US Bishops' Pastoral Letter on Marriage, Part 1: An Overview

Recently, my introductory ethics class was considering same-sex marriage. As part of that unit, I typically have them read key sections of the US Bishops' Pastoral Letter on Marriage, "Marriage: Love and Life in the Divine Plan."

The reasoning on display in that pastoral letter plays an important role in shaping much Christian opposition to same-sex marriage. As such, I think that any Christian who supports same-sex marriage, as I do, ought to engage with it seriously. Since I haven't done so explicitly on the blog, I thought I'd devote a series of posts to doing that.

This post is the first in that series. Others will follow as I have the time to develop them, which may not be right away. Here, I will simply offer an overview of what I take to be the key features of the views and arguments laid out in the Pastoral Letter, especially as they relate to same-sex relationships.

The Roman Catholic Definition of Marriage

The main aim of the Pastoral Letter is to articulate a Catholic vision of the sacrament of marriage, and to explore the implications of that vision. According to that vision, marriage is " a lifelong partnership of the whole life, of mutual and exclusive fidelity, established by mutual consent between a man and a woman, and ordered towards the good of the spouses and the procreation of offspring."

The Bishops argue that marriage is not merely a human institution but a divine one, authored by God for two interconnected purposes: conjugal union and procreation. That is, marriage serves to unite a man and a woman in a distinctive kind of bond characterized by mutual self-giving love, a love which culminates in the generation of new life and becomes the context within which that new life is nurtured into adulthood.

"It is the nature of love to overflow," say the Bishops, "to be life-giving." And so marital love is designed by God to produce new life: a child onto whom the love of the parents overflows.

The Bishops maintain that same-sex marriage violates God's purpose for marriage. In fact, they hold that it "poses a multifaceted threat to the very fabric of society, striking at the source from which society and culture come and which they are meant to serve." (By contrast, terrorism only kills people and destroys infrastructure!) To make this case, the Bishops rely on two key premises, what I call the Inseparability Thesis and the Complementarity Thesis.

The Inseperability Thesis

The Inseparability Thesis holds that one cannot separate the two purposes of marriage (loving union and procreation) without doing violence to the nature of human sexuality and the marital union. As the Bishops put it, these two purposes "cannot be separated without altering the couple's spiritual life and compromising the goods of marriage and the future of the family."

This inseparability cuts in both directions, according to the Bishops. It's not just that the procreative aim is harmed if mutual self-gifting love is absent between the sexual partners (because children are then brought into the world in less-than-ideal conditions, lacking the stability and overflowing love that conjugal love brings). It's also the case, they think, that conjugal love itself  is undermined if the couple's intimacy isn't properly directed towards reproduction. It is the latter claim that is particularly crucial for making the case that same-sex marriage (not to mention contraception) is unacceptable. Insofar as same-sex couples cannot be procreative, their intimacy cannot be directed towards reproduction. And this, the Bishops maintain, entails that the kind of love they can have for each other is diminished and cannot be of the marital sort.

The Complementarity Thesis

The Complementarity Thesis holds that men and women are designed by God to complement one another in a distinctive way, such that when a man and woman form an intimate partnership there is a natural fit, a way in which they complete each other. Male and female are, according to the Bishops, "distinct bodily ways of being human" that have personal and spiritual implications (since the body cannot be separated from the rest of the person). The result is "two distinct yet harmonizing ways of responding to the vocation to love." 

And these two ways of being  human were "made for each other," created by God to suit each other uniquely "as partners and helpmates." The idea is that there is a distinctive kind of union that is possible only between a man and a woman because of how men and women are differentially designed. And according to the Bishops, the conjugal union simply is this distinctive kind of union--and hence is not possible at all for same-sex pairs.

Key Concessions

In the course of developing their case, the US Catholic Bishops make a couple of important claims that I will call "key concessions." I call them concessions because they express strong moral intuitions that Catholics don't want to give up, but at the same time they create prima facie problems for the arguments sketched out above. In a sense, they are concessions to human decency, made because of human decency, even though they create some difficulties for their position. Typically, Catholic thinkers treat these as soluble problems: while they might appear to generate contradictions, this is only an appearance, one that evaporates when the right distinctions are made.

The concessions are these:

1. The Infertility Concession: Infertile heterosexual couples can have marriages that are in no way defective, but are fully valid and complete. The Bishops recognize that some married couples who learn they are infertile "may be tempted to think that their union is not complete or truly blessed." The Bishops reply that this is a false impression. "The marital union of a man and a woman is a distinctive communion of persons," they say in response. "An infertile couple continues to manifest this attribute."

2. The Gay and Lesbian Dignity Concession: The Church stresses that "homosexual persons" have a "human dignity" that needs to be treated with "respect, compassion, and sensitivity." Implicit here (and explicit elsewhere in Roman Catholic writings) is the acknowledgment that a homosexual orientation is not a perverse choice but a discovered condition--that just like a heterosexual orientation (or a bisexual one, for that matter), a homosexual orientation is a feature of a person's lived reality that they cannot ordinarily change. Although Catholics teach that homosexuality is "intrinsically disordered," what they mean by this is that it is a kind of disability in the way that blindness and deafness are. In this respect, it is like infertility: an unchosen feature of one's life that one can't wish away but must live with. This is why, in general, the Catholic Church urges gays and lesbians to pursue celibacy and "chaste friendship" rather than attempt a doomed heterosexual marriage (doomed insofar as a homosexual orientation would thwart the unitive end of such a marriage).

