Linguistic battles are difficult when the words are obviously different (gender vs. sex, pro-life vs. anti-abortion, etc.). They are much harder when the word stays the same, but the meaning changes. The same-sex marriage movement reveals that “marriage” has already undergone a meaning shift. Recognizing—and addressing—the character of that shift has to be a major part of how we defend marriage today.
“Marriage” in its Judeo-Christian context means the self-gift of a man and a woman to each other, so that God might bring each to Himself through the other. A man and a woman who get married vow that they will embrace the natural consequences of their life together as a gift from God, be they joyous or tragic: abundant children or the pain of sterility, lobster dinners or store-brand fish sticks, death in sleep at 90 or cancer at 30. It’s what Catholics call a vocation, a specific path to holiness that structures an entire life and everything in it.
But as any pastor who prepares couples for marriage can tell you, that vision of marriage is about as far from most couples’ minds as Mars is from Venus. If marriage is a gift of self, we now make sure to leave the tags on and keep the receipt.
What we expect from a marriage has changed: no-fault divorce helped change when we imagine a marriage ends, contraception helped change how we imagine a marriage should give life, and pornography helped change what we imagine should be done to and by whom in a marriage. In all three instances, what was part of an entire pattern of life that included but surpassed my momentary tastes has been broken apart into small fragments that I can change to suit my whims.
Once marriage was a vocation; now it is a lifestyle. As such, it is little more than a legal sanctioning of two people’s sexual complementarity, usually involving an emotional bond, a general notion of physical exclusivity, financial intermingling, and the option of children. When any of these separable components interferes with the root purpose—personal satisfaction—then it has to go. And then worse problems intervene: career conflicts, squabbles about money, sexual apathy or disloyalty, or just the general feeling that the inevitable tensions and sacrifices of marital union aren’t worth it. So, divorce. Now the two people are free to live their lives independently again.
Enter same-sex marriage. If marriage is just a lifestyle option, same-sex marriage advocates are right to say that the option should be open to all on the same terms. If two people can satisfy each other sexually and emotionally, the argument goes, they can get married. After all, sexual intimacy and the emotional bond it can create often lead to monetary mingling and the wistful desire for permanence and maybe even children. If men and women can fall into marriage along that path, why not men and men or women and women?
Sex columnist Dan Savage argues that the way to save marriage as an institution is to focus even more intently on personal satisfaction, which he naturally imagines in the Maxim mode. He urges Americans to drop the baggage about male and female and consider what’s really important to a marriage: sexual satisfaction. Because good sex is the one non-negotiable of the marriage lifestyle according to Savage, anything that makes sex better for one member of the marriage makes the marriage better, whether it’s the occasional fling, whips, or a cake in the face. A marriage that fetish-plays together (or separately), stays together.
Of course this is hardly the vision of marriage predominant in America today. Thankfully many men and women, atheists and believers alike, desire a more virtuous practice of marriage. But we often lack confidence in our own aspirations. Even well-intentioned Christians hedge their bets with pre-nuptial agreements, “trial marriages,” or cohabitation, with one eye on the ever-present escape hatch of divorce. That is why Judeo-Christian defenders of marriage are so often met with frothing rage or blank stares. When we invoke the sacramental bond of marriage, we are literally speaking a different language than most of our contemporaries.
Social conservatives risk giving up the game by attacking the excesses of Savage Love and same-sex marriage with utilitarian, sociological arguments about the benefits of mixed-sex, two-parent homes. Books like The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better off Financially serve a purpose—showing that the redefinition of marriage fails on its own terms—but they cannot address the orientation to personal satisfaction that has crept into our understanding of marriage in general. Speaking of marriage as the best lifestyle among many lifestyles might help change social policy, but it won’t change the convictions that underlie our marital misunderstandings.
The opposition to same-sex marriage must be part of a larger movement addressing the root causes that led Americans to quietly redefine marriage as a lifestyle choice long before homosexual marriage was on the table. Even passing a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman will have little effect unless it is accompanied by a renewed awakening of the intrinsically unitive and fruitful vocation of marriage.
Those who oppose same-sex marriage directly are doing laudable work. But the men and women who work to restore sanity to divorce laws, change the ubiquitous contraceptive mentality, and abolish pornography are also battling for marriage, and their work may prove decisive. And perhaps most decisive is the quiet witness of men and women living their marriages to the full.
Marriage is not just a word, endlessly redefined by slipping social values and ideology. Marriage is not a lifestyle, blithely focused on my organs and whims. Marriage is a mode of being. Only as such can it be saved.
Gabriel Torretta, OP is a summer fellow at First Things and is studying for the priesthood in the Dominican Order.
