Pseudo Marriage
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Marriage on Thursday, May 21, 2009 12:00 PM
Two weeks ago I highlighted Bishop Thomas Tobin’s educational and motivational column on same-sex marriage.
I admit I was surprised that several readers took the bishop to task saying they couldn’t see what the big deal was.
Originally I was going to respond in comments by linking to a couple of columns (here & here) I’ve written for the magazine on the topic and let it go.
But since the issue isn’t going away and raises so many important questions: not only legal and moral questions, but questions of tolerance and courtesy, I decided it might be more fruitful to tackle several of those issues individually in a series of posts.
So here’s the first installment: Not anti-homosexual, pro marriage.
At some point during the Clinton administration, while I was a young pro-life lobbyist, I attended a speech by William Bennett to a Christian Coalition convention. The precise date I can’t place—1994 if I had to hazard a guess. “The homosexual agenda” was much in the news at the time: perhaps because of President Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy with respect to homosexuals serving in the military, I no longer recall.
What I do remember is the thunderous ovation Bennett received when he made some remark about resisting the homosexual agenda… and the deafening silence that followed when he said this:
I understand the aversion to homosexuality. But if you look in terms of damage to the children of America, you cannot compare the homosexual movement, the gay rights movement, what that has done in damage, to what divorce has done to this society.
That was followed with a polite but firm rebuke to all the Christians in the room—including Christian pastors—for coming to such ready terms with divorce. Persons with same-sex attraction are some 1-2% of the population, Bennett pointed out, but 50% of American marriages end in divorce. So who is ruining marriage? he asked. Don’t fool yourselves into thinking it’s homosexuals.
The stunned silence gave me a chill up my spine.
It was the first time I realized how difficult the defense of marriage—which is not just a religious institution, but the bedrock of all human liberty—was going to be. Christians were as guilty of undermining it as anyone.
With that introduction, I want to highlight a beautiful post by Professor Anthony Esolen—Pseudogamy 101—and let him take this first part of the argument from here.
Our problem is pseudogamy, false marriage, and it assumes many forms. Same-sex pseudogamy is but the latest and most flagrantly absurd, but it is not the first. We find the most fundamental form, from which other corruptions rise up like diseases, when a man and woman go through the ceremony and utter the traditional words “as long as you both shall live,” while harboring the mental reservation, “as long, that is, as I am happy,” or “as long as the marriage ‘works,’” whatever that is supposed to mean. In other words, in the fundamental form of pseudogamy, we don’t have people who are not married behaving as if they were, but people who are married (or who present themselves as having been married) behaving as if they were not.
Cohabitation, fornication, “marrying” while leaving open the option of divorce, or same-sex marriage. These are all forms of the same thing, and Esolen goes on to explain how it affects me—how it can’t help but affect me—when my neighbors pretend to be married, whatever form the pretense may take.
Do read his post, as you won’t follow my full point without it. The main things I want to get across in this first in a series, however, are these.
First, I know there are radicals who would like to destroy marriage (I used to read their literature for a living), but I don’t believe they speak for most persons who suffer from same-sex attraction any more than clinic bombers speak for pro-lifers. Rather, I think decades of contraception and no-fault divorce have so reduced our collective understanding of what marriage is that, as one blogger has noted, in a sense all marriage in this country is already “gay marriage.”
If marriage is simply the state’s blessing on two people’s public profession of mutual love and intent to be each other’s power of attorney, well…anyone can do that. I firmly believe the reason few of us can make a good case against same-sex marriage is that we can’t defend marriage, period. We’ve forgotten that it is a human good; and we no longer understand in what that good consists.
Therefore, secondly, the key to opposing same-sex marriage does not lie in demonizing homosexuals, who after all are only appropriating to themselves the license heterosexuals granted themselves years ago. It lies in defending authentic marriage. The particular importance of same-sex marriage is not animus against persons with same-sex attraaction, but the fact that it enshrines in law what for years has been only a change in attitude. It’s like the crowning moment of a long battle against marriage and the family. That’s why not only the Church but many others draw a line in the sand: as a matter of justice and charity, we have to stand up for marriage—not a specific religious or sectarian definition of marriage, but marriage in itself. We may look the other way or tolerate all kinds of pseudo-marriage in practice; but when someone wants to change the legal definition of the family, we have to wake up.
I don’t suppose it’s any consolation to you, but you’re not a homophobe if you defend marriage. It’s not just your homosexual brother or that nice same-sex couple across the street with whom you may have some awkward moments regarding what marriage means. There’s also your mother when she tries to re-marry outside the Church, or your cohabiting boss who expects you to congratulate him on fathering another child out of wedlock, and your kid who wants his visiting girlfriend to sleep in his room over Christmas break. Awkwardness all around! Bigotry’s got nothing to do with it!
Esolen’s very hard on divorce. Let me stipulate right here that there are some cases—abuse comes to mind—when a spouse may have no recourse other than separation and civil divorce (a redundancy, as there’s no other kind) for legal reasons. Neither Esolen nor I am speaking of such cases. No one who is bearing such a cross should imagine himself in the article’s crosshairs, so please, no hurt feelings in the comment box.
But for the rest of us, we’re called to stand up for marriage, even when—maybe especially when—it’s less than ideal:
I know full well that men and women are sinners. I’m a sinner, after all. But even a poor marriage, when husband and wife do their duty by one another, stands as an example of the ideal, and in one way a more powerful example of it than will the good marriage, just as the man who stands by his post in defeat is a greater hero than one who does so in victory. And of course, just as the determination to stand by your post helps your comrades to victory even when all seems bleak, so the determination not to revoke your complete gift of self in a poor marriage may turn that marriage itself around and help others navigate through the storms. But in a nation of pseudogamy, the only place to turn to for the noble call for complete gift of self will be the military—a call which few of us will even hear.
Read the whole thing. In subsequent posts I hope to address Church teaching, support for persons with same-sex tendencies, loving our homosexual neighbors and why the law should defend marriage.
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