What Is Marriage Anyway?

Sunday, August 22, 2004

Rev. Gretchen Woods

READING

from What Is Marriage For? by E.J. Graff

One of the most basic tensions in the history of marriage is between those two interlocking sides of marriage: marriage as a publicly policed institution and marriage as an inner experience. Which one turns your bond into a marriage: a public authority or your heart? Are you married when the two of you decide to care for each other for life, a decision you live out day to day, a decision only afterwards recognized by your community? Or is it the other way around: does the family, or church, or state pronounce some words over your head, write your names side by side in a registry, and bestow upon you marriage, a license and legal obligation to carry out the responsibilities of affection and care? This may sound like one of those faces/vases illusions, and for good reason: marriage doesn’t exist unless both parts happen – two human beings behave as married, and everyone else treats them as such. But it does matter which side you think counts more: the decisions made about individual marriages will be quite different if you think marriage is a publicly conferred status or an immanent state. And each position’s internal contradictions can – and have – caused social havoc when unchecked.

In history, this debate is almost inextricable from the debate over which authority rules marriage. Who decides where the enforceable marriage is made – in your heart, or in a registry – and why? That decision might be less complex if the only people who have to recognize your marriage live within twenty-five miles, when the people who see you two behaving as married are also the ones who oversee the granting of the widow’s dower. And it might be more complex in our world, in which each of our daily lives goes beyond our circle of acquaintances to touch dozens of strangers and anonymous entities, from the motor vehicle agency to our children’s schools. The story of the public/private marriage line is therefore also a story of how marriage has shifted , in comparative legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon’s words, from custom to law. (pp. 193-194.)

SERMON:

"What Is Marriage Anyway?"

As some of you know, Judy and I hoped to be married in Needham, Massachusetts, on July 31 of this year. When we arrived there, we learned that no municipal clerk is allowed to issue a marriage license to any same-sex couple who resides outside the state of Massachusetts, by order of Governor "Mitt" Romney, a Mormon. The governor is using a 1913 miscegenation law, written to keep people of different races from marrying legally in Massachusetts if they could not be married in their own state of residence. This is a blatant use of racism turned against same-sex couples.

I thought our case especially interesting because there are 3,022 legally registered same-sex marriages currently in this state of Oregon. Gay and Lesbian Advocacy and Defense, which leads the suit for same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, was mildly interested in our case, but focused upon the eight couples from out of state who had already filed suit. If they win, our suit is unnecessary and moot. We found ourselves "not of interest at this time," unless, of course, we make a really big donation.

So we return to you, as yet not legally married, because we were unwilling to perjure ourselves or to ask Judy’s sister, Jane, an assistant town clerk in Needham, to perjure her self. Still, Jane threw a wonderful un-wedding reception for us, and we had a great visit with her family and Judy’s daughter, Maia, who came from Reno to help celebrate the marriage. Frankly, if we had married in Oregon while we had the Massachusetts wedding planned, we would have disappointed Jane. Now we are considering a quickie wedding wherever the laws in the U.S. of A. clear first, perhaps Washington state, where we had a lovely service of union almost thirteen years ago.

Perhaps most interesting about all of this is that none of our six children, three of whom are in long-term heterosexual relationships, are interested in marriage. They abhor the whole system of legal privilege offered to married people, specifically, 1,138 federal laws that give rights and privileges to traditional heterosexual marriages, including the right to make decisions in the hospital, the right to tax free inheritance, the right to determine the final resting place of the remains of one’s loved one, etc.) So our children are just as determined not to join the system as we are to do so. Of course, they are graduates of the Evergreen State College in Washington, a hot-bed for radical thinking since the 1960’s. Ours is not a traditional family.

Today, I should like to offer a brief consideration of the question, "What is marriage anyway?" We will not explore the lives of those who are, happily or unhappily, single. Their choices do not affect this aspect of communal life. We shall look at the history of marriage in dominant western culture, our Unitarian Universalist responses, and my own take on all of this, which may surprise some of you.

First, history: Contrary to what you may be told by opponents of same-sex marriage, marriage has been a very fluid concept, and deeply culturally determined. Cultures not influenced by "western thinking" as it emerged from the Greeks ad Romans, often diverge widely from the current "traditional family values" view of marriage. I shall not murky these waters with descriptions of those views. But perspectives in western cultures have also varied and changed immensely.

