Sex, Sacrament, and Civil Society

            In a world so flooded with sexual images and energies that it has reached a Brave New Level of boredom, it seems only the eccentricities retain any possibility to excite.  Hence our current seeming fascination with such matters as “same-sex marriage.”  In the last few years, some have insisted that we should ban same-sex marriage by legislative fiat.  Most recently, this country’s highest court has taken the opposite approach by banning any and all such bans by its own judicial fiat

            But, as usual, they are all wrong.  Or at least, that is not the whole story.

            That cannot be the whole story because to presume that it is such is to hold to the fallacious belief that marriage is a mere human creation of positive law: the Supreme Court decision treated the issuing of marriage licenses as if it were merely another service, to be provided to all equally.  It was also ruled that all states must recognize such marriages equally, as they would recognize any contract entered into in another state.

            The decision was, from one perspective, quite logical.  But to see marriage as merely a contact or service is to recognize only its most narrow dimensions.  In its broader theological dimensions, marriage is not a contact, but a covenant, and even a sacrament.  These are facts, and they must be emphasized, lest the reductionist tendencies of a society overly enamored of purely legal solutions lull us into too flat a view of civil society itself, and of what was once referred to with no hint of irony as “holy matrimony.”

            Marriage is not a mere service, to be offered to all indiscriminately; it is not a creation of law or government, to be defined or redefined as each generation sees fit.  Ultimately, marriage is a natural thing, and the laws we make concerning it only reflect the nature of the thing and put the force of government behind its enablement and preservation—much as a law forbidding murder only reflects the naturally-intuited reality that killing another human being is wrong (although certain mitigating circumstances might make it justified).  The institution of marriage, the crime of murder, and—to add a third, even clearer example—the law of gravity: three examples of natural law, where our written laws about them are more descriptive than prescriptive.  The first is as old as Eve, the second as old as Adam and the image of God he bore, and the last is as old as the universe.  Some things cannot be changed.

            Legally, one can create a phenomenon called “same-sex marriage” and require that it be recognized as a valid contact, but such actions would not grant that relationship the fuller dimensions of natural and sacramental marriage.  You can grant a tree a degree in mathematics, but it still won’t be able to do sums.  You can call a “ménage a deux” of two men a “marriage” if you wish, but it still won’t be able to produce children, or the “one flesh” union of which they are the common natural result.  Naturally and sacramentally speaking, a marriage that produces no children is still a marriage, but a coupling which cannot do so even in principle is not.

            Theologically speaking, therefore, it is pointless to speak of banning or requiring same-sex marriage, as it is pointless to speak of banning antigravity rocks that fall upward.   In both cases, you cannot ban the thing because it does not exist (although I could be wrong about the rocks: there are more things in Heaven and on Earth…). 

            So here is where we must make a distinction.  Along with unification (realizing that two apparently different things share a common nature or origin), making distinctions is one of our most powerful tools for intellectual progress.  The ancients, for example, understood the concept of weight to be the tendency of heavier objects to fall towards the center (read them.  They are quite clear on this).  What they did not understand was that this meant “the local center of gravitational attraction” (in our case, Earth) and not “the center of the Universe.”  They were unaware that these were two separate things.  Once they distinguished between the two (and it was probably difficult to do this before Newton’s work on universal gravitation), they were able to make much more sense of the universe Copernicus had shown them: one where Earth was the center of local gravitational attraction (i.e. the place dropped stuff falls towards), but not the center of all.

            Perhaps it is time for us likewise to make some distinctions.  The Supreme Court’s decision was founded at least partly on an act of unification: if all are equal, then one cannot grant a contract to couple A and deny it to couple B.  This is all well and good, so long as it extends only to the logic of contracts.  However, we must distinguish such purely legal “marriages” from marriage as a natural and even a sacramental thing. How, I wonder, would—or should—such legal “marriages” differ from the previous idea of “civil unions”?  I do not know, as I suspect many others do not (do the courts?).  There is much to discuss here, and it is far too important to be short-circuited by rash legal action or the foolish assumption that we are all already on the same page; here civil society has a crucial role to play, I suspect, if we have the courage for it.

             Freedom of religion is an American right than which none can be more fundamental—unless it be the right to life.  The recent Supreme Court ruling must not be used to force religious persons or organizations to violate their consciences, canons, or creeds.  Secular democracy is a balancing act, and rarely is that act more difficult than when we are trying to manage the relationship between church and state.

            So here we are again, at the place where church and state, law and liturgy, meet.  For some time, the question of church-state relations has repeatedly been answered by the Church’s retreat from one area of life after another, as the state expands into the vacuums thus created.  The same thing has happened with other aspects of civil society, even the family itself.  Jefferson was right: governments tend to grow larger, and rarely shrink.  Civil society has given up much space to government, but if government demands that the Church yield marriage up to government monopoly, it will have demanded what the Church can never yield. 

            And yet, such demands are not necessary, if we can only learn to make some important distinctions.  We must distinguish among the different dimensions of what we call “marriage”: legal, natural, sacramental.  Bearing those in mind, we can continue the discussing of such things as “same-sex marriages” and “civil unions,” and hopefully, we can do so in a civil manner and at a civil level.  Let us hope so.  A healthy democracy requires skillful shaping, like a sculpture; but judges wield gavels, and when hammers get involved, sculptures tend to go to pieces.