Gay marriage and the church

Being inclusive of all people is core tenet of the Episcopal Church and they began allowing same-sex marriage in , days after the United States Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. Many of the largest U.S. religious institutions have remained firmly against allowing same-sex marriage, including the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Jewish movement and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as the Southern Baptist Convention and other evangelical Protestant denominations.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- A Catholic priest can bless a gay or other unmarried couple as long as it is not a formal liturgical blessing and does not give the impression that the Catholic Church is blessing the union as if it were a marriage, the Vatican doctrinal office said. Today, various Christian denominations are accepting of homosexuality and transgender identity and inclusive of homosexual and transgender people, such as the Episcopal Church, [8] the Presbyterian Church, [9] United Church of Christ, and the Metropolitan Community Church.

My purpose today is not to support or defend gay and lesbian marriages—indeed, many gays and lesbians do not want to marry—but simply suggest a theological approach that might open up the possibility for greater Christian acceptance of, and ecclesiastical approval for, same sex unions.

My concern is with the church—what she believes, what she celebrates, and what she proclaims. Many Christians are keen to resurrect the old pro-choice mantra touted by some Catholic politicians: personally opposed, but publicly none of my business. I want Christians to see why this issue matters and why—when same-sex marriage became the law of the land—the integrity of the family was weakened and the freedom of the church was threatened.

Perhaps you believe that homosexual behavior is biblically unacceptable. Any legal system which distinguishes marriage from other kinds of relationships and associations will inevitably exclude many kinds of unions in its definition. The state denies marriage licenses to sexual threesomes. It denies marriage licenses to eight-year-olds. There are an almost infinite number of friendship and kinship combinations which the state does not recognize as marriage.

You can have one friend or three friends or a hundred. You can live with your sister, your mother, your grandfather, your dog, or three buddies from work. In the traditional view, marriage is the union of a man and a woman. Marriage, in the traditional view, is a prepolitical institution. It is a sad irony that those who support same-sex marriage on libertarian grounds are actually ceding to the state a vast amount of heretofore unknown power.

No longer is marriage treated as a prepolitical entity which exists independent of the state. Now the state defines marriage and authorizes its existence.

catholic views on same-sex marriage bbc bitesize

We must consider why the state has bothered to recognize marriage in the first place. Why not let people have whatever relationships they choose and call them whatever they want? Why go to the trouble of sanctioning a specific relationship and giving it a unique legal standing? The reason is that the state has an interest in promoting the familial arrangement whereby a mother and a father raise the children that came from their union.

The state has been in the marriage business for the common good and for the well-being of the society it is supposed to protect. Kids do better with a mom and a dad. It assumes the indistinguishability of gender in parenting, the relative unimportance of procreation in marriage, and the near infinite flexibility as to what sorts of structures and habits lead to human flourishing. That hardly seems fair. But to equate the previous sentence with a right to same-sex marriage begs the question.

It assumes that same-sex partnerships actually constitute a marriage. The issue is not whether to expand the number of persons eligible to participate in marriage, but whether the state will publicly declare, privilege, and codify a different way of defining marriage altogether. Or to use a different example, the pacifist has a right to join the army, but he does not have the right to insist that the army create a nonviolent branch of the military for him to join.

Redefining marriage to include same-sex partnerships publicly validates these relationships as bona fide marriage. In the traditional view, marriage was ordered to the well-being of the child, which is why the state had a vested interest in regulating and supporting it. Under the new morality, marriage is oriented to the emotional bond of the couple.

They want public recognition. And yet, same-sex unions cannot be accepted as marriage without devaluing all marriages, because the only way to embrace same-sex partnerships as marriage is by changing what marriage means altogether. So why not call a truce on the culture war and let the world define marriage its way and the church define marriage its way?