Earlier I wrote about the so-called polygamy challenge to same-sex marriage, which Rick Santorum recently made before a crowd of hostile New Hampshire college students. The gist of it is that, if two people of the same sex ought to have a right to marry simply because they are in love, why shouldn’t three people in love have the same right? Or four? And - as Rick Santorum and other traditionalists have also suggested - if love is an adequate justification of same-sex marriage, why shouldn’t it justify bestiality, too?
Most of us realize there is something faulty about this argument, and yet it is not always easy to articulate exactly what that is. The first problem, I would suggest, is the contention that gay rights advocates claim same-sex marriage is justified by love. We often say that in everyday conversation, of course, but I don’t think most of us really believe it. At least not if what we mean by “love” are those feelings of romantic and erotic desire that are commonly associated with the experience of falling in love. Why? Because we now have proof, in the form of functional MRI brain scans, that what the poets and our mothers have told us all along about this kind of love is true: it doesn’t last. Sooner or later, it will either change into a more stable (and hopefully deeper) kind of love – or else it will die off.
Of course, this does not mean that feelings of romantic and erotic love – and the bonds they help to create – are unimportant. It just means, as the ancient Greeks knew, that Eros is a notoriously fickle god. Today a lover will proclaim his undying love for his beloved; tomorrow he will tell her he has fallen out of love. It happens every day. And even when it doesn’t – even when two people manage to find lasting happiness – this is not, as C.S. Lewis has pointed out, “solely because they are great lovers but because they are also – I must put it crudely – good people; controlled, loyal, fair-minded, mutually adaptable people.”
We can all come up with factors that could be added to Lewis’s list of what makes marriage work. But if we are to think in explicitly Christian terms, surely one of the most important factors must be the couple’s willingness to stand before their families, friends and God and truthfully make the kind of promises set forth in the church’s wedding vows. As the Book of Common Prayer puts them:
I, N., take thee N., to my wedded (wife) (husband), to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.
It is exactly here, when we examine exactly what it is that Christians promise when they marry, that we hit upon the main fault in Santorum’s comparison of same-sex marriage to bestiality and polygamy. There is nothing about the church’s wedding vows that depend on gender. Two men and two women can, at least in theory, fulfill those vows just as faithfully as can a man and woman.
The same cannot be said of human-animal pairings. A man may love his dog, and he may love it deeply. But dogs do not talk. A dog therefore cannot even say the Christian wedding vows, let alone understand what those vows mean and meaningfully assent to them. This is one reason why we can be certain that, whatever (hopefully non-sexual!) bond may unite a man and his dog, it is different in kind from the bond that unites two spouses.
But what of polygamy? That is a question I will turn to in my next post.
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