Marriage Wars: Orthodoxy and Progressivism

 

Years ago, I posted on Facebook this meme from Cynthia Nixon, who married a woman in 2012: When women got the vote, they did not redefine voting. When African-Americans got the right to sit at a lunch counter alongside white people, they did not redefine eating out. They were simply invited to the table. That is all we want to do; we have no desire to change marriage. We want to be entitled to not only the same privileges but the same responsibilities as straight people.

          This constructs same-sex marriage as another step in American's march toward freedom and justice for all, the familiar story of a minority denied fair treatment. Constructed this way, resisting same-sex marriage is like supporting slavery or segregation. It's a gender-based equivalent of racism. If, as a heterosexual, I want to sit at the marriage lunch counter but keep homosexuals away, I'm asking for special privileges.

As marriage is legally defined, this makes a perfect sense. A man and a woman can take out a marriage license, declare their vows, and enjoy all the benefits of marriage--such as tax deductions, health insurance, and simplified inheritance--without doing anything else. They needn't have sex or live together. What they do in their bedroom, if any, is nobody's business. If their only intimacy is non-reproductive, nobody revokes their marriage license. Even if, like a same-sex couple, they can't possibly reproduce--say, because of a hysterectomy or age--they enjoy all the perks of marriage. They can adopt and be considered a traditional family.

          Under the old laws, a two-sex couple and a one-sex couple could do identical legal and personal things but be treated differently purely on the basis of gender. The idea that they had equal rights because they both had the privilege of marrying the other sex implodes with the understanding that, for many people, sexual orientation is an inalterable personal trait, as involuntary as height or hair color. A homosexual friend of mine--drawn to males from the earliest stirrings of puberty--is no more "free" to pair-bond with a woman than I am free to pair-bond with a man.

If we take the Enlightenment view that the observed world expresses the Creator's will--a second book of divine revelation--then the natural occurrence of sexual orientation establishes it as God's will. Human institutions such as a governments or churches violate nature when they pressure people to violate their God-given orientations. The modern world-view that bases physics on the calculations of Isaac Newton, not on the speculations of Aristotle, locates ultimate authority in the book of nature, not in ancient books of wisdom. A properly designed psychological experiment trumps Deuteronomy. With respect to physics, this paradigm shift was settled in the 1700s, but it remains unsettled today with respect to morality. That is the thesis of James Davison Hunter's 1991 best-seller Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America.

Hunter, a conservative sociology professor at the University of Virginia, had written two academic studies of Evangelicalism when he read about a Protestant pastor, a Catholic priest, and an Orthodox rabbi arrested together in an antiabortion demonstration and it occurred to him that the ideological conflicts that earlier had divided religious denominations from each other were now created divisions within denominations. On issues such as abortion, school prayer, gender roles, and same-sex marriage, Americans of all major religious groups split into two camps, which Hunter calls orthodox and progressive. Orthodoxy depends on traditional authorities such a Aristotelian Nature, the Bible, the Catholic Magisterium, or the Torah, while progressivism ignores traditional authorities and measures current benefits to people by polls, experiments, and statistics. The first approach is religious while the second attempts to be scientific. 

         Mark R. Kowalewski summarizes this in his 1992 review: "The roots of the hostility lie in two opposing systems of moral understanding. For orthodoxy, Hunter states, moral truth is unchanging, universal, and divinely sanctioned; for progressivism, it is evolving and contextual. Religious faith fuels the debate, but traditional denominational differences have given way to ecumenical, special agenda organizations who fight each other across the ideological divide." From the orthodox standpoint, Cynthia Nixon's claim that same-sex unions don't redefine marriage is nonsense. If homosexuals sit down at the orthodox marriage table, they radically redefine it. Any table including them desecrates of the divinely sanctioned paradigm.

              This is because of the radically different way that orthodoxy goes about defining marriage, as a sacrament. It is not merely the sum of all laws regulating it, but is a sacred institution designed to establish and regulate what the orthodox call the family--the traditional unit of reproduction and social organization. A man and a woman become "one flesh" in the marriage ritual as a prelude to becoming one flesh in the bodies of children that normally result from the reproductive act that the ritual celebrates. Marriage is, in the orthodox definition, the fruitful combination of opposites. The union of sperm and egg in a womb is its very essence.

