Who's on the wrong side of history now?
Posted on 02/16/2014 2:27:09 PM PST by NYer
An important discussion is occurring among young Evangelicals over whether the government should even be in the marriage business. According to those who are advocating this option, the most important reason for commending state withdrawal is that it seems to promise a permanent vacation from the most contentious battle in the culture wars. You can still believe that same-sex conduct is immoral and that Christian marriage is between one man and one woman while at the same time saying that you advocate “marriage equality,” since if no marriage is legally recognized, then everyone is “equal” to pursue his or her vision of the good life without interference from the state.
In other words, you can in good conscience put an equal sign on your Facebook page, in order to announce to all your progressive college friends that you are not a dangerous bigot like the rest of your faith community, while telling the members of that same community in private that you support the biblical view of marriage. You can be, to borrow a phrase from another cultural dispute, “prochoice but personally opposed.”
It’s easy to understand why young Evangelicals find this approach so attractive. Who, in their right mind, would want to bring upon themselves the derision and marginalization that typically attends embracing views that are not in cultural ascendancy? In the age of social media, the once dreaded vice of succumbing to peer pressure, as they called it when I was a kid, has been relegated to the dustbin of history. Today, peer-pressure is now a virtue, with its own Facebook page and “like” button.
The baby-boom generation that once decried the machinations and political power of “the Man,” and called for all right thinking people to resist him, has become “the Man,” and now calls for all right thinking people to embrace his machinations and political power, or else. The cultural avant-garde that once told its peers to open their minds and “protest the rising tide of conformity” now tell its children to set aside their critical faculties so that they are “not on the wrong side of history.”
Young Evangelicals are not stupid. They see the writing on the wall, and they don’t want to drown when the approaching cultural tsunami hits land. Their suggested compromise makes an enormous amount of sense to them. Unfortunately, it cannot work.
Imagine, for example, as one of my former doctoral students once suggested in a dissertation that defended this idea of privatization, that marriage becomes exclusively the domain of “the church.” Suppose Bob and Mary, both devout Catholics, marry in the Church under the authority of canon law. Over the next decade, they have three children. Mary decides to leave the Church, however, to become a Unitarian and seeks to dissolve the marriage. Because the Church maintains that marriage is indissoluble, and Mary has no grounds for an annulment, the Church refuses her request.
Who's on the wrong side of history now?
Mary then seeks the counsel of her pastor at the Unitarian Church. She tells Mary that the Unitarian Church recognizes her marriage with Bob, but maintains that divorcing him is perfectly justified, since the Unitarian Church holds that incompatibility is a legitimate ground for divorce. So, Mary now requests a divorce from the Unitarian Church, and it is granted. The Church also grants her full custody of her children, since, according to Unitarian moral theology, what Bob teaches their children about contraception, abortion, and same-sex relations are “hate sins,” and thus is a form of child abuse.
So, who wins in this case? Suppose you say that because it was originally a Catholic marriage, it should remain so, even if Mary changes her religion. But who has the authority to enforce such a rule? The Catholic Church? The Unitarians? What if the Catholic Church agrees to it, but not the Unitarians?
Suppose Mary, on the authority of the Unitarian ruling, simply takes the children and moves out of state. Is that kidnapping? Can a Catholic ecclesial court issue an order to a local Knights of Columbus office to return Mary and her children to their original domicile so that she can be tried in an ecclesial court for violations of canon law? And if she is convicted, can the Church put her in an ecclesial prison or fine her?
Suppose that Mary not only leaves with all the children, but also empties the couple’s bank accounts and donates their contents to the Unitarian Church? Is it a crime? Who decides? Imagine that all these issues were addressed in private contracts that Bob and Mary drew up and signed upon the commencement of their marriage in the Catholic Church. Who has the power to make sure these breaches are remedied and compensation given to the wronged parties?
The only way to resolve these disputes is for the state to intervene. What to do with children, property, state residency, freedom of movement, etc. when marital relationships break down are public issues. They are not private ones. Consequently, in such a privatization of marriage scenario, the state would actually become more intrusive into ecclesial matters than it is at present.
In order to resolve these problems, it would have to spell out the limits and scope of ecclesial jurisdictions, not to mention what religious bodies are permitted to do with married citizens from different religious traditions that hold contrary perspectives on everything from child-rearing, spousal authority, and religious training to culinary practices.
Despite their best efforts, there is no high ground to which young Evangelicals – or any of us – can retreat that will not be covered by the cultural tsunami.
If they’re smart roommates get documentation. At the very least you have the lease agreement they both should be on if they’re renting together. And if one owns and is renting to the other one then they better have a lease agreement. Siblings have documentation, they both have birth certificates that show they have the same parents and what order they were born in. Business partners that didn’t bother to create an business or at least a contract are in for a world of hurt.
The way courts handle the affairs of unmarried people is to figure out what their relationship most clearly resembles. If it resembles a marriage they’ll handle it that way, if it resembles roommates they’ll handle it that way. And if the couple has a preferred method for the government to deal with them they’re best filling out the paperwork.
You WILL recognize theirs whether you like it or not. If you want your spouse to get you stuff when you die then there’s some sort of paperwork you need to handle. You can write it up in a complex contract that isn’t a marriage license, and get it in your will, and hopefully you dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s to get it all right, and hopefully you don’t have any estranged children, and neither of you has any kind of previous not quite a spouse, or even a business partner that could stick their nose in, and sure hope if you have surviving parents or siblings they like your not legal spouse and won’t interfere. Or you can just file a marriage license.
This moral agreement would say that they all agree on the minimum standards for marriage, to which individual religions could add criteria but not remove criteria. And as such, they would recognize only their own marriages and those of other Orthodox churches.
