I’ve long argued that recognizing that gays have the right to marry does nothing to harm my own marriage, or why I feel my own marriage is special, or blessed, or witnessed before God — any more than the state recognizing a marriage that I am sure will be a horrible mistake, or one celebrated in a faith I do not share (or no faith at all). Gay marriage doesn’t destroy marriage, it enhances it, spreads it outward, shares the wealth — and so, like sharing anything good, increases it accordingly.
Conversely, according to this article by David Quigg, restricting marriage may be counter-productive, may make marriage more of a “niche” phenomenon than it already is.
Face it: marriage, as an institution, is in some trouble. Not only is divorce rampant, but more people are choosing to marry much later, or even never marry at all — or marry not because it changes how they feel about each other (as if marriage for “love” were a Biblical tradition) but because it guarantees certain legal rights. Restricting a group that wants to (and, by rights, ought to be able to) marry from doing so doesn’t make marriage any more viable of an institution in that sort of environment. It makes it even less relevant.
Denied the right to marry, our friends nonetheless give each other all the care, love, honesty, loyalty, support, shelter, and shared laughter that marriage is all about for me. You can’t spend much time around couples who accomplish all that in their daily unmarried lives without realizing that you don’t need a marriage to love each other well. My marriage begins to seem about as essential as my appendix. Vestigial.
[…] If the word “marriage” is so fragile that it needs to be protected from the loving couples I’m privileged to call my friends, go lock the word up in a pretty box. Keep the locked box in your church. Share the blessing inside the box only with those you deem worthy. Let only those worthy ones be called “married.” Refuse to recognize the legitimacy of gay weddings or secular straight weddings or devout straight weddings held within the walls of churches that interpret God’s words differently than you do. Expect those churches to look with the same disdain on the so-called “marriages” of your faithful.
Pick a new name for the civil contract I have with my wife. Give it a clunky name if that will help you stomach laws that grant gay civil unions and straight civil unions the same set of rights now enjoyed only by married heterosexuals. Give it a name like an IRS form. I simply don’t care. No name can change what my wife and I have with each other.
We don’t need your blessing.
Stay out of our lives.
The Religious Right has harmed Christianity, as a whole, by making it seem judgmental, theocratic, intolerant, and obnoxious — “Your choices are to either believe as we do and vote as we do and live as we do say you should — or keep your mouths shut and ‘think of England.'” The result has been a discouragement of those who feel their Christianity has been hi-jacked by bullies, and an active resentment and anger from those who aren’t Christian.
Ironically, they run the risk of making “Holy Matrimony” much the same, by trying to keep it pure, unsullied, unchanging, restricted only to the Right Kind of People, i.e., Our Kind of People. It’s like the French Academy, striving to keep the language pure, to kick out or ban any “riff-raff” language borrowings from other lifestyles languages that would pollute the pure precious bodily fluids language that is Francaise. We laugh at the French, even while the Religious Right tries to do the same through their “ownership” of “marriage.”
The inevitable result, in this era of ever-diminishing church-going and denominational membership, will be more people saying, “Hell, we don’t need to kow-tow to some Christianist ceremony to bind our lives together in love. We’ll buy some rings, throw a party with friends, and call it done.” And, eventually, the law will accommodate that, through common law or civil marriage, or even civil unions fleshed out to be just like Marriage but without using that oh-so-precious “M” word for something of which The Righteous Do Not Approve.
Which would be a shame, really. But the shame will not be on those trying to “redefine marriage,” but those who treat it as something too precious to share and invest in, and so, like the bad servant in the Parable of the Talents, will lose what little they were given, kicked out into the darkness to “weep and gnash their teeth.” If marriage is threatened, it’s not by those who seek to expand its reach, but those who try to keep it an unchanging little club of their own devising, “NO GAYZ ALLOWED.”