I lived in Kentucky when 75 percent of voters approved a 2004 constitutional amendment banning not only same-sex marriage, but civil unions. A common argument at the time was that the purpose of marriage was reproduction, which struck me as nonsense unless the law revoked the licenses of couples who failed to breed within a reasonable period--maybe five years. Also, if sterile mixed-sex couples were allowed to adopt and be families, then why not same-sex couples? Additionally, it's hard to see what reproductive purpose is served by weddings of senior citizens or women with hysterectomies--or by even by parents like me of grown children, who shouldn't deserve the perks of marriage since we're no longer contributing anything to its reproductive purpose. Clearly, the law is poorly written if its sole purpose is reproduction. 

But this kind of thinking betrays my progressive bias, which defines marriage by its formal rules rather than by its traditional mystique--in a sense by its body rather than its soul. Orthodoxy defines marriage by what it is supposed to create--children and well-regulated homes to nurture them--and, as late as my teenage years in the 1950s, it served this purpose pretty well. Marriage was a breeding license and marker of paternity. A wedding was a signal to commence humping, preferably without contraception and, in any case, without the Pill, IUD, or a legal abortion backstop. A girl differed from a lightbulb, the joke went, because "You can unscrew a lightbulb." There was such an onus on unwed pregnancy that a young woman might preserve her virginity even while she indulged in all sorts of diddling--what my my Baptist Training Union condemned (but never defined) as "heavy petting." 

The "marital act" was of the essence in an orthodox contract, so much so that if a wedding wasn't consummated--if the couple hadn't gone through the motions of introducing sperm to an egg--it could be annulled as if it had never happened. Marriage laws effectively regulated and legitimated reproduction, and legal perks accidentally distributed to seniors and other barren couples were God's will and not a problem.

A "womanless wedding" in a church

Well into the 20th century, the idea of two men marrying was absurd, the basis for pantomimes called "womanless weddings" where the tallest guy was typically chosen to play the bride. Bearded brides were good clean fun. But tidal shift in sexual mores around 1960--probably triggered by better birth control--uncoupled sex from marriage and redefined the institution for progressives. Now a wedding is no longer a fertility rite, but a contract between two adults, arguably for their sole benefit. If they only want to cohabit, they've probably already done that, and reproductive technology makes parenthood voluntary, not a gift from God. A progressive man and woman may avoid parenthood, raise a puppy instead of a child, and even, after years of cohabitation, marry for tax advantages, free to divorce if they change their minds. 

        Once marriage is redefined as a potentially non-reproductive domestic partnership--along with recognition of same-sex orientation as a natural variation--then marriage between two men ceases to look absurd.

In 2020 the Louisville Courier Journal interviewed residents of a Kentucky county that in 2004 voted 94% to outlaw same-sex marriage, and found little changed even five years after the 2015 Supreme Court ruling. Andrew Wolfson had to question ten people to find one that supported same-sex marriage, and nearly all the opposition was about human anatomy. "The mechanics only work between a man and a woman," said one man. Another found same-sex marriage "ridiculous--the Bible says we are supposed to marry and make babies." Another: "Two men can't reproduce, and neither can two women." Of course, nobody questions these facts, only the presumption that they define marriage. For these Kentuckians, egg-fertilizing is so essential to marriage that they find ridiculous, even blasphemous, the progressive claim that same-sex marriage enlarges the institution without redefining it. As one of my online friends put it, in response to Nixon's meme, such a claim makes them sound like fools. 

          The disagreement hinges, not on questions of fact or justice, but on the basis of moral order. Are there eternal moral principles revealed by God or nature, commandments dictated from one holy mountain or another, or is morality a product of human reason in evolving circumstances? Everybody agrees that Genesis describes Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. The question is whether a bronze-age fable is relevant to current law. As long as one side imagines an unchanging moral order ordained by God or nature, the other an evolving body of beneficial customs, they will talk past each other in a blame-game of bigot versus libertine.

References

Hunter, James Davison. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. Basic Books, 1991.

Kowalewski, Mark R. "Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, by James Davison Hunter." Sociology of Religion, Fall 1992, pp. 337-338.

Wolfson, Andrew. "A Kentucky County in 2004 Voted 94% to Outlaw Same-Sex Marriage. Few Attitudes Have Changed." Louisville Courier Journal, June 19, 2020.