Posted on 08/16/2010 3:35:57 PM PDT by B-Chan
In a way, we should be grateful for the controversy in Perry v. Schwartzenegger (whose legal aspects I discuss here) because it provides an occasion to clarify the sort of things that a state must do.
Marriage has functioned in various ways throughout human history, though with different emphases and even degrees of seriousness. (The term has hitherto been used with respect to a relationship between men and women, with trivial and merely analogical exceptions). Very frequently, if not quite invariably, marriage has been regarded as the recapitulation on the human level of cosmic principles, and particularly as the reconciliation of opposites. In the West, marriage has also been associated with the idea of closure. This cultural insistence runs from the simple fairy tale "and then they lived happily ever after" all the way up to the bridal imagery in the Book of Revelation, to the eschatological marriage between Christ and the Church. Some Christian denominations have made a dogma of this gendering of ontology; for that matter, so did the alchemists with their Chemical Wedding. In any case, the point is broader than any theory or confessional statement. People with no interest in religion of any kind generally share this kind of cultural insistence. One might even suspect that Romantic love was invented to keep the insistence and dispense with the theology. And who can say which way the causality runs? Did the confessional preference create the cultural insistence, or did a pre-existing insistence make the confession attractive?
When secular authorities in the West, and not least the United States Supreme Court, declared in the past that marriage was a sacred institution and a fundamental human right, they were simply expressing in another medium the insistence that underlies the Chemical Wedding. This insistence, that marriage in some way reflects the operation of the cosmos, attaches only to liaisons involving both genders. To put it another way, the Chemical Wedding is what was declared a human right. Other sorts of liaisons present other questions and are manifestly less interesting. The principle enunciated by Perry v. Schwarzenegger, which goes to the mere legal promotion of personal affection, is the sort of mandate that might usefully be written into a condominium time-sharing agreement, but which would never rise to the level of a fundamental liberty.
Neither alchemy nor the Book of Revelation, or for that matter the novels of Jane Austen, are universally admired or understood in the early 21st century. One might reasonably ask whether the state would be better advised to simply cease supporting the insistence that underlies them all. (The hypothesis that the insistence and its great cultural power might migrate to the condominium time-share clause can be safely dismissed.) It is not at all clear that the state can simply neglect this area, however...
Food for thought on the issue of homosexual marriage. The complete text can be found at the link.
Is there any state left that out-and-out disallows gay adoptions?
It may be an abomination to declare that gay marriage is OK, but then we've already decided as a nation that abortion is OK.
Everything else is details.
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