Deliver Us from Evil

If your next wedding invitation is from a gay couple, should you accept?

American Catholics face this and many other perplexing questions in the wake of last week’s decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC), ruling that the state’s refusal to grant marriage license to same-sex couples violates the Massachusetts Constitution. The final impact of this decision is hard to predict, but some things are already clear. The court gave the legislature 180 days to respond, but it appears the legislature can do little more than prepare the administrative details to implement same-sex marriages (e.g., printing gender-neutral marriage licenses). Moreover, amending the state constitution to reverse the court (unlikely anyway, if current polls showing a majority of bay-staters opposed to such an amendment are accurate) could not take effect before 2006. The bottom line: between mid-2004 and 2006, thousands of gay couples will be legally married.

The Catholic hierarchy has already made its position clear, but in the wake of the sex-abuse crisis, fewer and fewer Catholics regard their bishops as credible or competent experts on human sexuality. During a recent talk to Catholic laity, I quoted the headline from a diocesan newspaper’s story about the US Bishops' Conference opposing same-sex marriage: “Bishops Explain Marriage.” The audience reaction was general laughter.

The bishops may be expert on Catholic tradition, so they may well tell us what the Church has taught—but that does not tell us what we should think. Our tradition consists largely of inherited answers to historical questions, and so it evolves whenever those answers prove inadequate to new questions that arise. The SJC decision certainly poses new questions, on a number of levels.

On the historical level, one question is: “Do we need a sharper distinction between civil marriage and sacramental marriage?” The SJC meticulously restricted its analysis to civil marriage only. Many Catholics may not realize that 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.

In fact, many Catholics can’t tell civil and sacramental marriage apart; after all, they share the same label, and in the US our priests perform double duty: at the same time they witness the sacrament for the Church, they also certify the civil contract for the State. Maybe, if civil marriage is now diverging from Church teaching, the time has come for US priests to stop representing the State, and let couples have a separate civil ceremony before the church ceremony, with a civil official presiding (as is generally done in Europe).

On the social level, Catholics may ask: “Won’t this decision harm the institution of the family?” This is a question of social consequences, not theological values. The court had its own opinion that the state had failed to demonstrate any harm from allowing same-sex couples to marry. Indeed, the court’s supporters are convinced that “this decision will not hurt anyone.”

The bishops believe, though, that protecting “traditional” civil marriage supports “traditional” family life: mother and father and children living together. The social reality, of course, is that such families are now a small minority. Personally, I doubt the “traditional” family will recover its dominant status (if it ever was dominant). More likely, it is time to acknowledge that families take a variety of forms. In fact, more than 20 years ago the bishops themselves inaugurated the 1980s as the “Decade of the Family” by publishing an extensive analysis of family life that never even attempted to define “family” at all, lest they exclude anyone. In other words, they already knew that families take many and varied forms. Moreover, there is no evidence that approving same-sex civil marriages will reduce the number or strength of heterosexual marriages or families.

It is true, nonetheless, that the SJC decision alters centuries of preference for heterosexuals that crossed virtually all major cultures. So the real concern may be: what will the families of same-sex couples be like? The meager evidence suggests that gay marriages will succeed—and fail—at rates similar to heterosexual marriages.

But here arise questions the moral level: “What of the sexuality of same-sex marriages? And what about the children growing in such families?” The official Catholic view is that homosexuals have a “disorder,” which naturally leads to disapproval of homosexual activity and suspicion of their influence on others, such as children. But the Catholic position rests on both interpretation of Scripture and Natural Law reasoning. Recent scripture scholarship, such as Father Daniel Helminiak’s book “What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality,” suggests that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality as we understand it today, so a review past interpretations may be in order.

Natural law reasoning, meanwhile, presumes that we can study the nature of something, learn its function, and thus deduce its purpose in God’s plan—which then allows us to determine moral standards for its appropriate use. Such reasoning depends on the facts we observe; as our understanding of the natural world changes, so do our moral conclusions. And a growing body of evidence suggests that homosexuality is a product of nature, not of culture. Indeed, a recent genetic study reported in Europe in October has concluded that scientists will soon be able to identity homosexuals before birth by analyzing the chromosomes of embryos. But if homosexuality is genetically determined, if, that is, it is a natural product of procreation—if, in fact, we discover that God makes a certain percentage of the human race homosexuals from conception, then Catholic moral reasoning will need to be completely reviewed. Ironically, the very same science of embryology that reinforces Catholic views on abortion (by establishing how early identity is established in the womb) may undermine traditional Catholic views of homosexual morality.

There remains, of course, the key question on the legal level: “How do we guarantee that homosexuals are not penalized just for being homosexual?” The Catholic position is that human rights are for everyone, but that marriage is not. And here is the sharpest clash, for the Massachusetts SJC has determined that there is no way to guarantee gays all the rights and privileges enjoyed by others as long as they are denied marriage licenses. Perhaps those opposing this view will find some other way to secure the rights of gays—for example, by amending the constitution and then creating “civil union” status for them.

But by that time thousands of gay couples will be legally married and living family lives of their own. So the genie is out of the bottle, and the challenge for people of faith, as always, will be to discern the will of God amid the confusion of human history.

Send Your Comments and Questions to bfswain@juno.com