Over at The Immanent Frame, there is an interesting post this morning: Promoting Marriage and Christianity in America. To read the entire post, click here. The author, Melanie Heath, "is assistant professor of sociology at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Her forthcoming book, One Marriage Under God: Defense of Marriage Actions in Middle America, will be published by New York University Press."
Here are some excerpts:
Following the recent California Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage, National Public Radio offered a report
on “the coming storm” between two “titanic” legal principles: “equal
treatment for same-sex couples” and “the freedom to exercise religious
beliefs.” The report gave several examples of this “collision,” which
opponents cite as proof that same-sex marriage is a threat to religious
liberty. The idea of an impending collision may overstate the intensity
of impending legal conflicts, especially since cases of this nature
have been fought for several decades following the emergence of laws
prohibiting discrimination in housing, employment and education for
non-heterosexuals. Still, the current portrayal of this conflict does
foreground the complex relationship of marriage, religion, and the
state to promote one form of marriage (white, heterosexual,
monogamous). It is same-sex marriage’s (and polygamy’s) challenge to
this interrelationship that provokes such anxiety among religious
conservatives.
Posts by Stephanie Coontz and Tey Meadow and Judith Stacey
reveal the multilayered and complex history of marriage and
Christianity in Europe and America, and its culmination in what Coontz
remarks was an “untraditional” shift by the state to make marriage a privileged
status that is attached to a large number of social and economic
benefits (and constraints). In this vein, I will turn my attention to
the less-known marriage promotion movement in the United States, in
order to shed further light on how state and religion work together to
define and protect the boundaries of marriage, and what this movement
might mean for the future of marriage equality.
. . .
While religious conservatives balk at their loss of religious liberty
under an increasingly wide array of antidiscrimination laws in relation
to non-heterosexuals, it is significant that government marriage
promotion policies combine religion and science to extend the
privileged status of marriage to white, middle-class, heterosexual
couples. This analysis speaks to the demands that social justice will
require of the movement for marriage equality. Even as the battle
against “separate but equal” recognition of same-sex couples gains
legal footing, those fighting for marriage equality must take into
consideration the consequences of the movement on other forms of social
inequality. On the one hand, as states move in the direction of
Massachusetts and California, it will become more difficult for
government, politics, and religion to unite in an effort to promote heterosexual
marriage as the superior family form. On the other, as Meadow and
Stacey argue in their post, it does not offer justice to those outside
the boundary of marriage who are barred from accessing its
socioeconomic benefits, whether straight or gay. Thus, there are good
reasons to expand the fight for marriage equality to consider the
option offered in the California Supreme Court decision, for the state
to eliminate the term “marriage” altogether
and allow religious and secular communities to offer their own
“definition.” This solution will not eliminate legal conflicts over
antidiscrimination and religious liberty, but it might provide for a
more just world.
