When I began writing CrossCurrents in 2003, America’s debate over same-sex marriage was just heating up. Almost immediately, the American Catholic hierarchy made protection of the status quo on marriage a top priority. They have spent 10 years losing ground, and this week’s Supreme Court rulings confirm what has been clear for some time: the burden of proof is now on the US Bishops and anyone else trying to resist this change.
My doubts about the bishops’ strategy are not new. In my early CrossCurrents pieces on this issue, I advised that the bishops back civil unions for gays, as Pope Francis did in Argentina. After the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned a ban on civil marriage licenses for same-sex couples in 2003, I observed that it was time for the U.S. Catholic Church to get out of the civil marriage business (in which priests act as agents of the state) while the getting was good, in order to focus on the Sacrament of Matrimony. I wrote:
The bishops could have drawn a sharp line between “civil marriage” and the “Sacrament of Matrimony”. Then they could have defended the unique meaning of Christian marriage against evolving, secular versions of civil marriage. Instead, the bishops chose to meet the court on its own turf, arguing that the good of society depends on denying same-sex couples, and lobbying against any broadening of civil marriage.
Thus the bishops dug in their heels by talking about “marriage” as though civil marriage and sacramental Matrimony were the same institution, while launching scary warnings about the woes to follow us if gays were to marry one another.
Ten years later, the rising tide has eroded the bishops’ stand, yet they cling to the same losing strategy. Immediately after the Supreme Court killed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) this week and reinstated a California court’s ruling in favor of gay marriage, Catholic bishops quickly sprung into reaction. Predictably, they offered only more of the same losing strategy.
Archbishop Alan Vigneron of Detroit said:
Catholics and millions of our fellow citizens will continue to make the case…that marriage cannot be redefined, and that attempts to do so hurt us all.
And Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco hammered away on the theme of the “truth about marriage”:
The federal government ought to respect the truth that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, even where states fail to do so. The preservation of liberty and justice requires that all laws, federal and state, respect the truth, including the truth about marriage...The common good of all, especially our children, depends upon a society that strives to uphold the truth of marriage. Now is the time to redouble our efforts in witness to this truth.
The Bishops’ problem is very simple: by confusing the two institutions of matrimony and civil marriage, they’ve replaced the facts with wishful thinking. They want to make their case on two grounds: (1) there is one unique, non-negotiable truth about “marriage,” and (2) changing our definition of marriage will “hurt us all.” But both these arguments have become less and less credible over time.
Actually, the “truth about marriage” argument was never very convincing. It only worked as long as people pretended that “marriage” referred to one thing rather than two different institutions, as I wrote earlier:
Many Catholics can’t tell civil and sacramental marriage apart. They may not realize that in fact civil marriage is a great deal older than sacramental marriage: it existed in archaic cultures, in Egyptian and the Israelite cultures, in Greek and Roman cultures, all before St. Paul ever taught that marriage could be understood as a sign of Christ’s bond with his church. Civil marriage took various forms, with various rules (Israelite men were sometimes required to marry their brother’s widow; Roman men were permitted extra-marital sex with slave-women; Greek men were permitted extra-marital sex with boys). Such rules evolve even within a culture, of course: not long ago most states forbade marriage by mixed-race couples.
But while the Bishops failed to acknowledge this truth, Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret Marshall stated it plainly in her landmark Goodrich opinion legalizing same-sex marriage:
We begin by considering the nature of civil marriage itself. Simply put, the government creates civil marriage. In Massachusetts, civil marriage is, and since pre-Colonial days has been, precisely what its name implies: a wholly secular institution…No religious ceremony has ever been required to validate a Massachusetts marriage.
The truth is that “civil marriage” is an invention of the government, and different governments have defined it differently for centuries. Moreover, this re-defining has included the evolving recognition that civil marriage, unlike the Sacrament of Matrimony, is a civil right that people make claim access to as a matter of justice:
The benefits accessible only by way of a marriage license are enormous, touching nearly every aspect of life and death. The department states that "hundreds of statutes" are related to marriage and to marital benefits...It is undoubtedly for these concrete reasons, as well as for its intimately personal significance, that civil marriage has long been termed a "civil right."
Without the right to marry…one is excluded from the full range of human experience and denied full protection of the laws…Because civil marriage is central to the lives of individuals and the welfare of the community, our laws assiduously protect the individual's right to marry against undue government incursion. Laws may not "interfere directly and substantially with the right to marry…"There can be no prohibition of marriage except for an important social objective and reasonable means."
There are two consequences of this fact. First, civil marriage is now being drawn into the general history of civil rights. Second, this history now challenges Catholic teaching to practice what it preaches about the just treatment of homosexuals.
First, on general history, Marshall wrote:
The history of constitutional law "is the story of the extension of constitutional rights and protections to people once ignored or excluded."…This statement is as true in the area of civil marriage as in any other area of civil rights.
In this week’s DOMA case, the Supreme Court saw this at work as well in New York State:
The limitation of lawful marriage to heterosexual couples, which for centuries have been deemed both necessary and fundamental, came to be seen in New York and certain other states as an unjust exclusion…New York acted to enlarge the definition of marriage to correct what its citizens and elected representatives perceived to be an injustice they had not earlier known or understood.
This movement linking civil marriage to all other civil rights explains the rising tide of court decisions favoring a new definition of marriage. For if keeping the “one man and one woman” definition means denying gay people in a civil right, the question arises: how can that be justified? It becomes a matter of justice.
This explains why the movement to accept same-sex marriage has been so rapid: from one state in 2003 to 13 and counting in 2013. Now 40% of gay Americans already have access to this civil right, and the rest are demanding to know why they should be denied their rights.
This has dramatically shifted the burden of proof away from those proposing change; they now have both the rhetoric and the reality of civil rights on their side.
NEXT: How the new burden of proof challenges the Church to honor its own teachings.
NEXT: How the new burden of proof challenges the Church to honor its own teachings.
© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2013
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