The Paradoxes of Gay Marriage

The Paradoxes Of Gay Marriage

Gay marriage is a defining issue. The position that an individual and society as a whole take on it reveals much about their social philosophy, their religious views and experience, and their (attitudes towards) sexuality. At the social and political level, the question about whether to introduce some form of legalised gay marriage relates to fundamental issues of equality and liberty. At the religious level, teachings about marriage – being such a fundamental and universal feature of human cultures – touch upon core elements of belief; and the idea of gay marriage is naturally viewed by many as challenging those traditional teachings and, by extension, the religions themselves. And at the sexual level, the idea that marriage – previously the exclusive prerogative of heterosexuality – could also be opened up to gays and lesbians challenges the barriers separating different forms of sexuality that cultures have traditionally set up; marriage being one of the main ones.

The concept of gay marriage is, among other things, another illustration of the interplay between secular liberalism and traditional Christianity within modern Western culture, and the attempt to reach a synthesis between the two. With respect to legislation, this involves a situation whereby the extent to which our laws embody liberal tolerance and protection for different lifestyles and activities is limited by a moral framework that is Christian in origin, if not necessarily consistent with any specific form of doctrinal Christianity (e.g. evangelicalism or Catholicism). (See my discussion of 14 December on this in the context of the laws on drugs and prostitution.) UK civil partnerships (formally recognised gay relationships that have a similar legal and fiscal status to marriages – introduced at the end of 2005) embody these contradictory pulls. On the one hand, they give to gay people a greater degree of equality with the straight population than they have ever enjoyed. They are effectively gay civil marriages in all but name, involving ceremonies and a legal contract that are almost identical to those of straight civil marriages; which are carried out by the same registrars who officiate at straight civil marriages; and are treated by the couples and their friends and families – and indeed are referred to in popular parlance – as gay marriages.

And yet, the law stopped short of officially calling them gay marriages. Why? For the same reason that it took so long to introduce civil partnerships themselves: that the country at large (or so it was thought) still held dear the view that marriage can only be between a man and a woman; and because the UK is still ‘officially’ (in terms of the established order) a Christian country. In other words, the legislation stopped short of being truly egalitarian and liberal (allowing gay couples to have an equal status – marriage – to straight couples) because of Christian-derived moral scruples. In the same way, it has also been argued that civil partnerships discriminate against unmarried straight couples, in that they are open only to gay couples. And, again, the reason why civil partnerships were not made available to straight people was because they had their own form of it: civil or religious marriage. Adding a third type of legal status (or should we say, rather, making the same legal status available to both straight and gay people?) would only confuse people about the meaning of these different things and undermine marriage (straight marriage, that is). Therefore, gay civil partnerships were to be viewed as the ‘gay equivalent to’ straight civil marriages; but, at the same time, they are not in fact deemed to be equivalent = of equal value to straight marriage. Hence, while the straight variety is called marriage, the gay version is called a partnership.

The thing is a conceptual mess; and yet, at the same time, it’s a very British compromise: a pragmatic solution that ‘gives gays what they want’, addresses the demands (at least in part) of the liberals, and retains marriage as the preserve of heterosexuals, in line with the Christian tradition. But like all compromises, this keeps everyone happy while definitively satisfying no one. The ultimate battleground, if it can be called that, is over the meaning of marriage (the word and the status) itself, and whether that can and should be extended to gay couples.

In my Myspace blog of yesterday (see http://blog.myspace.com/culturalcritique), I argued that the social consensus about the meaning and purpose of marriage has broken down. In a way, there seems little point – from a philosophical or semantic point of view – haggling over whether to allow gay civil partnerships to be ‘upgraded’ and be officially referred to as marriages, and / or to allow unmarried straight relationships to be formally recognised as civil partnerships. (In fact, I argued for some version of this latter option in the blog entry just referred to.) This is because until we know what we mean by marriage, what we call the relationships in question will remain extremely relative or arbitrary. It is ironic that gay people, not just in the UK but around the world, are campaigning for the introduction of gay marriage at a time when the meaning of marriage has never been in greater doubt.

Opponents of gay marriage would of course say that this is not ironic but that there is a causal relationship: the more the concept of gay marriage is accepted, the less there is consensus about and assent to traditional ideas about marriage. But even that’s not really the full picture because one of the reasons why many gay people want to see gay marriage become a reality is because they do cherish traditional ideas about marriage (e.g. exclusivity, life-long fidelity, self-giving in love, even family) but just long for it to be accepted that these can take expression in gay relationships as well as straight.

This difficulty in reaching consensus about the meaning of marriage, and consequently about the possibility or not of extending marriage to gay people, is a stumbling block only if one thinks it is necessary to achieve that consensus in a definitive way, based on what I referred to above as some sort of synthesis of secular-liberal and Christian-traditional frames of reference. My own view is that it is not possible to reach this consensus, because orthodox Christian faith – whether Catholic or evangelical – can and will never accept it. This is because, putting it simply, the heterosexual nature of marriage is a core element of dogma: orthodox teaching that the faithful have an obligation to accept. Nevertheless, the attempt to realise a synthesis between the liberal and the Christian – not just in connection with marriage but across the board – is in my view a (perhaps the) fundamental project of modern Western culture. Liberalism itself – in its ‘pure’ or ‘radical’ form – is not comprehensible without taking into account the Christian tradition and heritage from which it evolved and which it took forward.

So efforts will continue to introduce an official status for gay marriage, which I suppose might be referred to in the law along the lines of ‘marriage between persons born with or currently having the same physical sex as each other’ (but let’s not complicate things by getting onto the trans-gender issue . . .). And parallel with these efforts, there will be an attempt or desire to obtain general socio-cultural recognition of gay marriage as being in the full sense equivalent to straight marriage. This latter aspiration will not be ultimately successful, for the religious reasons just mentioned, as well as for anthropological reasons (to do with the role of marriage in reproduction and family) that I haven’t had time to go into here.

But if you don’t strive to achieve this elusive higher-level of acceptance of gay marriage (as an instance, indeed, of the marriage of liberal tolerance with Christianity), there is no reason why one can’t accept a secular definition and understanding of gay marriage that could be enshrined in law. What you might then end up with is church marriages (and marriages in other religions) remaining exclusively heterosexual (although it’s always possible that some liberal churches might eventually introduce gay matrimony); straight and gay civil marriages – complete equality there; and straight and gay civil partnerships (or some new term that would encompass existing gay civil partnerships that the couples involved chose not to ‘upgrade’ to marriages, and was made available to unmarried straight couples).

Whatever the eventual mix of legal statuses for gay and straight couples that was adopted, such a set up would be dependent on accepting a separation between the religious and secular understanding of marriage. And that doesn’t mean that a ‘secular’ (civil) marriage, for either a gay or straight couple, can’t have a private or publicly celebrated religious significance of its own. But there should be a renunciation of the painful and ultimately fruitless endeavour to get official (civil) gay marriage accepted as marriage in the full sense by the Church; or, putting it in a less Western-centric and more multi-faith way, by all of the main faith traditions in our society.