A lot of the fuss and the bother that the religious right is flinging up about the Supreme Court's decision regarding the Texas sodomy law has to do with the door being wide open now for gay marriage, allegedly violating "the sanctity of marriage". They keep saying they want to protect marriage in this country.
"I very much feel that marriage is a sacrament, and that sacrament should extend and can extend to that legal entity of a union between -- what is traditionally in our Western values has been defined -- as between a man and a woman."
Bill Frist
Senator (R-TN)
"This case will be ammunition for a full-scale assault on the institution of marriage by the homosexual lobby. What this decision will be used to do is to try to deconstruct marriage, as Justice Scalia recognized in his dissent, and to empty the word of any meaning."
Ken Connor
President
Family Research Council
These people don't know what the hell they are talking about. They are seriously trying to suggest that marriage as it's been traditionally practiced has been approached with anything remotely resembling sanctity.
My big rosy round arse.
Why do people get married? Honestly, take a big step back and ask yourself and others - just why is it that people decide to get married? How do they execute it? How do they maintain it once it's been started? Look around you at all your married friends. If you are married yourself, or have been, look at yourself and your partner(s). Look at your parents and your grandparents, aunts and uncles. Why did they get married? How did they do at it?
Just what exactly does marriage mean in this day and age? What did it mean before? If it has/had sanctity, what sanctified it?
The only really big difference between marriage as it was practiced in the youth of our grandparents and the way it's practiced now is that people are allowed to get divorced without massive social stigma. People still get married for the same reasons they always did, but now if they find out they've made a grave mistake, they can opt not to traumatize themselves or their children with the side effects of domestic violence, drug or alcohol abuse, or chronic emotional dysfunction that previous generations report as being the direct result of living in a poorly made marriage. Nope, now people get to get divorced and start all over again, with a whole new batch of worries like custody battles, single parenthood, recombinant nuclear families with steps and halves, out-in-laws, multiplication of grandparents, abuse issues arising out of these, jealousies and manipulations, and the general failure of people to understand each others' lives.
It's enough to make you scream, isn't it? It's not that we are losing the sanctity of marriage - it's that we are now failing to conceal that we didn't have it in the first place, and we darned well need some.
It's not gays who are a threat to the sacrament of marriage. It's not poly folk or bisexuals or swingers. It's not people who "live in sin" until they grow old and die together. It's our entire reckless approach to marriage in the first place, this social expectation that we must marry as soon as we find Prince(ss) Charming and are relatively sure that we can stand them in somewhat large doses. It's asking each other, "So, when are you and [insert name here] gonna take it to 'the next level'?" It's asking our children, "Well just when am I going to have some grandkids? I'm not exactly getting any younger!" It's setting up our preschoolers with little boyfriends and girlfriends. It's the constant prod - pair off, procreate, hurry up and then come back for a mortgage!
It's frivolous application that devours the sanctity of marriage - people getting hitched because it's "the next level", people joining up because they're now expecting to be parents, people getting married for money or status or convenience, people getting married because they don't know what love is. It's people getting married to people they hardly know, people making allegedly lifetime commitments on a whim, or even a series of whims, people (like me) bowing to the powerful biological drive to reproduce.
It's the way things are done. Frivolous. Frivolous, I tell you!
People get married for all the wrong reasons, and then they don't work on what they have. They don't make a point of communicating openly and honestly. They let all their insecurities get in the way. They second guess their partners, third and fourth guess them, even. They don't plan together. They don't compromise. And then when it's plainly failing to work out, they might go to a counseling session or two, but they're already looking for the way out.
In that mental exercise up there, did you come across some couples who seem to embody that "sanctity of marriage" ideal? If so, how did they get like that? Did they go through some rough spots? Did they help each other out? Did they stay committed?
Do you think whether or not they used the missionary position might have had anything to do with it? Do you think the ink on the paper of their marriage certificate, or whether it was a church wedding or a courthouse ceremony, made much of a difference? Or was it something else? Was it love? Was it commitment? Was it loyalty perhaps?
The devil, you know, is in the details. We pay far too much attention to things that do not matter, and miss the larger picture. The sanctity of marriage is in the embodiment of loving and cherishing another human being, and making their happiness and welfare sacred and paramount. Yes, Senator Frist, it's a sacrament, and it's not about sex and gender. It's a sacrament to the holiness of love.