We already have a problem with the Orthodox Church in that they recognize 3 divorces vs 0 for the Catholic Church.
Did you read this article through in its entirety? Picking up from here ....
Imagine, for example, as one of my former doctoral students once suggested in a dissertation that defended this idea of privatization, that marriage becomes exclusively the domain of “the church.” Suppose Bob and Mary, both devout Catholics, marry in the Church under the authority of canon law. Over the next decade, they have three children. Mary decides to leave the Church, however, to become a Unitarian and seeks to dissolve the marriage. Because the Church maintains that marriage is indissoluble, and Mary has no grounds for an annulment, the Church refuses her request.
... the author continues to describe the issues the would surface. You are proposing individual agreements between churches. How does that work with the 20,000 and growing independent churches?
You are talking “nice to have”, not requirements. And siblings may not have a father on their birth certificate, or they may have the wrong man listed.
Point is, I can make any legal contract I want, just as useful as a marriage license, without a state mandate or license.
Write up a contract and get married in the church. Since I don’t recognize the state’s definition of marriage, I don’t have to pay the tax penalties associated with it.
Courts were always, and will always be involved in contract issues, as well as custody matters. They would be involved even if Bob and Mary lived in sin. That wouldn't change.
This is wrong.
Anybody who does not find anything wrong with the term “marriage license” has nothing to complain about when the state applies it to someone we don’t approve of.
Marriage is a spiritual, personal thing. It’s not the government’s business. But, we were brainwashed otherwise, and look what it has wrought.
Now, we have the term “homeland” brainwashing us into other atrocities.
Nothing is unchallengeable, certainly not marriage. Many a second wife has found themselves in court with the deceased husbands business associates, children, ex-wife, etc.
A legal contract is no less binding, and by nature of its specificity, is often more binding than general inheritance/divorce law.
So true, however you and a few others are the proverbial fish upstream thing around here.....many apparently need the ‘blessing’ of the state to ‘save’ our culture. To those I ask “How are those state ‘blessings’of anything working out??”
I still believe we could operate as a society without the government involved in marriage but you and discostu did get me thinking about end games.
Why do we wish to stop homosexuals from “marrying?” In my mind it is becuase I do not want them to use the legitimate institution of marriage to legitimize the rest of the homosexual agenda. The homosexuals want to normalize their unhealthy behavior. They want to normalize pedophilia. They want to persecute those who do not approve of their sexual deviancy. They want to adopt children, and they want to propagandize in schools for recruitment. Taking marriage away from the government might stop them from being legally defined as married but it would not stop them from using government to advance the rest of their nefarious plans.
As I said before I believe less government is almost always better but I am starting to see that even if taking marriage away from the government is feasible, it will not prevent the government advancing homosexual agenda. On the flip side legally telling the homosexuals NO might stymie some of their other efforts.
Dear Nyer,
Please relax. President 0bama has promised us “if you want to keep your religion, you can keep your religion.” And one “must” trust the president’s promises.
Said with 300% sarcasm toward bh0 by GreyFriar
They’re “nice to have” all the way up until things go bad then you find out they were requirements.
The point is from the state perspective a marriage IS a legal contract. So if you go that route the best you accomplished was to spend a lot of time on paperwork to get something that works just like a marriage license.
And then when you die your wife gets nothing because you didn’t write the contract right. Or if you DID write the contract right the state will say “hey you’re actually married give us our money”.
it’s already been proven we can’t operate as a society without getting the government involved in marriage. That’s why it is.
Whoops my post 30 was for a different ping from Nyer
Nothing is unchallengeable but when you have a marriage license a lot of the challenges go away. A lot of it depends on the state too. Here in AZ where we have a community property state things are cut and dry, since everything is ours if I die first it all becomes hers. Of course “all” includes debts and obligations which is where business associate problems come in. You’ll never manage to write a contract that’s as comprehensive as the jurisprudence surrounding marriage, and if you try you’ll make some lawyer quite wealthy, which I always thought was one of the big things married people are trying to avoid.
Exactly so.
And, true to their form, Catholics (and the Church) want to have the government do their bidding, because that’s what they’ve been reduced to now that we have this whole “separation of church and state” idea going on since the 1500’s.
The Catholic Church will always find a way to poke their noses into everyone else’s business by justifying government support of their positions.
At long last, those of us whose ancestors fled Europe to American to have done with this BS that the Catholic Church likes to govern from both the pulpit and the legislature would dearly like the Catholic Church to take up residence on some distant shores where they still hew to this nonsense.
Oh, tickety-boo.
Thanks for the ping. Like it or not, the state will continue to treat marriages as contracts. Churches cannot stop the state from recognizing gay marriages, but the state must not be allowed to force churches to perform or sanctify gay marriages.
We already have privatized marriage, and always have.
If you don’t want to deal with whatever constitutes “legal” marriage, then don’t.
The idea is for Orthodox and conservatives churches to agree on the tenets of marriage, and only to recognize marriages among themselves that conform to those tenets.
As he pointed out in his article, divorce does need to be secular, for legal reasons, even if some churches permit it. But in the case he cited, the current rules would still apply.
Thus Mary leaves the church and divorces Bob. All this means is that neither of them can have a Catholic wedding in church again. But their division of assets and children are not up to the church.
Bob, still a Catholic, can marry another woman, just not inside a Catholic church. Since that is outside of the Orthodox agreement, the Catholic church does not need to recognize them as married, nor give them consideration due to those married within the church.
The important thing is that the churches regain marriage as an exclusive sacrament, not available to just anyone.
Arguing over private versus state marriage is a distration from the real issue, which is that conservatives are losing the culture war with the left.
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