A tentative word on the government’s gay marriage proposals

I have pondered whether it is worth saying anything more on the topic du jour: marriage between those of the same sex. But I have been surprised by a) the number of times I have been asked around the parish by non-churchgoers what I think of “gay marriage” (their term) and b) fascinated to find that all who have asked me have wanted me to oppose it. That’s obviously a self-selecting group, but I note it for whatever it’s worth.

I repeat the conclusion of my piece back in March:

There is a sense (to adapt Marx on religion) in which the criticism of marriage is the premise of all social criticism. Does the new gay desire for marriage represent the death of queer criticism and the triumph of hetero-normativity? Will only a celibate Catholic clergy, sworn to preach the virtues of marriage, be the last bastion of a lived out critique queering domesticity and romantic love? That would be irony indeed.

There are, in short, new queer as well as old straight voices insisting that the two relationships are not the same kind of thing. Whether these relationships should be given equality in the same institution, or be given two equal but different institutions is a serious and genuine question.

I still think that question has failed to get the attention it deserved and deserves. And I haven’t really changed my mind. I still tend to think that gay and lesbian relationships are sufficiently different to need a distinctive but legally equal institution.

In a curious kind of way, the government’s proposals try both to maintain the rhetoric of the same institution – marriage – for both relationships, while changing the actual details of relationships for gay people. The language may be “equal marriage”: the legislation is not. The detail of the legislation rather seems to agree that the institution needs to be different, even while it applies the same name to it.

It is not just that gay people will have the option of two institutions, civil partnership and marriage, whereas straight people will only be able to choose one. It is that the grounds of divorce are significantly different (if I have understood the proposals rightly) for marriage between people of the same sex. 

I grant that it might have been rather tricky to define “consummation” either for gay men or lesbians, but it seems rather more straightforward to define adultery. The fact that adultery is not a ground for divorce in a same-sex marriage raises very big problems for the definition of all marriage as an intentionally life-long exclusive commitment, if we are presuming to talk about the same institution. for both gay and straight couples.

In other words, the legislation itself seems to be proposing that marriage for gay people is not the same as marriage for straight people, and undermines its own rhetoric about equality.

In part, the church has made a rod for its own back by first (at the official level whatever it claims now) offering a heel-dragging and grudging acceptance of civil partnerships. It has made the situation worse by refusing to explore whether and how to create a liturgy to bless them, in case that made it look like marriage. The paralysis of internal politics has driven out any chance of creative or generous responses to social change or pastoral need. But I wonder whether a generous acceptance of civil partnerships might have strengthened the institution sufficiently that it was seen as good in its own right and appropriate to the distinctive nature of the relationship.

Either way, we are where we are now, which seems to me the worst of all possible worlds, applying the language of marriage equally to relationships which are being treated in the detail of the law as having differences and distinctions between them. 

Gay marriage and moral inconsistency

There’s been a huge amount today on the blogs, on Twitter and around the interwebs generally about the Church of England’s official submission to the Government’s consultation (their word, not mine) on same-sex marriage. Apparently it could be the end of the world as we know it.

It needs to be said that in this semi-rural town in Worcestershire, I haven’t heard a single flesh and blood person mention it all day. I suspect that, whatever vociferous proponents and opponents think, this is not a front-page issue for most people.

There are quite a few people who seem terribly indignant that they, as members of the Church of England, were not consulted on this response. However, while I’m sure there could have been greater transparency about the process of responding, the document  explicitly roots itself in the most recent agreed statement the Church of England has made on marriage, and one which virtually all clergy will have repeated several times already this year. It’s called the marriage service. It might need challenging, but it’s a democratically approved corporate view.

Personally, I think the question is much more open than the official response does. As I argued a while back, the key question is whether a committed loving relationship between people of the same sex is sufficiently like one between those of the opposite sex to be included within the institution of marriage. There are queer arguments against it as well as Christian ones. (As there are gay and Christian arguments for it.) Some, particularly those who are aware of the ways in which marriage has continued to change and grow as a social institution, will agree that it can and should now include gay couples. Others, particularly those who resist relativism and prioritise some kind of traditional ontology over cultural construction, will feel (at the very least) that it is a sufficiently different relationship to need a different kind of social institution.

Currently in the UK we have different institutions implying different types of equal relationship which give the same legal rights to those who have entered them. The existence of civil partnerships makes it harder, I think, to justify the arguments for gay marriage on the basis of equal rights. It is an argument, rather, about what sort of institution marriage is.

