Let's
try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and
define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great
patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved
wife Sarah was infertile? Or to Jacob, who fathered children with four
different women (two sisters and their servants)? Abraham, Jacob,
David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and
heroes were polygamists. The New Testament model of marriage is hardly
better. Jesus himself was single and preached an indifference to
earthly attachments—especially family. The apostle Paul (also single)
regarded marriage as an act of last resort for those unable to contain
their animal lust. "It is better to marry than to burn with passion,"
says the apostle, in one of the most lukewarm endorsements of a
treasured institution ever uttered. Would any contemporary heterosexual
married couple—who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some
optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic
love—turn to the Bible as a how-to script?
Of course not, yet the religious opponents of gay marriage would have it be so.
The
battle over gay marriage has been waged for more than a decade, but
within the last six months—since California legalized gay marriage and
then, with a ballot initiative in November, amended its Constitution to
prohibit it—the debate has grown into a full-scale war, with
religious-rhetoric slinging to match. Not since 1860, when the
country's pulpits were full of preachers pronouncing on slavery, pro
and con, has one of our basic social (and economic) institutions been
so subject to biblical scrutiny. But whereas in the Civil War the
traditionalists had their James Henley Thornwell—and the advocates for
change, their Henry Ward Beecher—this time the sides are unevenly
matched. All the religious rhetoric, it seems, has been on the side of
the gay-marriage opponents, who use Scripture as the foundation for
their objections.
The argument goes something like this
statement, which the Rev. Richard A. Hunter, a United Methodist
minister, gave to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in June: "The Bible
and Jesus define marriage as between one man and one woman. The church
cannot condone or bless same-sex marriages because this stands in
opposition to Scripture and our tradition."
To which there are
two obvious responses: First, while the Bible and Jesus say many
important things about love and family, neither explicitly defines
marriage as between one man and one woman. And second, as the examples
above illustrate, no sensible modern person wants marriage—theirs or
anyone else's —to look in its particulars anything like what the Bible
describes. "Marriage" in America refers to two separate things, a
religious institution and a civil one, though it is most often enacted
as a messy conflation of the two. As a civil institution, marriage
offers practical benefits to both partners: contractual rights having
to do with taxes; insurance; the care and custody of children;
visitation rights; and inheritance. As a religious institution,
marriage offers something else: a commitment of both partners before
God to love, honor and cherish each other—in sickness and in health,
for richer and poorer—in accordance with God's will. In a religious
marriage, two people promise to take care of each other, profoundly,
the way they believe God cares for them. Biblical literalists will
disagree, but the Bible is a living document, powerful for more than
2,000 years because its truths speak to us even as we change through
history. In that light, Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and
lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married—and a number
of excellent reasons why they should.
In the Old Testament, the
concept of family is fundamental, but examples of what social
conservatives would call "the traditional family" are scarcely to be
found. Marriage was critical to the passing along of tradition and
history, as well as to maintaining the Jews' precious and fragile
monotheism. But as the Barnard University Bible scholar Alan Segal puts
it, the arrangement was between "one man and as many women as he could
pay for." Social conservatives point to Adam and Eve as evidence for
their one man, one woman argument—in particular, this verse from
Genesis: "Therefore shall a man leave his mother and father, and shall
cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh." But as Segal says,
if you believe that the Bible was written by men and not handed down in
its leather bindings by God, then that verse was written by people for
whom polygamy was the way of the world. (The fact that homosexual
couples cannot procreate has also been raised as a biblical objection,
for didn't God say, "Be fruitful and multiply"? But the Bible authors
could never have imagined the brave new world of international adoption
and assisted reproductive technology—and besides, heterosexuals who are
infertile or past the age of reproducing get married all the time.)
Ozzie
and Harriet are nowhere in the New Testament either. The biblical Jesus
was—in spite of recent efforts of novelists to paint him
otherwise—emphatically unmarried. He preached a radical kind of family,
a caring community of believers, whose bond in God superseded all blood
ties. Leave your families and follow me, Jesus says in the gospels.
There will be no marriage in heaven, he says in Matthew. Jesus never
mentions homosexuality, but he roundly condemns divorce (leaving a
loophole in some cases for the husbands of unfaithful women).
The
apostle Paul echoed the Christian Lord's lack of interest in matters of
the flesh. For him, celibacy was the Christian ideal, but family
stability was the best alternative. Marry if you must, he told his
audiences, but do not get divorced. "To the married I give this command
(not I, but the Lord): a wife must not separate from her husband." It
probably goes without saying that the phrase "gay marriage" does not
appear in the Bible at all.
