Gay Marriage

The following is a conversation I have been having about gay marriage. Someone on facebook had a status that said, "The California Supreme Court got it right! Marriage will always be one man and one woman, for life!" Knowing this person was an evangelical, I chimed in on the hateful nature of religion in situations like this. After going back and forth with any takers on this guy's wall, someone sent me the following message. My response follows his.

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The words 'marry' and 'marriage' were derived in about the 12th century from the Latin word 'maritare'. Maritare literally meant the joining of a 'mari' (young female) with a 'maritus' (young male) with the intent of producing an offspring. Originally applied to animal husbandry, the terms were later employed by the Catholic church for the rite of uniting a man and a woman in the hopes of producing offspring. Later, the nomenclature was used in civil courts and legal processes to clearly identify lawfully dependent relationships. As such, the construct of 'marriage' has been determined by custom and generally accepted cultural norms. Over the years, laws have been enacted to govern the construct of the public institution of marriage. Qualifiers such as age, consanguinity, presence of sexually transmitted diseases, qualifications of officiant and others have all been determined as rule of law to protect the man, woman and subsequent offspring and have been determined by each governing domain, such as a state or county. In consideration of the lawful dependencies created by raising children, some institutions, such as medical insurance companies and employers, have afforded special considerations to individuals legally classified as 'married'.

Dictionaries generally define a 'right' as an abstract idea of that which is due to a person or governmental body by law, tradition, or nature. The framers of the U.S. Constitution took the abstract nature of 'rights' into consideration when they enacted the first amendment to the Constitution - The Bill of Rights. Article 10 of the Bill of Rights states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people". In other words, anything not specifically spelled out in the U.S. Constitution is to be determined on a state-by-state basis and is under the authority of the democratic will of the people. On these premises, several questions arise;

1) Can the conjugal union of same-sex individuals with no possibility of naturally producing offspring fit into the historical, legal, and publicly accepted definition of 'marriage' or would the word 'marriage' require a totally new legal definition?

2) Since, by its very nature, marriage is the public declaration and public acceptance of a social construct, and that social construct produces legal, economic and social ramifications on the entire community, doesn't the community have the authority to govern the public institution of marriage?

3) Are the special considerations offered by various institutions to relieve some of the burden of supporting lawful dependencies 'rights', entitlements, or benevolent allowances?

4) Is the formal public recognition of the conjugal union of two individuals a 'right' or is it a social construct based on custom and only legally recognized as a benefit of residing in a country that governs by the rule of law?

5) If the people of California legally voted on the governance of the public institution of marriage and the Supreme Court of California ruled that the people of California had the legal authority to do so, doesn't that just represent the democratic process in action?

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Everyone is well aware that “marriage” has historically meant the joining of a man and a woman, and this has been based on, as you said, “custom and generally accepted cultural norms.” But people don’t change or resist change based solely on semantics. Popular languages have remained so because they changed to accomodate progress, sophistication, and cultural acceptance. So to say that the meaning of a word, legal or otherwise, would have to be fine-tuned is not uncommon much less without precedent.

Because semantics are not unalterable, the issue then becomes the natural changing of the public perception of marriage over time to include the joining of same-sex partners so that language and law will have no choice but to adapt as they have in the past. The masses are becoming more and more comfortable with same-sex relationships as we learn more and ultimately become more sophisticated. The diffusion of American mainstream culture by same-sex relationships also speaks to the “normalization” of the issue. So the question becomes, what makes marriage, a social construct, impervious to this obvious paradigm shift? What’s stopping the majority of our “democracy” from altering their perception of marriage to include same-sex partners?

This is where religious groups have taken the authority over deciding what “marriage” is and has always been. This is why you were able to refer to the meaning of “marriage” matter-of-factly and the meaning of “right” as an abstract idea. But marriage has transcended religious significance and become, as you said, a social construct. So my question is, with so many economic, social, and legal considerations, why should the religious significance of a word have any weight at all?

The most abstract and popular answer is, because homosexuality is seen as immoral by conservative Christians, opponents think that allowing gays to marry will somehow poison or dillute the term,”marriage” inevitably threatening the institution it symbolizes, an insitution that disintegrates 50% of the time in the U.S. among heterosexual partners (much less so in Massachusetts, the only state with legalized gay-marriage laws for much of the last 5 years).

If you mean this to be a conversation about the democratic process or lawmaking from the bench, then you are not going to get much of an argument from me. This is not because I put a whole lot of faith in our so-called democratic process, or really care about defending it when it is convenient, but because I don’t feel like it is the fundamental issue here.

There is no doubt in my mind that gay marriage will pass in California and elsewhere eventually, and it will be done up to the democratic standards you describe. The only question is, how long will detractors (religious conservatives) keep this from happening?

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I'm looking forward to his response and I will post it here as soon as I can. If anyone still reads this, please join in.