Equal Rites: Why All the Fuss?

Martha Hodges - 2006-07-30

Ten years ago, delegates from Unitarian Universalist congregations around the country came together at their General Assembly and voted to pass the following Action of Immediate Witness that I will read in part:

Because Unitarian Universalists affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person; and

Because marriage is held in honor among the blessings of life; and

WHEREAS debate about legally recognized marriage of same-sex couples has focused on the objections of certain religious communities, while the Unitarian Universalist Association has adopted numerous resolutions over the last twenty-six years supporting equal rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons, including support of Ceremonies of Union between members of the same sex; and

WHEREAS the Unitarian Universalist Association Board of Trustees and the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association have voted their support for the right to marry for same-sex couples;

THEREFORE be it resolved that the 1996 General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association adopts a position in support of legal recognition for marriage between members of the same sex;

BE IT finally resolved that the 1996 General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association urges the member congregations to proclaim the worth of marriage between any two committed persons and to make this position known in their home communities.

This resolution was passed ten years ago, and as it states, this denomination has been affirming equal rights for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people since 1970. Our own congregation recently reaffirmed its status as a Welcoming Congregation, meaning that we not only welcome and affirm LGBT persons here; we also resolve to work together to secure recognition of their rights in the larger community.

I know that some of you may not entirely agree with the sentiments expressed in this statement, nor with the decision to hang a banner from this building in support of marriage equality. As equal marriage rights are getting cut down in state after state, it’s time for us to explore this issue in some depth, and time for me to justify why I am committed to the legal recognition of same-sex marriages. It is your right to disagree with me, just as it is my duty to speak my mind to you. It is such conversations that challenge us all to examine our beliefs and commitments. This is how we grow as spiritual people and as a community bound together by love and mutual respect.

The idea of gays and lesbians entering into marriages that are recognized by the state, as well as by churches such as this one, evokes a visceral objection is some people, an intellectual one in others. But why should anyone care what emotional, legal and spiritual bonds other people make with each other? To understand what these objections are all about, we need to look at what marriage is all about – what it means to us as a society and as individuals.

Marriage is an odd institution, by any understanding. First of all, promising to love someone for the rest of your life seems like a gamble, at the very least. And we’re all familiar with the statistics: this promise proves impossible to carry out in roughly fifty percent of marriages. And that’s just those that end in divorce. It doesn’t even try to measure the number of marriages that continue despite the unhappiness of one or both partners. And yet… What an idea! What a profound and heroic thing to do! To commit to what is best in yourself and your partner – your capacity to love without conditions, your capacity to hope and to believe in a shared future of deepening love – This leap of faith is one that most of us – gay or straight – are called by love to make at some point in our lives.

It has not always been thus. Marriage was not always about love. Marriage was originally about money and property – a business transaction – and it still is, in less obvious ways. And this brings up the other odd thing about marriage. It is at once a spiritual and a legal covenant. It is about law and love – finances and heart – two very different kinds of commitment coexisting within one institution – sometimes uneasily.

Back in the bad old days, when women enjoyed roughly the same legal and social status as oxen, the bride was considered property, given to the groom and his family in exchange for protection for the woman and her future children. A dowry was negotiated and passed from one family to the other. The wedded pair depended on each other’s labor, and the labor of their children, for their very survival. Women were as likely as men to engage in hard physical labor. Cooperation was essential, as were the kinship systems extended by means of the marriage agreement. Marriage was anything but a private matter. It determined your social and economic power. It determined the passing of property between generations. It determined the legitimacy and, hence, the survival of your children, and the survival of society. Divorce was unthinkable because of this interdependency and because marriage was not about feelings, or choice.

With the rise of capitalism and industrialization, all this changed. Couples no longer form a work team centered in the home. Individualism and the concept that you can take your skills and brains and create your own future now come into play. You now have a choice about whether to marry, when and whom to marry and how many children to have, if any. Gender equality has changed the nature of marriage. But it has been a rocky road. At every step along the way, change has been resisted with cries that the death of marriage and of civilized society was imminent. Listen to some of these expressions of outraged protest:

Can you guess what the issue in question was in this case? A New York State legislative committee pronounced: [The proposed legislation] would lead to “infidelity in the marriage bed, a high rate of divorce, and increased female criminality,” while turning marriage from its “high and holy purposes” into something arranged for “convenience and sensuality.” The Times of London intoned that this reform was “contrary to the law of God and would destroy the institution of marriage with one thoughtless blow.” The issue? Allowing women to own property. The year was 1844. And marriage survived.

On legalizing contraception, this 1876 pamphlet asked: “Why should men and women marry? Friendship between men and women, if possible at all, is as possible outside marriage as inside. If contraception becomes respectable, comparatively few people will marry… because the natural reason for marriage, physical satisfaction, will be obtainable, without loss of respectability, outside marriage.” And in 1926, the Atlantic Monthly editorialized “Contraception challenges the permanence of the State… Such activity is distinctly antisocial, for it enables selfish people to escape their responsibility, ultimately to their own detriment and the injury of the State.” No less than Teddy Roosevelt opined that legalizing contraception was “committing race suicide… Willful sterility inevitably produces and accentuates every hideous form of vice.” And the Archbishop of New York pronounced: “It is not what the God of nature and grace, in his divine wisdom, ordained marriage to be;… Religion shudders at the wild orgy of atheism and immorality the situation forebodes.” Sound familiar? Yet marriage survived.

Or how about this? “ It is the doctrine of all civilized nations. It is according to the revealed law and the law of nature. The family, long supposed to be the best anchored of all social institutions, appears at last to have broken from its moorings.” This was the opinion of a Mississippi judge. It was the nineteenth century, and the issue was awarding child custody to mothers. And yet, marriage survived.