If the bible doesn't give abundant
examples of traditional marriage, then what are the gay-marriage
opponents really exercised about? Well, homosexuality, of
course—specifically sex between men. Sex between women has never, even
in biblical times, raised as much ire. In its entry on "Homosexual
Practices," the Anchor Bible Dictionary notes that nowhere in the Bible
do its authors refer to sex between women, "possibly because it did not
result in true physical 'union' (by male entry)." The Bible does
condemn gay male sex in a handful of passages. Twice Leviticus refers
to sex between men as "an abomination" (King James version), but these
are throwaway lines in a peculiar text given over to codes for living
in the ancient Jewish world, a text that devotes verse after verse to
treatments for leprosy, cleanliness rituals for menstruating women and
the correct way to sacrifice a goat—or a lamb or a turtle dove. Most of
us no longer heed Leviticus on haircuts or blood sacrifices; our modern
understanding of the world has surpassed its prescriptions. Why would
we regard its condemnation of homosexuality with more seriousness than
we regard its advice, which is far lengthier, on the best price to pay
for a slave?
Paul was tough on homosexuality, though recently
progressive scholars have argued that his condemnation of men who "were
inflamed with lust for one another" (which he calls "a perversion") is
really a critique of the worst kind of wickedness: self-delusion,
violence, promiscuity and debauchery. In his book "The Arrogance of
Nations," the scholar Neil Elliott argues that Paul is referring in
this famous passage to the depravity of the Roman emperors, the craven
habits of Nero and Caligula, a reference his audience would have
grasped instantly. "Paul is not talking about what we call
homosexuality at all," Elliott says. "He's talking about a certain
group of people who have done everything in this list. We're not
dealing with anything like gay love or gay marriage. We're talking
about really, really violent people who meet their end and are judged
by God." In any case, one might add, Paul argued more strenuously
against divorce—and at least half of the Christians in America
disregard that teaching.
Religious objections to gay marriage are
rooted not in the Bible at all, then, but in custom and tradition (and,
to talk turkey for a minute, a personal discomfort with gay sex that
transcends theological argument). Common prayers and rituals reflect
our common practice: the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer describes the
participants in a marriage as "the man and the woman." But common
practice changes—and for the better, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
said, "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice." The
Bible endorses slavery, a practice that Americans now universally
consider shameful and barbaric. It recommends the death penalty for
adulterers (and in Leviticus, for men who have sex with men, for that
matter). It provides conceptual shelter for anti-Semites. A mature view
of scriptural authority requires us, as we have in the past, to move
beyond literalism. The Bible was written for a world so unlike our own,
it's impossible to apply its rules, at face value, to ours.
Marriage,
specifically, has evolved so as to be unrecognizable to the wives of
Abraham and Jacob. Monogamy became the norm in the Christian world in
the sixth century; husbands' frequent enjoyment of mistresses and
prostitutes became taboo by the beginning of the 20th. (In the NEWSWEEK POLL,
55 percent of respondents said that married heterosexuals who have sex
with someone other than their spouses are more morally objectionable
than a gay couple in a committed sexual relationship.) By the mid-19th
century, U.S. courts were siding with wives who were the victims of
domestic violence, and by the 1970s most states had gotten rid of their
"head and master" laws, which gave husbands the right to decide where a
family would live and whether a wife would be able to take a job.
Today's vision of marriage as a union of equal partners, joined in a
relationship both romantic and pragmatic, is, by very recent standards,
radical, says Stephanie Coontz, author of "Marriage, a History."
Religious
wedding ceremonies have already changed to reflect new conceptions of
marriage. Remember when we used to say "man and wife" instead of
"husband and wife"? Remember when we stopped using the word "obey"?
Even Miss Manners, the voice of tradition and reason, approved in 1997
of that change. "It seems," she wrote, "that dropping 'obey' was a
sensible editing of a service that made assumptions about marriage that
the society no longer holds."
