauline Chuch was initially rather indifferent to religion, when Paul said "It is better to marry, than to burn" he was somewhat grudgingly bowing to social convention, for the early Church the path to salvation ran right through celibacy.

In early Christian Europe this pattern held, the Church organized itself largely in the forms of celibate communities, leaving marriage outside and largely relegated to pagan practices inherited from a pre-Christian path. It was only during the early Middle Ages that Bishops started coming to the fore and the focus of the Church turned more towards the congregation of the lay and began on a twin campaign to suppress paganism and to exert social control over marriage, first by encouraging a blessing at the church door and then ultimately drawing it inside. But at no time did the church consider a marraige outside the church to not be a marriage, it just successfully was able to assert that such a marriage was illegitimate for the purposes of inheritance.

The insistence among some fundamentalists that the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition was focused on the married couple right from the Garden of Eden onward relies on a selective reading of both religion and history. Certainly there were strictures against exogamy, losing the faithful to some other tribe and god, and an interest in fertility, and among the latter Christian Church about matters of inheritence (in England wills were subject to Church law for many centuries) but not I think about the fundamental institution of marriage which remained very much a familial and even pagan institution (both the Greeks and the Romans carried their new brides over the threshold, and even the bachelor party has ancient roots).

So Christianity did not originate marriage or in the early days control it, instead it inherited it and only slowly drew it within its own boundaries. But that it was more or less successful in this process in a certain time and place, which is to say Europe in the Middle Ages doesn't give it a permanent lockhold. After all the Protestant Church adopted the legitimacy of a married clergy, in many ways a hell of a bigger break from tradition than allowing gays and lesbians from forming familial bounds within whatever religious tradition or lack there of that will accommodate them.

I mean if the Catholic Church marched into Maine and demanded that the Lutheran Church abandon the married clergy they would be laughed out of the State, they lost that battle four hundred years ago. And I suspect in the medium to long term they are going to lose this one too.

by: Bruce Webb @ Sat Oct 17, 2009 at 18:48:48 PM UTC

Bruce Webb just hit this in much more detail, (4.00 / 2)

but I don't believe we should ever concede that "marriage started as a religious institution". Religion does not own marriage; marriage exists outside of religion, prior to religion*, and in communities that conservative Christians wouldn't even recognize as having a religion (jungle tribes, East Village, etc). Religious people do not get to assert their control over marriage.

* "prior to religion" is a problematic formulation, but "prior to organized religion" is fairly easy.

by: texas dem @ Sat Oct 17, 2009 at 19:04:25 PM UTC

The purposes of marraige (0.00 / 0)

In Catholic school I was taught these things about the purposes of marriage:

1. Companionable love - the love, respect, mutual help, and commitment between the spouses. A special added dimension of Christian marriage: a sacramental reflection of Christ's love for his people in the church. Obviously gay marriage could fulfill this purpose, even for Catholics.

2. Generative love - contributing to the well being of the next generation. Obviously this love encompassed procreation, but was not limited to it. There are many ways childless couple, including childless gay couples, can contribute to the well being of the next generation. And obviously gay couples with children could fulfill this purpose. This is true for Catholics or anyone.

3. Virtue and social stability. Marriage help people to strengthen virtues such as prudence/forethought, justice, fortitude, mercy, humility, generosity and charity. Marriages help stabilize society. Obviously could be fulfilled by gays.

Reducing the purpose of marriage to "procreation" is a degenerative, brutish form of moral and theological reductionism.

by: Citizen0 @ Sun Oct 18, 2009 at 13:36:17 PM UTC