As E.J. Graff notes in her extensive exploration of marriage, What Is Marriage For?: the strange social history of our most intimate institution, "In history, this debate is almost inextricable from the debate over which authority rules marriage." (p. 194.) Is marriage the purview of church or state or the individuals involved?

Initially, individuals decided if they were married or not. Their communities generally accepted their word for it, and that was that. The community knew the parties involved and knew and accepted the decisions of the couple regarding inheritance, kinship, children, etc.

In Roman times, when there was an argument over marriage, public registry was not a guiding consideration. "The Romans may never have defined it, but (like Americans and pornography) they knew it when they saw it. A judge sized up the couple’s ‘marital intentions’ by such signals as whether she’d brought a dowry, or whether he openly called her his wife." (Ibid.)

For Jews, through millennia, marriage is "a private act: only bride and groom could say the magic words that turned them into husband and wife." (Ibid.) And, in Jewish law courts cannot grant a divorce, they ". . . merely decide questions of fault and finances." (p. 195.)

"Christianity . . . wanted nothing to do with marriage for centuries." (Ibid.) Christians focused on the "second coming" and trying to manage their lustful desires. I have a friend who is a UU because he believes Christianity is still essentially anti-family. In time, the developing Church realized that it had an interest in controlling marriage as part of . . . "ordering Europe’s civil and political life." (Ibid.) That battle for control lasted over a thousand years. "It was not until 1215 that the Church decreed marriage a sacrament – the least important one, but a sacrament nonetheless – and set up a systematic canon law of marriage with a system of ecclesiastical courts to enforce it. . ." (p. 196.) But enforcement was difficult and sporadic among common people. The notion of "inner marriage" held sway. The Church system mostly served to manage power conflicts among and with nobility.

Protestants, on the other hand, fed up with the personal marriage ideals of people and their lack of enforcement by the Church, took an even more pro-active stance and moved " . . . from announced to pronounced."

. . . "the Protestants usually required . . . a priest, several witnesses, a public ceremony, parental consent up to age twenty-one or twenty-five or so, even a register of all births, deaths, and marriages. Yes, the Protestants still believed that the moment of marriage was when the two said their vows. But that moment was no longer a mystical sacrament, a concept the Protestants ridiculed openly. Rather, the Protestants insisted, marriage was – by definition – a secular status conferred by an outside authority. No Protestant group had the power to control that public recognition, or was prepared to spend a thousand years building that power. So they handed off marriage to their running mates for power, the rising nation-states. In 1525 Zurich flatly denied that private vows were valid, instead insisting that a marriage legally required at least "two pious, honorable, and incontestable witnesses. (p. 201.)

Thus, Protestants devised much of the current system, ceding power to the nation-states in their varied forms, with continued tweaking to the present. The Catholic Church, at the Council of Trent, followed suit in 1563.

In the last two centuries, "Free Love" movements arose on both sides of the Atlantic to challenge this control, but never gained public affirmation. Still, Graff maintains, they won. "The ability to dissolve marriage when love dissolves; the freedom to form sexual relationships based upon affection, without state sanction or intervention; equality between spouses in everything from property ownership to divorce; the idea that affection and companionship are marriage’s main goals; the free-lovers’ demands have been absorbed into our laws." (P. 207.) A significant missing piece is the expectation that this could also apply to same-sex couples, though there is no logical reason for it not to.

All of this shows that marriage is a cultural attempt, by church and/or state, to manage money, sex, kinship relationships, children, the social order of things, and the human heart. The success of control is directly related to the willingness of people to abide by the rules and/or to face whatever consequences may inhere in the refusal to obey the rules. Again, who has control of people’s behavior and how much control do they have? Difficulty in discerning this creates unease among people.

I think Lynn Darling captures some of the angst that has arisen in recent cultural wars over marriage:

Still, there’s something profoundly threatening to our nervous age about the idea that marriage itself isn’t working, as if without it we would have tossed out the last lifeboat. Having exchanged the extended family, the neighborhood bowling league, the two-party system, and the church social for the anonymous camaraderie of the gym and for Prozac’s hearty slap on the back, we are down to a nation of two. The state of marriage has become the barometer for measuring the culture’s decline, the porousness of its moral fiber. (Darling in Here Lies My Heart. P. 181.)

This uncertainty triggers fundamentalism as a hoped for source of stability.