RESOURCES
Mark Oppenheimer, Married, With Infidelities
Matthew Schmitz, A New Movement for Marriage
Matthew J. Franck , Religion, Reason, and Same-Sex Marriage
Robert P. George, What Marriage Is—And What It Isn’t
Gary A. Anderson, A Marriage in Full
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Comments:
Now, fortunately, the answer is really simple. It is to establish the juridical bond between men and their children. Even a pagan jurist, like Paulus, could see that: “the mother is always certain,” he observes, “but marriage points out the father.” His wife’s children are his, because she is his.
That led the French Senate to declare that “Preserving the presumption ” is est pater quem nuptiae demonstrant “, [Dig. 2, 4, 5; 1] adopted in all European legislation as Ms. Frédérique Granet-Lambrechts, professor at the Robert Schuman University of Strasbourg, told your reporter, Article 312 of Civil Code provides that a child conceived or born during the marriage has the husband for its father.
The presumption of paternity of the husband rests on the obligation of fidelity between spouses and reflects the commitment made by the husband during the celebration of marriage, to raise the couple’s children. The report presenting the order to the President of the Republic rightly points out that ” it is, in the words of Dean Carbonnier, the ‘heart of marriage,’ and cannot be questioned without losing for this institution its meaning and value.”"
No wonder both the law professors (154 of them in the 1999 symposium) and the courts of that strictly secular country decisively rejected same-sex marriage, whilst allowing a robust system of civil unions for both same-sex and opposite-sex couples. In fact 90% of PACS (civil unions) are between opposite-sex couples.
« le cœur du mariage, ce n’est pas le couple, c’est la présomption de paternité » [“The heart of marriage is not the couple, but the presumption of paternity.”]
No, marriage is not about procreation, nature can take care of that; it is about mothers and fathers, and especially fathers, taking responsibility for their children. In essence, a married couple (man and woman) are united in a parental alliance that affords a child, natural or adopted, an indivisible filiatition. It is precisely their legal bond to each other that makes their joint commitment to the child an objective, juridical reality, recognized and enforced in the public sphere, that is, by the law.
The sacrament of Holy Matrimony is, for believers, something more; it is certainly no less
So the solution lies in the question: "Were our forefathers more virtuous accidentally?" We can increase the consequences of things today, which is like trying to beat butter back into milk, or we can promote essential virtue.
What would Jesus do? What does God the Father do? Some people persist in grace out of fear of Hell. But that won't get you too far today. It seems God is always leading us around by the nose, not with a ring but with a hunger and a whiff of something better in His house.
Torretta represents what I would call the restorationist position, and argues for a return to a previous understanding of marriage that has been lost in the last couple of generations. One challenge to that position, I think, is to defend it in a way that presupposes less in the way of Christianity, so that it can be both more legitimate and more persuasive in more varied society.
I'm one of those who wants to chagen divorce and I don't want to prevent same sex marriages. And I have a fear that as legislation to reduce divorce is crafted agendas for preventing same sex marriage will be slipped in or attached as an addendum to good legslation. I don;t like it that people think that my being a marriage advocate means I'm against homesexual marriage; I'm not. Not all Christians are against it.
Some time ago homosexuals began calling themselves “gay,” thus appropriating a perfectly good word that uniquely conveys a light-hearted exuberance that other terms cannot. Having been hijacked by the homosexual community, “gay” is no longer available for conversation by people like me.
“People like me?” you ask, with a slight note of disdain in your voice. Yes, like me: a heterosexual male happily married to the same heterosexual female for forty years.
And, since other groups feel free to call themselves what they wish, I have decided upon a word to describe folks like me: normal.
I'm not sure what strength or point this kind of statement is meant to have. Is it intended as an argument against 'same-sex marriage'? If so, it seems to me to be a signularly bad one.
In Biblical times marriage was not only ever a relationship between a single man and a single woman, rather, it was common for a marriage to include one man and a number of women (both multiple wives and multiple conclubines - think of Jacob). Does that mean that when certain countries stopped allowing polygamous marriages, the meaning of the word 'marriage' was changed? If so, does it mean that polygamy shouldn't have been made impossible? And what about in Tibet, where a single woman can have more than one husband (often two brothers)? Is this not be be counted as a marriage? Why on earth not? I find it astonishing that people assume that how things are done here and now are the only ways that things have ever been done anywhere and at any time - and proceed project accordingly.
The form of marriage can change. If you like, we can use double-barreled phrases. We can then talk of polygamous marriage, polyandrous marriage, monogomous marriage. If if we alreday need all those to describe the variety of marriages, I see no reason - from the mere meaning of the word - why we can't equally legitimately talk of different-sex marriage and same-sex marriage. Whether or not such options should be made possible or not by the law is another matter entirely. But the menaing of the 'marriage' will not help you to reach a conclusion one way or the other.