Can you guess what prompted this outcry from a judge in Tennessee? “We might have in Tennessee the father living with his daughter, the son with the mother, the brother with the sister, in lawful wedlock, because they had formed such relations in a state or country where they were not prohibited. Yet none of these are more revolting, more to be avoided, or more unnatural than the case before us.” The issue was interracial marriage, and the year was 1872. Yet marriage survived.

Or this: Any such proposal “criticizes the Bible, degrading the holy bonds of matrimony into a mere civil contract, striking at the root of those divinely ordained principles upon which is built the superstructure of society.” This on improving the condition of women. Yet marriage survived.

And listen to this opinion of Yale President Timothy Dwight: “Within a moderate period, the whole community will be thrown, by laws made in open opposition to the Laws of God, into general prostitution…” The year was 1816 and he was talking about divorce. “To the eye of God, those who are polluted in each of these modes (divorce and prostitution) are alike, and equally impure, loathsome, abandoned wretches, and the offspring of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Yet marriage survived through all of these social and legal upheavals. Did it change? Absolutely, and a good thing, too. But marriage did not expire, nor did civilization as we know it.

I share this record of change and resistance with you to make two points: First of all, marriage is not a static institution. It has evolved, and continues to evolve, in response to economic and societal changes. And secondly, these changes have not been random. Looked at cumulatively, these developments in the understanding of the rights and responsibilities of marriage all point in the same direction – toward greater personal freedoms – specifically, the freedom of women – and toward the definition of marriage as a voluntary covenant, entered into for the purpose of greater happiness and spiritual fulfillment. Happiness and fulfillment that depend on the presence of real – that is – legally recognized – choice.

Marriage no longer depends on the weaker position of one of the participants or on the perceived unfitness of one gender or the other to perform certain roles. As gender roles have opened up, it is no longer economically or socially necessary for marriage to be confined to the union of man and woman. The question of the legal right of gays and lesbians to be married in the eyes of the law is but one more step in this progression toward the practice of marriage as a union of equals, entered into without economic or social coercion – a true union of love and mutual responsibility.

But why does it have to be marriage? Why can’t civil unions suffice? Don’t we need to restrict marriage itself to heterosexuals, in the words of one writer, as a kind of “seatbelt on the roller coaster of social change?” Well, the truth is, the roller coaster is open to all and, gays and straights, we’re all on it together. It has left the ticket booth far behind. Hang on and enjoy the ride.

But, some will say, civil unions are recognized by law and afford the same privileges as marriage, don’t they? Well, actually, they don’t. Questions of property division, the right to sue for wrongful death in the event of partner’s demise, inheritance of property, the right to visit a partner in the hospital and make medical decisions for that partner, custody of children in the event of death or separation – these are just a few of the privileges of married couples that are up for grabs when it comes to civil unions or domestic partnerships. There are no fewer than 1,049 federal laws that discriminate against same-sex partners and make certain that none of these rights of civil union are guaranteed under the law.

But there is something much more at stake here. By refusing same-sex couples the right to legally marry – not just form civil unions, but to be married in the eyes of the law and society – we are implicitly (or in many cases, explicitly) saying that those of us who are gay or lesbian are less than those of us who are heterosexual. That gays and lesbians are second-class; that their love is not legitimate and their families are suspect.

In the words of E.J. Graff, author of the book What Is Marriage For? “To marry, in the public sense, means to expect the world to treat your life as shared – to announce that your sexual partner has first claim on you and your efforts. For the couple to fulfill the wedding vows that make mothers and strangers weep, that claim must be honored by others, in things large and small, from holiday invitations to burial instructions. From conversation to finance, the couple’s bond can never entirely be severed from the polis, the collective, the society in which they live.”

The bottom line is this: If the loves of gays and lesbians don’t count the way the loves of heterosexuals do, aren’t we saying that their lives don’t count? That, because of who they are, some of our brothers and sisters are not entitled to all the blessings of life?

Listen to these words from the Reverend Bill Sinkford, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, in response to state courts’ decisions to deny full legal status to marriages of same-sex couples:

“The Unitarian Universalist Association has a long-standing and deeply held religious commitment to support full civil equality for all loving couples. The court's decision reinforces the commitment of Unitarian Universalists everywhere to combat homophobia and to end legal discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons… We must also acknowledge that our society is still a long way from honoring every person's inherent worth and dignity.”

"Laws aimed at discriminating against bisexual, gay, lesbian, and transgender people are affronts to all people, no matter their sexual or gender orientation. These laws have been used to separate and divide us from one another; their intent is to support discrimination and make some people in our country second-class citizens. Unitarian Universalists across our country will continue [our] efforts, grounded in faith, which call us to support everyone's full humanity, everyone's ability to love, and everyone's value in the world."

As Sinkford so clearly says, this is a religious commitment. Not a political one, but a religious one. Because it is our faith or lack of faith in the inherent worth and dignity of every person – regardless of gender or sexual orientation – that must determine whether or not we “stand on the side of love” in this matter. The decision to marry is a personal matter. Religious commitment is a personal matter. But justice – the living out of those religious beliefs -- is never merely personal. Making justice is not a secondary or an optional outgrowth of spirituality. The two are wound together in the life of a church, inseparable.

As the former president of the UUA and head of Amnesty International, Bill Schulz, said in our opening words:
This is the mission of our faith:

"To teach the fragile art of hospitality;

To revere both the critical mind and the generous heart;

To prove that diversity need not mean divisiveness;

And to witness to all that we must hold the whole world in our hands."

To witness to all that we must hold the whole world in our hands. In the name of love and reason, the twin legacies of our Universalist and Unitarian faith, how can we do any less?

All quotations (except where noted) are from What Is Marriage For? by E.J. Graff (Boston, Beacon Pr., 2004)