In a curious fashion, Unitarian Universalists have maintained a centrist role in society by accepting and exercising our right as a religious body to proclaim marriages valid according to the rules of the states in which they reside (though some of my colleagues are refusing to sign marriage certificates for heterosexuals until same-sex couples have the same right). We also have an opposing role by pushing the boundaries of accepted marriage. In 1984, the year I attained preliminary fellowship as a Unitarian Universalist minister, the Unitarian Universalist Association voted to permit clergy to preside over same-sex "services of union" which would be fully acknowledged by our religious association, if not by the states.

We knew we could not confer federal privileges of marriage, but chose to acknowledge these unions within our religious communities.

Our UU governing body, the General Assembly, asserted that same-sex unions should be honored according to the values of our first five Principles: the inherent worth and dignity of every person; justice, equity and compassion in human relations; acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations; a free and responsible search for truth and meaning; and the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large. Those principles led this congregation to vote to affirm same–sex marriage as a civil right. This vote allows us, as a congregation, to take a stand against Ballot measure 36, as well as to work for the acceptance of same-sex marriage.

So what do I, as a minister and a person in a committed same-sex relationship, which was affirmed by this religious association through four ministers and 220 of our family and friends on December 23, 1991, think marriage is? First, I believe that neither church nor state makes my relationship what it is. My companion for life and I do, repeatedly. It is our constant re-affirmation of our desire and commitment to share our lives, to support our individual and collective dreams, to care for our individual and collective children, to remain sexually monogamous, and to encourage one another throughout all our days to come that makes our relationship, whether anyone else calls that a marriage or not. I have known that since I asked her to share my life more than fourteen years ago.

And I also know we do not do this in a vacuum. We spent a lot of time discussing the implications for our families and our religious institutions. I think we intuited what Lynn Darling learned at the funeral of her husband’s son, speaking of the people who came to share their grief:

But that day, it wasn’t their foibles that caught the light; it was the immense, tangled net of them, the strength of that net, the weight it could support. The terrible necessity of other people at last came home to me. (Darling. P. 195.)

I came to Unitarian Universalism because I knew I needed a religious community, and I especially know I need it to support my primary relationship with Judy. Thank you all for being here!

You see, what scares me and causes me to work for a legally state-sanctioned marriage is that I know if I have an accident and am unable to make decisions for myself, Judy can be forced out of that process by uncaring hospitals. If she dies before I do, I will have to pay hefty inheritance taxes that no opposite sex spouse would have to pay. If I predecease her, shirt-tail relatives could decide what to do with my remains, in spite of our most thoughtfully planned desires. Neither one of us is getting any younger, and these are but a few of the situations that stare us in the face. Yes, fear is a motivator in all this. I love her – and I am afraid for her and me as end-of-lie issues loom larger for us.

From an intellectual view, I am unhappy the federal government gets to decide about all these issues for us. Emotionally, I also ache for those of other religions who can’t even get acceptance from their own religious communities. It is not so simple as "rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s." Caesar is changing rapidly. I have come to believe that nation-sates are on their way out, and I don’t know what will replace them. Mega-corporations? What will that mean for marriage privileges, or will nation-states continue to manage such areas of life for most people? Will we be even more excluded systematically? I don’t want special rights. I want equal rights.

Marriage is a willingness to be open and vulnerable to another person, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Judy and I made our strongest connections emotionally and spiritually, long before we engaged the physical aspects of marriage. And we discussed and argued our relationship with a concerned eye to our families and our communities. We know we do not live in a vacuum. We must live in relationship with concentric communities, all of which have a real interest and investment in who we are and our choices for life. This sense of responsibility inheres to marriage, but the community needs to include us as well.

I guess I end with as many questions as answers, for the state of marriage is in flux as it probably always will be, with a delicate dance of concern for individuals, families, communities, and states in which we live. Marjorie Ingall opines, ""It’s healthy, I think, to reexamine old institutions and futz with them rather than throw them out entirely. Working for change from within lets you feel connected: turning your back entirely sets you adrift." (Ingall in "Going to the Temple" from Here Lies My Heart: Essays on Why Marry, Why We Don’t, and What We Find There. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. p. 31.) I, for one, choose to keep working from within, while being kept out.

You are being asked to choose as well. You can vote on important questions of marriage over the next few months. May our heads and our hearts work together, responding to our most dearly held values, so that we co-create a culture that stands on the side of love and against control for its own sake, with respect, responsibility, and relish for the process.

So Be It! Blessed Be!