thomascwaters.com

This was posted to Facebook, and decided I would respond here on my blog:

I had a conversation with an old friend about equality. My friend is a Christian and he’s someone who was a student at a Christian university in Florida I once did a theatre workshop at. My workshop had nothing to do with me being gay, it was purely a preparational workshop for students looking to enter a theatrical career. But I recall specifically never denying who I was and hoping the students could be themselves when we were working in groups together.

I asked my friend if any of those kids I’d worked with had come out of the closet as they’ve grown up and I was a bit baffled to learn that several were “in recovery.” I asked him what this meant and he told me that they were trying their best to not act on their choices and their friends, families and loved ones were praying over them so that they could become straight.

In his defense, my friend is a Christian who has many gay friends and in his opinion, thinks others should “mind their own business” when it comes to affairs of the heart. Working in the industry he works in, it’s pretty difficult to start making assumptions about others’ attractions.

We then spoke about marriage and I was so happy to have such an honest and open discussion with someone with such a strong Christian background. In his opinion, where marriage is concerned, he doesn’t think the state should be involved at all and I am curious as to how some of you, my friends, feel about that.

I’ve said this before and I’d like to encourage discussion on the topic as well. Not saying that this is absolutely how I feel or what I personally endorse, but I’m interested in hearing what others have to say. If the Federal and/or Local governments were to say, “The government no longer will recognize marriages but only civil unions for all citizens,” how would that make you feel? The government would only preside over “Civil Unions” and the word “marriage” would be a word that was a religious institution, not unsimilar to “Communion” or “Bar Mitzvah.” Equality in the eyes of the government would reign, and religions would be able to have the word they seem to covet and seemingly we would have the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else.

Please write to me and let me know your thoughts on this. I’m truly fascinated by it.

I have expressed the opinion before that separating the legal from the religious was one potential direction for this go go, because on the surface, it looks like a win/win for everyone. But in reality, it wouldn’t work for a few reasons (not in any specific order):

1. Some within the religious communities who claim to only care about “protecting marriage” will still fight tooth and nail to keep GLBTQs from having any rights. For some claiming to care about marriage is really just a smokescreen for anti-gay bigotry. Others, will claim that civil unions for same-sex couples is just a  trick and that queers only want marriage, so they must fight cicl unions as a way of fighting the bigger gay desire for marriage.
2. Not all religious faith communities want to keep same-sex couples away from marriage. There are denominations even now, that perform marriage ceremonies for male couples and female couples. Would these churches be forced to stop offering these ceremonies?
3. Everyone will still talk about whatever their relationship is, by using the word “marriage” since marriage, married, husband, and wife of such well understood terms to describe committed relationships. Maybe not EVERYONE.. but almost everyone. The religious who get ownership of “Marriage” according to this idea, will be forever pissed off as same-sex couples and opposite sex couples who choose (or are forced to) the Civil Union option, still use the “M” word to describe their status.
4. This approach will hurt the institution of Marriage, depending upon your perspective. But without a doubt the number of marriages will decline or at least fail to grow at the same rate. An article published last February about Civil Unions in France discusses this very situation.
5. While most same-sex couples who seek marriage do so for all of the civil protections and benefits, some seek marriage because they want to be like straights. These queers won’t be happy with just Civil Unions.
6. Civil Unions offer many benefits to same-sex couples and families. But some may argue, that only marriage truly offers the foundation and support for healthy families. This may or may not be true, but my guess is that over time, we may see it as true for both same-sex as well as opposite-sex families. In a marriage ceremony, there is a part of the ceremony which is about each partner’s vows to the other partner, but there is also a part that is about the community of faith’s vow to support the couple. This placement of the newly formed family within a bigger context of community is important. This may be possible within Civil Unions, but will it be a standard?

I seem to remember from a grad school class, that historically, there was a time when the government played no role in marriage at all, and at some point that changed such that the government issued a license: a permission to get married. I seem to remember that the change had something to do with protecting people, which the church wasn’t doing, but don’t find any mention of that in a quick search.

The friend’s declaration of marriage as an “affair of the heart” is a great illustration  of why this simplistic viewpoint is so flawed. Marriage has little to do with the heart at all when you consider the heart is a body organ that pumps blood. Even if understood more generally, as dealing with “Love,” marriage is far, far more than that. The notion that love had anything to do with Marriage is a concept first raised in the 12th century. Marriage is about so much more than that, even if we all agreed that love was the starting point from which 2 individuals choose to make a commitment to each other and form a family (with or without children.)

My own views on all of this have changed much over the last few years. Today, I don’t believe any real change is needed anywhere, except for governments to stop discriminating against people based upon the gender of the two partners interested in being married. If everyone recognized “Marriage” as having 2 possible components: Civil Marriage, which entails the marriage license, and some public commitment of two persons to each other; and Religious Marriage where religious denominations conduct ritual or ceremony in accordance with that faith background . This separates what churches must do from what must happen for the legal rights and responsibilities. If any religious group doesn’t want to offer Religious Marriage to same-sex couples, they would have that right, but same-sex couples would still have the opportunity to be treated equally in the eyes of the government, and society overall. and, if any religius group does want to offer religious marriage to same-sex couples, they could.