Thinking to Believe

A proposal to legalize same-sex marriage in Britain in 2014 has passed its first major hurdle to becoming law when the lower house of Parliament passed the proposal 400-175 on Tuesday.

British law already allows for civil unions, which offer the exact same rights and privileges of marriage.  Since same-sex marriage is already recognized in England in-all-but-name, the legal ramifications of this law should be negligible.  The real impact of this law will be social.  I’ll explain how, but first let me make the case against calling same-sex unions “marriage” even if they enjoy the exact same rights afforded to married couples.

Treated as equals vs. being thought of as equals

Personally, I oppose any legal recognition and/or regulation of same-sex relationships, including civil unions.  If you are going to create civil unions as an alternative institution to marriage, however, it is foolish to make it identical to marriage in every respect but the name.  It’s like saying “you can work at the same place I work at, make the same money I make, get the same health insurance I have, but you can’t call it a ‘job.’”[1]  Nevertheless, that is what England and other countries (including various states in the U.S.) have done.  They have created two institutions that are identical in all-but-name.

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While there exists a natural right to form marriages, and while we have a right to form those marriages without government interference (a negative right), we do not have the right to government recognition of our marriages (a positive right).  The State regulates marriage because it is in their best interest to manage the procreative potential of opposite sex couples, not because they have a moral obligation to do so.  The institution of marriage is a natural union that exists prior to, and wholly independent of government recognition.

What basis is there, then, for SSM advocates to claim they have a right to civil marriage?  While those with homosexual orientations have a right to form same-sex relationships[1], they have no corresponding right to have their relationships recognized and regulated by the government.

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On January 30, 2011 the governor of Illinois signed “The Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act” into law, thereby enacting same-sex civil unions that are equal in rights and responsibilities to marriage in the state.  While religious organizations who did social service work were specifically exempted from the non-discrimination elements of the law, the State of Illinois moved to cancel more than $30 million dollars worth of contracts with Catholic charities who worked with the state to provide foster care and adoption services because they would not pair children with same-sex couples.  The state began sending referrals to other foster care agencies.  The Catholic charities challenged the state in court and lost at both the circuit and appellate levels.  They ultimately had to drop the case due to a lack of funds to appeal it further up the chain.  The lack of state cooperation and funding will virtually ascertain the closure of these adoption agencies, which have more than 90 years of experience in this area.

The lawyer who represented the Catholic charities, Peter Breen of the Thomas Moore Society, commented, “This stands as a stark lesson to the rest of the nation that legislators promising ‘religious protection’ in same sex marriage and civil union laws may not be able to deliver on those promises.”  Indeed.

During one of his recent radio shows, Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason made an important observation about the debate over same-sex marriage (SSM) that virtually all advocates of SSM miss: the debate over SSM has virtually nothing to do with what same-sex couples (SSCs) do, and everything to do with what we (society) do.

No one is regulating the behavior, love, living situation, or commitments of SSCs.  SSCs are free to live with one another, have sex with one another, create legal contracts with one another, and even engage in public ceremonies to celebrate their love and commitment to one another.  Being granted access to the institution of marriage would not give SSCs any additional freedoms.  What it would give them is a new social standing.  Why?  Because marriage is society’s way of putting their stamp of approval on a particular kind of relationship.  It’s society’s way of declaring what a family is.  To say SSCs can participate in the institution of marriage would be a social declaration that there is no difference between heterosexual and homosexual unions.  Whether society should make such a declaration stands at the heart of the debate over SSM.  Do we, as a society, want to declare same-sex relationships to be socially equivalent to heterosexual relationships?

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Those who wish to change the historic definition of marriage so as to include couples of the same sex often argue that marriage is a fluid institution with an evolutionary history.  One of their favorite examples is polygamy.  Polygamy used to be an acceptable form of marriage, but such is no longer the case in most societies.  They think it follows that if the definition of marriage is flexible enough to change in this fashion, then it should be capable of including people of the same sex as well.

The problem with this argument is that polygamy is not an exception to the “male and female” understanding of marriage.  Rather, it is an exception to the concept of monogamy.  Polygamy did not involve multiple partners in a single marriage, but rather multiple, concurrent marriages.  This can be demonstrated by the following:

1. Each wife entered into a marriage with the man at different points in time.
2. It was possible for the man to divorce one wife without divorcing all his wives.
3. The women in the relationship only viewed the man as their spouse, not the other women.

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Just a little over 1 ½ years ago the Senate of New York rejected a bill legalizing same-sex marriage, 38-24.  On Friday June 24, 2011, however, they approved a similar bill, 33-29, and Governor Cuomo signed it into law.  Beginning July 24, 2011, same-sex couples will be allowed to marry in New York.

New York is the 9^th state/district to legalize same-sex marriage (Massachusetts in 2003 by court order, California in 2008 by court order, Connecticut in 2008 by court order, Iowa in 2009 by court order, (more…)

McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, Robert George, et al have written what is arguably one of the best defenses for the traditional understanding of marriage available in print.  Titled “What is Marriage?”, this paper was first published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, and later expanded into a book by the same title.[1]

I’ve often said the reason support for same-sex marriage has grown so fast in the West is because our culture has long forgotten what marriage is.  George et al understand that when it comes to the marriage debate, everything hinges on the question, What is marriage?  Does marriage have a fixed nature independent of cultural norms, or is it a mere social construction that can be whatever society wishes it to be?  The authors rightly begin their paper by defining and contrasting these two perspectives (what they call the “conjugal view” and “revisionist view”):

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