Holy Matrimony, the Council of Trent, and the NY State Senate
written for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 20 June 2007

Just what is the sanctity of marriage? Well, in contemporary discourse it is that which conservative monotheists – Orthodox Jews, Muslims (both Sunni and Shia) and Christians (both Roman and not) – claim to be defending from the machinations of those who would give all people the right to marry.

This is an unusual example of the defensive paradigm. Generally, when the status quo is under attack, the threat comes from people who say that the state in question is itself wrong and must therefore be abolished. Abolitionists demanding universal human freedom threaten the status quo of economies built on slave labor. Revolutionaries demanding home rule threaten the status quo of various empires, from the Athenian to the Roman to the British. Suffragists and feminists demanding rights for women threaten the status quo of patriarchal societies.

We can easily see what those three examples have in common: the demands of the majority are assaulting the privileges of the minority, an elite group which will naturally wish to defend its status as wealthy landowners and traders, as geo-political power-brokers, as masters of the universe. All otherwise is the fight over same-sex marriage.
The people seeking same-sex union do not wish to abolish marriage; rather they seek to reify it, to acknowledge its moral and legal authority by participating in its rules and rituals. Contrary to the dictate on one of my favorite protest buttons, the lesbians, the gays, and the others do not wish to subvert the dominant paradigm; they wish to support that paradigm.

What, then, is in need of defending? Not the status of marriage itself, since that isn’t under attack. All that’s left is the history of marriage, the venerable tradition stretching back unto the very shades of the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve (no, not Steve) booked a church and an organist and Apple-Tree Catering to celebrate the first marriage, performed, presumably, by God.

OK, hold on a minute. If that implied union – detailed in neither the first nor second creation story nor yet in the narrative of the fall in Genesis 3 – sets the standard for all subsequent unions, what happened? How come Jacob can take as his wife first Leah and then a week (or seven years) later Rachel, and take them both without so much as a song and dance, let alone the blessings of clergy? What about David, centuries later, marrying first Michal, the daughter of Saul and then the smart and virtuous Abigail and yet once more the indiscreetly bathing wife of Uriah (to say nothing of Ahinoam, Maacah, Haggith, Abital, Eglah, and the snuggly Abishag) all without even a walk down the aisle? What vows were spoken and what authority invoked in the wedding at Cana? And why is such enormous importance placed on the teachings of Paul, the man who defines marriage as a moral fall-back position?

Well, if it’s not the Bible’s history, maybe it’s the history of marriage in Christian Western Europe that needs defending. Today I was reading a book by Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. I love Warner’s books. A feminist scholar but no revisionist, she takes the western canon on its own terms and shows her readers the terrifying implications of what those texts actually say. She doesn’t need to attack anything to make her points, because the texts themselves are so often the most frightening part of the ethical equation. Warner merely explicates, with unrelenting British courtesy and decorum and barely a shred of irony. In a discussion of the tradition of the medieval troubadours and the status of marriage in the literature of courtly romance, Warner remarks the fact that not until the Council of Trent did the Roman Church consider marriage a sacrament dependent upon the blessings of clergy.

The Council of Trent ended in 1563.

This particular modification to the institution of marriage, this dogmatic decree to use precise terminology, was made on 11 November 1563. (While earlier dogma may imply the sacramental nature of marriage, it was not formalized until the Council of Trent.) When we look at the history of our western civilization, when we read through the passing millennia of the narratives in Hebrew and Christian scripture, we realize that 1563 is Modern Times, virtually the day-before-yesterday. The printing press was going full blast. Columbus had long-since sailed. Martin Luther’s protests had gone second-gen. Copernicus had published essay on heliocentrism. Elizabeth Tudor had been on the throne of England for five years. The west had already made what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes as the wrong-turn into secular humanism. In fact, the Council of Trent can fairly be called secular humanism’s back-lash. In the required Humanities course I teach, 1563 is only four decades from the end of a three-thousand year survey of western ideas.

The history of marriage does not support the rhetoric of self-righteous exclusion used in opposition to same-sex unions. The paradigm of marriage, as we can see, has always been in flux, has only very recently been defined by the blessings of clergy.

What, then, are the grounds for denying those blessings to all the people who seek them?