We cannot look to the Bible as a
marriage manual, but we can read it for universal truths as we struggle
toward a more just future. The Bible offers inspiration and warning on
the subjects of love, marriage, family and community. It speaks
eloquently of the crucial role of families in a fair society and the
risks we incur to ourselves and our children should we cease trying to
bind ourselves together in loving pairs. Gay men like to point to the
story of passionate King David and his friend Jonathan, with whom he
was "one spirit" and whom he "loved as he loved himself." Conservatives
say this is a story about a platonic friendship, but it is also a story
about two men who stand up for each other in turbulent times, through
violent war and the disapproval of a powerful parent. David rends his
clothes at Jonathan's death and, in grieving, writes a song:
I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother;
You were very dear to me.
Your love for me was wonderful,
More wonderful than that of women.
Here,
the Bible praises enduring love between men. What Jonathan and David
did or did not do in privacy is perhaps best left to history and our
own imaginations.
In addition to its praise of friendship and its
condemnation of divorce, the Bible gives many examples of marriages
that defy convention yet benefit the greater community. The Torah
discouraged the ancient Hebrews from marrying outside the tribe, yet
Moses himself is married to a foreigner, Zipporah. Queen Esther is
married to a non-Jew and, according to legend, saves the Jewish people.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow, of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia, believes
that Judaism thrives through diversity and inclusion. "I don't think
Judaism should or ought to want to leave any portion of the human
population outside the religious process," he says. "We should not want
to leave [homosexuals] outside the sacred tent." The marriage of Joseph
and Mary is also unorthodox (to say the least), a case of an
unconventional arrangement accepted by society for the common good. The
boy needed two human parents, after all.
In the Christian story,
the message of acceptance for all is codified. Jesus reaches out to
everyone, especially those on the margins, and brings the whole
Christian community into his embrace. The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit
priest and author, cites the story of Jesus revealing himself to the
woman at the well— no matter that she had five former husbands and a
current boyfriend—as evidence of Christ's all-encompassing love. The
great Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann, emeritus professor at Columbia
Theological Seminary, quotes the apostle Paul when he looks for
biblical support of gay marriage: "There is neither Greek nor Jew,
slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ."
The religious argument for gay marriage, he adds, "is not generally
made with reference to particular texts, but with the general
conviction that the Bible is bent toward inclusiveness."
The
practice of inclusion, even in defiance of social convention, the
reaching out to outcasts, the emphasis on togetherness and community
over and against chaos, depravity, indifference—all these biblical
values argue for gay marriage. If one is for racial equality and the
common nature of humanity, then the values of stability, monogamy and
family necessarily follow. Terry Davis is the pastor of First
Presbyterian Church in Hartford, Conn., and has been presiding over
"holy unions" since 1992. "I'm against promiscuity—love ought to be
expressed in committed relationships, not through casual sex, and I
think the church should recognize the validity of committed same-sex
relationships," he says.
Still, very few Jewish or Christian
denominations do officially endorse gay marriage, even in the states
where it is legal. The practice varies by region, by church or
synagogue, even by cleric. More progressive denominations—the United
Church of Christ, for example—have agreed to support gay marriage.
Other denominations and dioceses will do "holy union" or "blessing"
ceremonies, but shy away from the word "marriage" because it is
politically explosive. So the frustrating, semantic question remains:
should gay people be married in the same, sacramental sense that
straight people are? I would argue that they should. If we are all
God's children, made in his likeness and image, then to deny access to
any sacrament based on sexuality is exactly the same thing as denying
it based on skin color—and no serious (or even semiserious) person
would argue that. People get married "for their mutual joy," explains
the Rev. Chloe Breyer, executive director of the Interfaith Center in
New York, quoting the Episcopal marriage ceremony. That's what
religious people do: care for each other in spite of difficulty, she
adds. In marriage, couples grow closer to God: "Being with one another
in community is how you love God. That's what marriage is about."
More
basic than theology, though, is human need. We want, as Abraham did, to
grow old surrounded by friends and family and to be buried at last
peacefully among them. We want, as Jesus taught, to love one another
for our own good—and, not to be too grandiose about it, for the good of
the world. We want our children to grow up in stable homes. What
happens in the bedroom, really, has nothing to do with any of this. My
friend the priest James Martin says his favorite Scripture relating to
the question of homosexuality is Psalm 139, a song that praises the
beauty and imperfection in all of us and that glorifies God's knowledge
of our most secret selves: "I praise you because I am fearfully and
wonderfully made." And then he adds that in his heart he believes that
if Jesus were alive today, he would reach out especially to the gays
and lesbians among us, for "Jesus does not want people to be lonely and
sad." Let the priest's prayer be our own.
With Sarah Ball and Anne Underwood
