That’s the claim a number religious leaders make in an open letter to Americans released this week:
Some posit that the principal threat to religious freedom posed by same-sex “marriage” is the possibility of government’s forcing religious ministers to preside over such “weddings,” on pain of civil or criminal liability. While we cannot rule out this possibility entirely, we believe that the First Amendment creates a very high bar to such attempts.
Instead, we believe the most urgent peril is this: forcing or pressuring both individuals and religious organizations—throughout their operations, well beyond religious ceremonies—to treat same-sex sexual conduct as the moral equivalent of marital sexual conduct. There is no doubt that the many people and groups whose moral and religious convictions forbid same-sex sexual conduct will resist the compulsion of the law, and church-state conflicts will result….
So, for example, religious adoption services that place children exclusively with married couples would be required by law to place children with persons of the same sex who are civilly “married.” Religious marriage counselors would be denied their professional accreditation for refusing to provide counseling in support of same-sex “married” relationships. Religious employers who provide special health benefits to married employees would be required by law to extend those benefits to same-sex “spouses.” Religious employers would also face lawsuits for taking any adverse employment action—no matter how modest—against an employee for the public act of obtaining a civil “marriage” with a member of the same sex.
Well, yes. All that is possible (though the Supreme Court did clarify this week that antidiscrimination laws do not apply to ministers employed by religious employers). It’s also nothing new. Already churches and religious groups impose all kinds of stipulations as to who may or may not marry that are not recognized by the state. Some churches, for example, do not permit members to marry outside the faith. Others forbid divorced members from remarrying (on the ground, in the case of the Catholic Church, that divorced people actually remain married to their first spouses notwithstanding the state's grant of a divorce). Still others refuse to recognize the validity of a marriage unless the couple was married according to certain religious rites.
And yet – despite the dozens of distinctions that various religious groups already make between those are merely civilly married and those who are properly and validly married for religious purposes – American life goes on. Religion continues to thrive. And the sky has not fallen in. Why same-sex marriage should somehow be the straw that breaks the back of religious liberty, the religious leaders never say.
Of course, no one ever said creating a society that gives everyone both the right to marry and the right to exercise their religion freely would be easy. Or that church-state conflicts would never arise. Or that resolving these conflicts in a manner that completely satisfies everyone would always be possible. No, freedom is not easy.
But then again, neither is following Christ. If these religious leaders – most of whom are Christian – really believe God requires them to oppose the legalization of same-sex marriage (but not other forms of civil marriage that are equally invalid according to their teachings), to fire at whim any gay employee who marries his or her lover (even when the employee is, say, a hard-working janitor who is also a good and decent man), and to stop gay couples from adopting children whose parents have died or abandoned them (even though permitting an atheist or even a Satanist couple to adopt apparently is perfectly fine so long as one spouse has a penis and the other a vagina) – if these religious leaders really believe the Holy Spirit is leading them to do all these things, then there's not much else to say.
Except, perhaps, this: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist…” (1 John 4:1-4). Then, perhaps, these religious leaders could ask some of us who are both gay and Christian how we reconcile our faith in Christ with our sexuality. They might even want to visit some of our churches, where Jesus is worshipped as Lord and Savior and same-sex unions are blessed in His name.
And, finally, they might wish to reexamine their own hearts, “for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love” (1 John 4:7-8).
So says the theologian D.G. Hart, whose book From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin:Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism is reviewed by Jordan Hylden in this month’s First Things. Money quote:
As Hart explains, evangelicals began in the nineteenth century as zealous reformers and social gospellers, and today they are only reverting to type. They believe in conversion, unexpected revival, and the timeless truth of the Bible. And so, more often than not, they tend to sit crossways to traditions and established institutions, to get impatient with gradualism and compromise, and to trouble the status quo with sweeping, radical reforms drawn directly from the pages of Scripture.
The lesson, at least as Hart (and Hylden) would have it, is that Evangelicals would be better off if they became more conservative in their outlook and started paying more attention to their own local parishes, schools, and neighborhoods than national politics. So far, so good. But then Hylden goes on to repeat Richard John Neuhaus's critique that "evangelicals had still not learned how to translate their biblically formed convictions into public political arguments." The point being, one is left to surmise, that they ought to do so because political arguments that effectively change American culture are worth making.
But I wonder. The way I read the New Testament, Jesus did not call us to reform society, whether through liberal or conservative means. He called us to start a new society, one that would not rely on the sword (or vote) for its survival, but on the promises of God. Jesus called this society the church. And if you read what the New Testament says about the church, it was anything but conservative. That’s why those who joined it and were faithful to its mission were persecuted and martyred.
