I said earlier on that the Church didn’t understand what marriage really was. I wonder whether I do, either, or whether many people really give it much thought. This lack of understanding is why those who feel discomfort at the move for equal marriage have such a problem articulating what’s wrong, and end up using specious arguments which sound like justifications for prejudice, as well as freakish, stupid, grotesque, offensive, and meaningless statements.
I’m not fazed by the idea of two people of the same sex in bed together or doing whatever they feel inclined to do. I am a bit bothered when a homosexual chap refers to his partner as his husband. I can’t do it, and this I suspect is the core of the matter. It feels as though somebody’s holding a cat in front of me and claiming it’s a dog, and then getting very angry when I can’t agree with them. It may be a perfectly nice cat. There’s nothing wicked or immoral about being a cat. But a cat isn’t a dog, it’s just not. If this is ‘wrong’, it’s not wrong in moral terms, but in terms of being untrue.
If you think marriage just means ‘two people saying they love each other’, to deny same-sex couples the right to say the same would indeed be positively unjust. To deny them that right with any degree of justice you’d have to work out what it is about them that would prevent them doing what heterosexual couples can, and there isn’t anything. But that definition of marriage is, I think, facile, romantic, shallow and naïve; it ignores the fact that the way marriage is understood is a construct, not a product merely of what two people happen to feel, and, ultimately, even what they may think of as ‘love’ is conditioned by things beyond them, rather than beginning with what they think they feel at any one moment. The essentialist romanticism at the heart of our modern view of sexual relationships, at the heart of which is an ideal of individual fulfilment, descends from the late 18th century and its idealisation of nature, emotion, and individuality. The move for equal marriage reflects a dream of dispensing with the social coding of marriage and uncovering the ‘real’ state underneath, conditioned only by what the couple feel.
Ultimately, certainly in Christian terms, the core reality
of ‘marriage’ is that of two people committing to bringing something new and
creative out of their difference, and that difference is most clearly figured
and summarised, however clumsily, by sexual difference. To say that sexual
difference doesn’t matter, that the sex of a marriage partner is of no
importance, is to change the understanding of the thing. This adds some credibility to conservative claims
that same-sex marriage somehow takes away the right of heterosexual couples to enter
into that institution as traditionally understood: it isn’t that they won’t get
married once gays can, but that society’s understanding of what they are doing
when they do has been shifted. Think of it linguistically: traditionally, you
can’t have a ‘husband’ without a ‘wife’. A person can’t be either on their own,
nor can you have two of them. To say that a marriage can include two husbands or two wives is to remake the terms, not
to define them in relation to each other as formerly, but to use them simply to
denote the sex of partners in a committed sexual relationship. In this sense
the ‘dog and cat’ analogy is unhelpful: it’s more like having a compass that says
‘North’ at both the top and the bottom. What you’re holding isn’t really a
compass any more. Of course, if you’re a libertarian of a certain sort,
emptying marriage of its traditional significance is not a bad thing at all,
given the oppressive reality of much traditional thinking about what it means.
My thinking on this is very vague, I admit (but no vaguer
than anyone else’s), but I believe that underneath the movement for gay
marriage is a very basic assumption, not even consciously articulated and which
would almost certainly be denied by its proponents on the Left, that
fundamentally human beings are nothing
but individuals making unencumbered choices and that men and women are
ultimately interchangeable. If heterosexual marriage is the ultimate social
symbol of our non-commensurability as beings, that is, the fact that we can’t simply be reduced to races,
classes, economic factors, or whatever, and randomly swapped with one another,
then saying that sexual difference is a thing of no consequence is not an unproblematic
matter. If we are interchangeable
then we’re disposable. And, politically, who will do the disposing? The irony
is that this is a movement justified by a belief in the unique worth of every
human being whose effect – I suspect – will be actually, eventually, to erode
our sense of that unique worth, which is a fundamental insight of Christianity.
Of course you can’t prove any of that and I can’t expect
anyone else to be persuaded by the argument, which is what leaves me open to
being called a bigot. Society has already decided in favour of the individualistic,
shallow definition of marriage and it has to get on with it; if you were to
dump me in Parliament and tell me to vote one way or the other it would be Yes,
because giving same-sex couples the same legal rights as everyone else can’t be
wrong no matter how dubious the
thinking behind it. Things have already gone too far to stop. Yet I couldn’t do
it without reservations. I see it as a symptom of a vast and perilous ideology,
one which is passionately committed to denying the truth about human nature,
but one which is so deep-rooted in me as well as others that it’s very
difficult even to squint through the mist and discern the shape of the real
problem. I am convinced that it’s not
really about gays; it’s about what human beings really are.