I'm interested in learning more about divorce laws, as my Mother unfortunately had to go through two during my childhood (because the covenant had been broken, no other reason than that), and back then it seemed very difficult. Now it seems anyone can get divorced.
Let secular culture have marriage, I'll take Holy Matrimony as a Sacrament any day!
You say: "I don;t like it that people think that my being a marriage advocate means I'm against homesexual (sic) marriage; I'm not. Not all Christians are against it."
First of all, a Christian has to accept the dictates of Christ as contained in the Bible. Therefore by definition, a Christian is one who is against same-sex marriage, as well as divorce and every other sins and social ills.
Secondly one cannot be both a marriage advocate and a supporter of same-sex marriage because such a position is meaningless, since a same sex relationship can never be a marriage, no matter how much its supporters wish it to be so, and despite changing the laws to describe it as marriage.
For example, an enterprising individual may travel to Thailand to buy an imitation Gucci handbag, and bring it back home for display in a glass case among other high-priced items in a luxury store. Does this elaborate process somehow miraculously transform the knockoff into a genuine article? Of course not. All that a prospective buyer has to do is examine the fake closely, outside the glass display, and the truth is immediately apparent.
In the same way, describing as marriage that which is fundamentally, naturally and intrinsically unable to be a marriage, does not change anything. The title is a false one, the label has no power, and the emperor remains naked.
First, we do not live in those times and their particulars are not ours. The way that they dealt with the relationships between men and women grew out of the state of and the understandings of their times.
I noticed that you did not include any historically culture wide instances of men and men forming relationships that approximate anyones understanding of marriage. The Greek culture was not one.
Second, unless you are advocating for your examples to be included in the ssm discussion you would seem to be using them to push for an ad hoc definition of marriage based on emotivism, oh, and benefits.
Thirdly, the whole point of our present discussion of marriage is exactly about what we mean by marriage. You may be right that it will not get us to a concensus on what it means but this is true of all words, in theory, and unless we come to a common understanding of what words mean then we either will not have a common language and we will all "be strangers in a strange land"or
the balkanization of America will continue apace.
The fact is that for most of us there is a definition of marriage, in spite of the results of some polls, and for generations Americans would have thought it odd if someone said there was not. Not too long ago most homosexuals would have agreed but not any longer. Now they wish to change its meaning, theres the rub.
And if I don’t fit your definition of a Christian. I don’t care. I’m Christian, I’m Lutheran—no, not Catholic, and I’m faithful. God knows that.
If you are interested in helping change divorce, please visit the Coalition for divorce reform at http:/ http://www.divorcereform.info
"First of all, a Christian has to accept the dictates of Christ as contained in the Bible. Therefore by definition, a Christian is one who is against same-sex marriage, as well as divorce and every other sins and social ills."
Your definition, not mine. You don’t get to define what my faith is to me. We interpret the Holy Scriptures differently.
"Secondly one cannot be both a marriage advocate and a supporter of same-sex marriage because such a position is meaningless…"
And yet I am living proof in the possibility of something you think can’t be possible. God is amazing. And I find it quite fulfilling and meaningful.
"…since a same sex relationship can never be a marriage, no matter how much its supporters wish it to be so, and despite changing the laws to describe it as marriage."
So you don’t have to call it that. Your choice. They can still call it a marriage. Just like I can call myself a Christian regardless of whether you call me that or not.
"…describing as marriage that which is fundamentally, naturally and intrinsically unable to be a marriage, does not change anything. The title is a false one, the label has no power, and the emperor remains naked."
The label has power to those who apply it to their marriage. I label myself a Christian and it has power to me. You may label me something else, go ahead. God know who and what I am.
The author who clothed the naked emperor is presumed to have been homosexual. No, he did not marry. But he would have a different life in today's world than he did 150 years ago.
It is not us who define what God has dictated, or we would not be Christian. We follow what was laid before us in Faith. So, as Ayodele said, you cannot be for both. "A man cannot serve two masters." Right there in the Bible. God has said this, God has dictated this, not we mere humans. But it is our duty, as Christians, to follow wholly. If one doesn't follow wholly and adhere, then they're not Christian.
If someone stands in a garage and calls themselves a car, does it make them a car? What if they dress up like a car, does that make them even more of a car?
Food for thought.
There is one definition of marriage. Just like there is one thing and one thing only that makes someone Christian.
Romans 1:27
New International Version (NIV)
"In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error."
