Date: Sat, 19 Aug 1995 15:25:16 -0500 From: mohr richard d Understanding Gay Marriage by Richard D. Mohr (November 1993, rev. January 1994) On Monday May 2nd, CBS will broadcast the first gay wedding in television history. Two minor, recurring characters on _Northern Exposure_ will be declared husband and husband in the fictional town of Cicely, Alaska. Reality may soon imitate art -- in Hawaii. The state's Supreme Court has ruled that same-sex marriages have the highest level of constitutional protections, and so the state's legislature now faces the prospect of having to legalize gay marriages. The legislature is stumped -- at once cringing and writhing. The nation as a whole isn't thrilled either: if you're married in Hawaii, you're married everywhere. Last October, a draft report from a national Lutheran study group on sexuality called for the blessing and even legal acknowledgment of loving committed relations only to have the group's director fired in the ensuing firestorm of protest from pews and pulpits. Usually in religious, ethical, and legal thinking, issues are settled with reference to a thing's goodness. Oddly the debate over gay marriage has focused not on whether the thing is good but whether the thing can even exist. Those opposing gay marriage say that the very definition of marriage rules out the possibility that gay couples can be viewed as married. But the definitions of marriage which one finds in dictionaries, even legal ones, are circular. They define marriage in terms of spouses, spouses in terms of husband and wife, and husband and wife in terms of marriage. No explanation is given for why a marriage's partners must be of different sexes. Sometimes judges and pontiffs try to give a functional definition by claiming that the defining purpose of marriage is childbearing and rearing. But any definition that tethers marriage to procreation is at once too narrow and too wide. On the one hand, we let people over sixty marry, though their unions will be childless. And on the other, we forbid certain extremely fertile marital unions -- polygamous ones. What then is marriage after all? Marriage is intimacy given substance in the medium of everyday life, the day-to-day. Marriage is the fused intersection of love's sanctity and necessity's demand. We do not count as marriages Great Loves, like Antony and Cleopatra or Catherine and Heathcliff, whose loves burn gloriously but too intensely ever to be manifest in a medium of breakfasts and tire-changes. Neither do we count roommates, even "domestic partners," as married if all that they do is share the common necessities of life (food, housing, and the like). Marriage requires the presence and blending of both necessity and intimacy. Life's necessities are a mixed fortune: they are frequently drag, dross, and cussedness, yet they can constitute opportunity, abidingness, and the prospect of nurture. They are the field across which, the medium through which, and the ground from which the intimacies which we consider marital flourish, blossom, and come to fruition. This required blending of intimacy and the everyday explains much of the legal content of marriage -- including its various privacy rights, like the spousal immunity against compelled testimony, and a vast array of protections against the occasions when necessity is cussed rather than opportune, especially when life is marked by changed circumstance -- crisis, illness, and destruction. Currently society and its discriminatory impulse make gay coupling very difficult. Still even against oppressive odds, gays have shown an amazing tendency to nest. The portraits of gay and lesbian committed relationships that emerge from ethnographic studies, like Kath Weston's _Families We Choose_ (1991), suggest that in the ways gay and lesbian couples arrange their lives, they fulfill the definition of marriage in an exemplary manner. Both the development of intimacy through choice and the proper valuing of love are interwoven in the day- to-day activities of gay couples. Choice improves intimacy. It makes sacrifices meaningful. It gives love its proper weight. Those lesbian and gay males couples who have survived the odds show that the structure of more usual couplings is not a matter of destiny, but of personal responsibility. The so-called basic unit of society turns out not to be a unique atom, but can adopt different parts and be adapted to different needs. Given, then, the nature of marriage and the nature of gay relations, it is time for religion and law to let them merge. -30-