Some More Comments About Marriages After Equality

One of the interesting things about the aftermath of the recent Supreme Court ruling concerning marriage equality for lesbians and gay men wishing to marry is how people seem to want things every which way, depending on what people and what situations they're talking about.   A lot of the problem is in the social, legal and religious practice of mixing up all kinds of things together which only become more confused for that mixing and, for a modern democracy, making the state a quasi-sacramental officiant in a way that should never have been its role is a large part of that.

If I had my way, in the beginning of the current go round, the problem would have been solved by getting the state out of the marriage business, altogether, for straight as well as same-sex spouses, granting them a civil union that covered all legal matters in an equal and just way, leaving it to them to decide the question of a sacramental or spiritual or whatever marriage between them.  In such a system no whining over paranoid delusions that priests and ministers and rabbis and other religious clergy would be forced, against the teachings of their church to officiate over their marriages would have happened.  And that is one of the foremost of the red herrings being thrown out there and eagerly pounced upon by bigots promoting anti-LGBT hatred through this issue.  I'd go farther than that and do away with the quasi-clerical role of county clerks and make a legal, formal civil union contingent merely on the signing of a pro-forma, standard document with two witnesses of the couples' choice, perhaps with a notary attesting to having witnessed their signature.  Certainly it's easy enough in almost every part of the country to find a notary public to perform that task, without the huge fuss that's being made on that count.

As to the also heard complaints that seem to be more felt than articulated that the state can't force clergy to officiate at lesbian and gay marriages, well, that's never really been any business of the state and it should never be.  I've heard that stuff mostly as a means of condemning religion than as anything to do with the issue of marriage equality.  When made by such folk I do have to wonder what business they think it is of theirs to comment on the religious practices of people who they don't think should be religious, to start with.    I came across this passage from Marriage, Sex and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London by Shannon McCheffrey, which shows how today's beliefs about and expectations of a marriage ceremony granted by clergy was not considered as anything as important as the only thing that is really necessary to make a marriage, the decision of two adults to make a formal commitment to each other, to marry themselves.

By the late Middle Ages, marriage was firmly entrenched as one of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church.  As such, it came under the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts, which administered their jurisdiction through canon law.  To think of the late medieval church as controlling marriage, however, would be fundamentally to misunderstand both the church's ability to direct and police the laity's actions and the somewhat peculiar nature of the medieval Catholic theology and canon law of marriage.  Because of the particular contingent circumstances of late twelfth-and thirteenth-century developments in theology and canon law, by the end of the thirteenth century the sacrament of marriage had come to be defined in such a way that it was the two principals, the man and woman marrying, who made the marriage bond rather than a priest.   The sacramental bond was created by the mutual consent of the two parties alone.  Marriage vows did not have to be exchanged in a church,  nor was a priest's presence required.  A couple could exchange consent anywhere, anytime;  all that was needed to prove the marriage in a church court were two witnesses.  Neither partner could be married against his or her will, and at the same time,, no one else's agreement – priest, parent, guardian. Or lord – was required to create a canonically valid marriage as long as both parties were of age (usually defined as twelve for girls, fourteen for boys).  As Michael Sheehan remarked,  this was an “astonishingly individualistic” marriage system, indeed one that in many ways ran counter to the prevailing currents of medieval society that emphasized the importance of the participation of parents, guardians, and (to a lesser extent) priests in the making of a marriage.  Much of this book is concerned with exploring the inherent tensions between the individualism of the consent theory and the societal pressures to marry for family and advantage and according to community norms.

Considering that some other of those who are whining the loudest about this are members of denominations which don't consider marriage to be a sacrament in the Catholic sense of the word, and that long history of Catholicism which didn't require even the participation of clergy in the creation of a marriage, I think they really need to have this history pointed out to them.   If what they're saying now were to be true, then many, perhaps pretty much everyone for the first twelve centuries of Christianity were living in sin, even as the Church, itself, held them to be married.   I couldn't find the exact history but seem to recall there was not even a formal rite of marriage in the Church for much of that period and that marriage pageants were pretty much restricted to the uppermost classes.

That's another thing I'd have hoped against hope for, even as I didn't ever expect it would happen, that the disgusting mega-weddings that have become the norm would give way to very simple, very small wedding parties, without carriages with ridiculously liveried attendants,  tacky themes, and everything up to and including shaking down those invited to pay for the thing that has come to comprise weddings, today.  I'd think that straight folk would like to seriously consider how THEY have turned weddings into a repulsive spectacle, an imposition and burden on all involved for a couple whose likelihood of fulfilling the vows they made, purportedly with God as their witness, is less than an even chance.   Till death do us part founders on the richer,poorer, sick or healthy part by immature self-involved people too selfish to make a commitment to one other person, never mind a string in a series.  Such folk are like bulbs strung in a series, of unknowable soundness and reliability, they can be counted on to blow the entire set in the same way.  Which produces more bad marriages, no good ones and in a ghastly spectacle of repetition, wedding after vulgar, superficial, appallingly hypocritical, wedding with another protection racket style shake down.

I used to wonder if the early rejection of gay marriages wasn't because some people expected it would lead to more invitations to weddings, more social requirements to buy expensive gifts and to go to who knows what kinds of ceremonies and receptions.   What straight people set up as the expectation of that scenario might have given some people qualms about the whole thing.   Too bad my original, never to be fulfilled wish couldn't have happened.