morgan_dhu | Musings on the Future of Marriage (Reply)

So, as just about everyone must know by now, a bill redefining marriage as a union between two people to the exclusion of all others passed in the Canadian House of Commons last night, and barring some totally unforeseen circumstance, will be signed into law within the next week or so. So, we've won the right for everyone to marry who they want to, and that's the end of it... or is it?

As I said in a previous rant, the general belief of many opponents of this legislation is that "marriage is so special, you know, and if queers get their deviant and debauched claws of doom on it, all marriage between heterosexuals will immediately collapse into the same primordial slime the rest of us are condemned to live our lives in."

Throughout this long fight for the recognition of relationships between two men or two women, most people have been doing their best to assure straight, non-secular folks that nothing's really going to change. And in one very real sense, it won't. No matter what kind of relationship *I* have, there's no reason why it should affect *your* relationship. My being queer isn't going to make someone else queer if they aren't already - whether they've become aware of it or not. Having a queer married couple living next door is not going to send anyone else to the divorce court, unless that relationship was already doomed.

To quote myself again, I said "I still have not been able to find one opponent of same-sex marriage who can make an effective argument, without resorting to religion, about how the marriage of two men or two women is going to irretrievably damage existing marriages between a man and a woman, or the concept of marriage, or society, or the fate of the universe." And I do believe that's true - same-sex marriage isn't going to damage marriage, or society, and it certainly has nothing to do with the fate of the universe.

But I do think it is part of a long slow change in the idea of what family is, and how families function in society. And that what has happened is a big step forward in that process of change. And that where we are headed is going to upset some people deeply.

What is happening, and what this legislation is part of, is the secularisation of liminal events in human life and the personalisation of ritual. We are moving away from a kind of social structure that has existed for most of the history of our kind, a social structure in which a common religion marked all the important changes in a person's social status - birth, coming of age, marriage, becoming a parent, death. What that religion was, and what events were seen as liminal, depended on what the particular culture was, but until very recently in terms of human history, that's just how it was. And the political organisation of that culture - be it clan, tribe, state, whatever - reflected the dictates of religion with respect to the definitions of all of these statuses.

But all that is breaking down - has been, very slowly, for three or four hundred years, actually - and at an increasing pace. We are moving toward a social structure where the state records and acknowledges personal, not religious, definitions of these liminal events, and where religious recognition becomes an individual and optional element in these events - often a very important element, but not the sufficient and necessary element.

With the passage of the Civil Marriages Act, we now have in Canada a situation where religious marriage and civil marriage have distinctly different definitions. It's been that way for a while, actually - the Catholic Church does not recognise civil marriages where one person has been previously married but whose marriage has not been properly dissolved under canon law. But it's now clear to everyone - civil marriage is defined in secular terms, and religious marriage is defined according to religious beliefs.

If the definition of civil marriage is whatever the state agrees to record and acknowledge, without consideration of religious beliefs, then that definition can change again as ideas of what forms a family can take change and evolve. The concept of marriage, at its heart, is about commitment and caring - which may extend to making commitments to and caring for children within that marriage. We've already decided that the race, ethnicity, religion or gender of the adults in a marriage is irrelevant to its legitimacy. The next change to the secular definition, I think, will be the number of adults in a marriage.

And it's still not going to affect anybody else's marriage if I get myself hitched to a dozen people of all genders and colours and cultures. Nor is it going to change the essence of marriage, or bring about the collapse of society or the end of the world. And not all of the ranting of narrow-minded people who can't understand that nurturing love in all its forms can only add to the peace, justice and joy in the world can make it otherwise.