A Christian friend of mine comments:
ReplyDelete"I think I do understand what marriage is. It is a lifetime, exclusive contract. For better for worse, etc, 'til death us do part. There is an insurance element - someone who will look after you, paid for by offering them the same. There is, therefore, a symmetry in marriage, that is quite unlike any other human relationship. The Christian element comes from the unconditionality of the marriage vows, and the potential for inequality in loving sacrifice. That is the compass bearing: an exclusive faithfulness to another, and a willingness to engage in loving sacrifice. The Christian nature of marriage is supported by its sacramental nature - the only sacrament you can administer yourselves. Polygamy and polyandry are not Christian, because these cannot have the exclusivity of the life long promise of marriage to be there for the other person, come what may. Child marriage is out too, because they do not know what they are promising. But the sexual orientation of the two people is irrelevant. I don't see this view of marriage as romantic, shallow or naive, nor do I see it as incoherent.
Matt Parris can be Julian Glover's husband and vice versa - you are being shown two married people, even if you insist, for reasons I frankly don't get, still less see as Christian, are not married. It's a dog. It barks like a dog, swims like a dog, and runs after balls like a dog. It does not mew, walk off on its own, or bring you small dead birds once in a while. Yet for some reason "you just can't" see that it is a dog. As you say, there is nothing immoral about being a cat, but this isn't a cat. As you say, it IS about truth, not morality."
And I reply, somewhat lengthily:
ReplyDeleteMy thinking arises from asking the question: Why does the Church marry people? Plenty of Christians have concluded down the centuries that matrimony isn’t a sacrament at all. During the Commonwealth England had civil registration of marriage and nobody was married in churches. There doesn’t seem any clear reason why this of all human relationships should be considered something that reveals the nature of God. This is why I say that the Church doesn’t really grasp what it’s doing when it marries a couple, and in fact the debate over same-sex marriage is a profound good as it forces it to try and work it out. There’s a parallel with baptism which is popularly treated as a ‘rite of passage’ but which we know isn’t really, but a sign of our dying to natural life and rising to our life in Jesus – a sign which may never come to reality in that individual, or not at that time. The Church’s business is not ritually congratulating people for taking big steps in their lives, no matter how good those steps may be. In the same way, matrimony isn’t primarily about recognising what the two people concerned feel (which is what society thinks) but about revealing the nature of God and of his activity in us. The question that needs answering is whether sexual difference is an essential part of that sign.
I’ve also been influenced by thinking over a long while about that very knotty passage in 1 Corinthians 11 where Paul seems to become almost hysterical over the breakdown of sexual boundaries he finds evident in the Christian community in Corinth. His reasoning seems barmy – all that talk about women praying with their heads uncovered and men having long hair – but underneath it is a root concern to defend the idea of the interdependence of the sexes, which he states: ‘man is not independent of woman, nor woman of man.’ I conclude that there is something here which the Church does not yet understand (which is one of my basic principles) and that the sexual differentiation of human beings, and their mutual interdependence on something more than just an individual basis, is something of deep and divine importance even if we can’t yet glimpse what that is. This is a dangerous idea because you could use it to justify all sorts of oppressive and horrible conditions, but nevertheless I think it’s there and we have to deal with it.
And secondly:
ReplyDeleteI think you get close to what I’m struggling to understand and express with that very telling phrase, ‘the potential for inequality in loving sacrifice’. Relationships between two people of the same sex can clearly have exactly that quality as can those of people of opposite sexes, although once we might have denied it. But they do not signal it by sexual difference. Instead the language which dominates the discourse relating to same-sex marriage (especially the secular discourse) is that of equality, commensurability, and interchangability of persons, which is where the Romantic focus on individual identity and fulfilment comes in – ‘it’s two people saying they love each other’, the position I’ve describing as shallow, rather than what you’re talking about. This is especially striking when you dispense with the social freight of the terms ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ and use them simply to mean ‘male or female partner in a committed relationship’. I acknowledge that I may be unduly affected by my reflections about my dealings with married and to-be-married couples, and the sense of sexual difference those relationships seem to witness, as well as being blinded by the existing social understandings of what ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ mean. Perhaps those differences are nothing more than patriarchal impositions that liberal-minded people should be working to eradicate; but I have to believe that the unbroken tradition of the Church and the apparent witness of Scripture have something in them, that they might know better than we do, and to try to work out what that something is. I have to believe that, because without them there’s no reason to believe in God at all.
I was also trying to work out how this might possibly make sense to anyone who isn’t a Christian because I was aware of the incoherence of my own thinking in basically creating an unnatural and irrational distinction between people inside the Church and those outside; God, who defines what reason is, cannot demand something of us which is without reason. Hence trying to think what sexual difference may mean in non-Christian terms. And it occurs to me that it constitutes the most obvious and powerful sign that we aren’t simply interchangeable one with another, basically nothing more than individuals whose sex is indifferent. I do know people who argue very strongly that that’s exactly what we are (‘just people who happen to have different sets of genitalia’), and in fact once upon a time I would have been one of them.