Saturday, October 25, 2003
(2:05 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Protecting the Traditional Family
This is based partly on the (at the time of this writing) nascent discussion of the politics of gay marriage over at CalPundit. I don't think it's necessary to use such inflammatory words as "marriage" in this debate -- I think it's pretty much self-evident that if two people of any combination of gender have been living together in a committed and intimate relationship (which may or may not include sex) for a long period of time, then they should have rights similar to relatives or spouses. For instance, if Richard and I had lived as roommates for as long as five years, I think there's a good argument to be made that we should be able to visit each other in the hospital with the same rights as a relative, even though Richard and I would be extremely unlikely to engage in sexual intercourse. In a nation with increasingly diverse living arrangements, I think some form of institutional recognition for a variety of close, long-term relationships, perhaps on the model of "common law" marriage, would be a good idea.
Quite possibly, we might need to maintain an infinite qualitative distinction between civil, legal unions (of all kinds) and church-sponsored marriages or partnerships. For instance, society at large might find it advantageous to recognize certain partnerships or other relationships (for instance, parenthood or legal guardianship) on an official level. People could be free to enter into such relationships regardless of their religious affiliation, and perhaps we could even go so far as to say that religious ministers should be stripped of the power to finalize such unions -- that is, the church should get out of the marriage/civil union business. If the church wishes to maintain an intra-church institution that it calls "marriage," in which people actively commit to lifelong cohabitation and sexual fidelity, then it can officially recognize such relationships at its discretion, independently of whether the state recognizes those relationships.
The problem with this is a certain incoherence in Christian teaching on marriage -- Christian marriages are always "piggy-backing" on state-recognized marriages, such that the church does not have an adequate independant vision of what marriage might mean in a church context or a very good justification for why the church should maintain the discipline of marriage for its members instead of some other hypothetical arrangements. In terms of officially recognizing celibates, anchorites, hermits, and larger religious communities (primarily monasteries), the church as a whole has developed (in some cases, previously existing) social structures in its own distinctive ways. In terms of marriage, I don't think that's the case. I honestly don't think there is an adequate, distinctively Christian doctrine of marriage -- if we read our Foucault, we'll find that everything Christians say about marriage (aside from calling it a "sacrament," which is a late and ambiguous addition), Roman sources were already saying. In the case of celibacy and other arrangements, that is not true, or at least not to the same degree.
Thus I think the current Christian panic over marriage is based on the fact that Christians don't know what to do about marriage and cannot come up with an adequate reason why they shouldn't tag along with the state if the state chooses to recognize homosexual marriages. Christians don't know what they're doing, qua Christians, when they get married. At least I don't think they do.