But neither was the church “liberal” as we would understand that term today. Saint Paul had many negative things to say about the Greco-Roman world in which he lived. But his answer to those problems was not to petition the Emperor for reform. Or to convene a convention of likeminded folks to establish a new political order. Or to write long treatises addressed to the Pagan world showing exactly where their political and ethical thinking had gone awry in the hope that such educational efforts would eventually set them aright.
Paul's answer was at once more mundane and, history has shown, more effective. It was this:
And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought: But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory: Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. (1 Cor. 2:1-8; KJV)
This is something those of us who are trying to change the church's mind about homosexuality and same-sex marriage would do well to remember.
So the Pope thinks same-sex marriage threatens "the future of humanity." Why? Because the traditional family, “based on the marriage of a man and a woman,” is “not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society. Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself.”
Funny. By that logic, those who enter the Catholic priesthood must be threats since they neither marry nor have children. Jesus must also be a threat since he seemed to dismiss the value of the traditional "family" (cf. Matt. 12:50 (NIV): "For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother"). But the greatest threat may be St. Paul. He not only exhorted the unmarried to remain single as he was, but he urged all men to refrain from having sexual relations (see 1 Cor. 7:1-8). Needless to say, if everyone followed Paul's advice, the human race would go extinct fairly quickly.
As I argued earlier, if we look at exactly what it is that Christians promise one another when they marry, it is pretty easy to see why bestiality is wholly incompatible with Christian marriage. In short, a dog not only cannot marry a man, but it literally cannot even vow to do so.
I would argue the same thing can be said of polygamists. Let’s start with an easy exa mple. We have all heard of the biblical King Solomon and his 700 wives (and if not, see 1 Kings 11:1-3). It's relatively easy for us to imagine Solomon having sex with all of them (though not, perhaps, all at once). We can even imagine that he had some sort of genuine intimacy and affection for them (though I myself probably would not have been able to remember all of their names, let alone their birthdates, favorite foods, and so forth).
But however wise Solomon may have been, he was still a finite creature bound by the limits of time and space. As such, it would have been impossible for him to give each of his 700 wives the kind of sustained care and attention that is envisioned in the Christian wedding vows. Indeed, Solomon could not have done something as simple as asking each of them how she was doing on a daily basis. At least not if the conversation was to last longer than a minute or two. There are, after all, only 1440 minutes in a day.
But Solomon is an easy example. What about three people who say they are in love? And – just to make sure we're not allowing our feminist sensibilities to cloud our judgment – what if the three happen to be women?
Again, it's easy to imagine them having sex and perhaps even sharing mutual feelings of romantic and erotic love. But could they all three fulfill for one another, over the course of a lifetime, the rigid demands of the church’s wedding vows? I doubt it. To have and hold another person, to love and cherish that person, and to do all this regardless of circumstance requires a genuine willingness to submit to that person (cf. Eph. 5:21).
But “[n]o one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other” (Matt. 6:24). And that, I would argue, is why polyamarous relationships will inevitably fail from a Christian standpoint. Sooner or later – and probably on a daily basis – at least two of the lovers will make valid but competing demands on the third, requiring the third to choose between the two. And the moment she does so, she will be breaking her vow to the other. And because these kinds of conflicts are both foreseeable and inevitable, three or more persons cannot truthfully vow to join their lives together in Christian marriage.
Or so it seems to me. But, then again, I have never actually met anyone involved in a polyamarous relationship. I doubt Rick Santorum or most traditionalists have either. And that really is the fatal flaw of the so-called polygamy/bestiality challenge to same-sex marriage. If someday I fall in love with another man and ask my family, friends, and church to bless our union, I expect and hope their response will be based on an honest assessment of the quality of our relationship – including our willingness and ability to make the Christian wedding vows and faithfully carry them out – not on the unknown and unknowable short-comings of hypothetical polygamists and man-dog couples.
I will even go further and insist that genuine Christian love, agape, requires exactly this kind of individualized response. When, for example, a young man asks his girlfriend’s father for his daughter’s hand in marriage, no one would begrudge that father if he had honest objections because, say, he felt the couple were too young and too caught up in the throes of first love to make a rational decision. But what if the father said: “Yes, you say you love my daughter and promise to treat her well and make her happy. And, thus far, you appear to have done so. But I still refuse to give my blessing because, by that logic, I might as well as let her marry her best friend Cindy or even her cat Socks”? In the real world, if any father did say that, we wouldn't bother with pointing out the flaws of his logic. We would be urging him to see the next available psychiatrist.
The challenge of the gay rights movement is to show our loved ones why Rick Santorum’s polygamy/bestiality argument against same-sex marriage ought to elicit exactly the same response from them.
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.