The fact is that procreative relationships regularly – perhaps normally – take place with little or no relationship to the institution of marriage. It is equally true that a very large proportion of marriages, including a great many conducted according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England, are “lifelong” as a romantic dream rather than a worked out and hard-headed commitment. The Church of England’s understanding of marriage has a fairly tenuous connection with a lot of actual marriages, or the ways people have and raise children.

A significant part of the pressure for including gay relationships within the institution of marriage is because in practice the institution has already been redefined as a romantic commitment between two individuals for as long it lasts, and wouldn’t it be nice if it was happily ever after. Indeed, the Church of England’s own Wedding Project has openly embraced a consumerist model of marriage. No longer are people signing up to a hallowed common institution in which each marriage is one and the same, but encouraged to request a personalised experience tailored to the uniqueness of their relationship.

Not all that many years ago, Michael Nazir-Ali called down a storm of opprobrium on his head (what’s new?) for calling couples who wanted marriage without children “self-indulgent”. But actually, he was at least being consistent, and, indeed uncomfortably but truly traditional, in his understanding of marriage.

It is genuinely a problem that there are a great many people who want to uphold “traditional marriage” (whatever exactly that is) when discussing same-sex marriage, but who don’t wish to “moralise” about the relationships of straight people. It is the inconsistency which gives rise to a lingering suspicion of “homophobia”.

Personally, I think there’s a serious conversation to be had. I just don’t see anyone – individual or organisation – really interested in doing anything other than getting their own way.

Queering marriage?

I’ve been pondering whether to write anything after last night’s Newsnight “debate” on marriage for same-sex couples infringed the Trades Description Act and placed a greater burden on the word “debate” than it could reasonable be expected to bear. You can watch it on iPlayer for a while if you have masochistic tendencies. Here are some of the things I’ve been thinking.

(While I think there is also a theological argument to be had – and you will find theologians arguing both sides of the debate too – I have deliberately here prescinded from those to focus on what I feel are more general issues.)

It is demonstrably the case that, historically, marriage has been quite a variable institution, not least in the number and age of wives permitted to one husband, the ease and motivations for divorce, and the concomitant understandings of marriage. There have been significant economic and community interests shaping it as a means of social alliance and peace, and a continuing regulation of procreation within those constraints for family inheritance and species survival.

Yet within that wide ranging diversity a continuing emphasis on the good of  the procreation of children and their proper upbringing (and therefore the survival of the community) is perhaps the most constant theme of what marriage was about. The household was where the next generation was conceived, and learnt to live in a community as well as being part of a unit of economic survival. Marriage, administered variously by church and state in Western society, was a single institution felt to have significant enough social ramifications beyond the relationship of two people to need regulating.

It is a pertinent question whether so many centuries of traditioned practice of a single institution of marriage recognised across society should be changed without a significant period of reflection and conversation on why it should be changed, rather than simply how to change it.

I think it further relevant that the government has seriously muddied its own equality argument by saying it will continue to provide civil partnerships for same-sex couples. It is in danger of creating new inequalities: straight couples will be able to choose between new civil marriage and new religious marriage, but not civil partnerships; gay couples can choose between civil partnerships and civil marriages, but not religious ones (even for religions that permit or encourage it).

At the heart of the debate (as I see it) is one question: is a committed romantic relationship between people of the same sex sufficiently like one between those of the opposite sex that it should be served by the same social institution. If the answer is “yes” then equal rights in the same institution is indeed the vital issue. If the answer is “no”, the question is not equality or equal rights in the same institution, but the provision of a equal but different institution with the same equal rights before the law.

That is a genuine question. There are those who will say the relationships are the same, taking romantic love as the sole or primary defining qualification for them. There are those who will say they are not, insisting on the place of procreation as fundamental. I have not yet been overwhelmed by a conviction of the rightness of either answer.

And, lest we forget, there are those who will continue to argue for a queer critique of all marriage (much of it shared with womanist approaches) as hopelessly tainted by patriarchy and heterosexist history, and celebrate a different kind of model for relationships. In this argument the queering of marriage is not only a positive virtue, but a testimony to same-sex relationships being different from marriage, and perhaps even better by being freed from the taint of historic patriarchy and property rights.

There is a sense (to adapt Marx on religion) in which the criticism of marriage is the premise of all social criticism. Does the new gay desire for marriage represent the death of queer criticism and the triumph of hetero-normativity? Will only a celibate Catholic clergy, sworn to preach the virtues of marriage, be the last bastion of a lived out critique queering domesticity and romantic love? That would be irony indeed.

There are, in short, new queer as well as old straight voices insisting that the two relationships are not the same kind of thing. Whether these relationships should be given equality in the same institution, or be given two equal but different institutions is a serious and genuine question. And that is the debate I think we should be having first, before we are “consulted” on how to do it.