The first of these is a concession to the human needs of infertile couples. It is one thing to face the often difficult challenge of infertility, something else to be part of a religion that would dissolve your marriage over it (or forbid you from marrying in the first place if they knew about it in advance).  A Church that did that--that barred you because of some disability from pursuing your human longing for conjugal love and life partnership--would, we might say, be rather monstrous, certainly not a Church that seeks to faithfully live out Jesus' ethic of love.

Likewise for the second concession. It is one thing to discover that you are gay, something else to be part of a religion that vilifies you for something you can't help, casts you out and refuses to offer you a place of dignity.

Hence, I think it is quite clear that the Catholic Church should not back down with respect to either concession. They should insist that infertile marriages are fully valid. They should insist that gays and lesbians have a human dignity that demands respect. Were I feeling hyperbolic, I might say that failure to do either of these things would "pose a multifaceted threat to the very fabric of the Christian love ethic, and to the Catholic Church's claim to represent the love of Christ in the world."

But although the Catholic Church thinks these concessions to decency are wholly compatible with their broader argument about same-sex marriage, I think, on the contrary, that they are not. Together with other considerations, I think these concessions help expose some very fundamental problems with the Roman Catholic conception of human intimacy and sexuality.

More significantly, they highlight that an impulse born of love has only been incompletely carried through. Jesus' call to love has the power to shatters walls, to break down calcified ideas that get in the way of love's fullest expression. But sometimes love hits walls of resistance and only succeeds in making cracks. But the cracks have a trajectory.

Likewise, the concessions above have a trajectory. If we follow them, I think we will see that what Christian love demands is something more than what these concessions allow.

I will begin exploring why I think this in subsequent posts.

Civil Marriage vs Civil Union: Why NOT Leave Marriage to Churches?

I've heard many people on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate make the following remark: "Really, the state should stay out of the marriage business altogether. They should offer civil unions to anyone who wants legal standing for their partnerships, and leave marriage to the churches."

Well, why not? There may be reasons for the state to legally recognize and regulate domestic partnerships--but "marriage" is such a heavily weighted concept, fraught with religious and social significance. Why couldn't the state avoid all the controversy by just announcing that it's limiting its role to making legal contracts between domestic partners, without intending these partnerships to be "marriages," however that contested concept is understood?

Is Same-Sex Marriage "Newer than Cell Phones"?

One of the most common and reasonable-sounding objections to marriage equality goes something like this: "Marriage has traditionally been a relationship between a man and a woman, and extending it to same-sex couples is a major change. Because marriage is such a core social institution, major changes should be approached with caution and nothing should be done quickly."

Justice Samuel Alito offered just such an argument during oral arguments yesterday, as the Supreme Court began to consider California's Proposition 8. "Traditional marriage," he said, "has been around for thousands of years." Same-sex marriage, by contrast, "is newer than cell phones or the internet." He expressed the worry that because it is so new, there "isn't a lot of data about its effects" and "we do not have the ability to see the future."

On the surface, this will sound to many like a reasonable expression of concern. But there are several rather serious problems with this "newer than cell phones" objection--problems that expose the objection as little more than a smoke screen. Here are three, arranged from the least significant to the most:

Pediatricians Agree: Marriage Equality is Good for Kids

Just today the American Academy of Pediatrics officially came out in support of marriage equality for same-sex couples. And what business does the AAP have making pronouncements on this controversial social issue? Well, their business. Marriage equality is good for children.

The argument is really very simple: As any conservative will tell you, a stable family is good for the welfare of children. As any conservative will tell you, marriage promotes family stability. From these two conservative premises--premises that every faculty member at Liberty University is likely to wholeheartedly endorse--it follows that marriage equality is good for those children being raised by same-sex couples.

Well, sure, a critic will respond. All else being equal this would follow. But all else is not equal.

The Social Meaning of Marriage: Some Thoughts on Wedgwood's Same-Sex Marriage Argument

USC philosopher Ralph Wedgwood has a published a very helpful article, "The Meaning of Same-Sex Marriage," in The Stone (the New York Times' philosophy forum). In it, he notes the debate over same-sex civil marriage shouldn't be limited to the legal issues, since marriage (even in its civic rather than religious sense) has more than just a legal meaning defined in terms of the legal rights and responsibilities it bestows. It also has a social meaning.

So what is this social meaning of "marriage"? Wedgwood notes that an institution has such a meaning when there are a set of "understandings and expectations...that almost all members of society share." Such general understandings and expectations typically exist when an institution is traditional, that is, when it has been around for awhile and has become part of our shared cultural furniture. While laws might support such an institution, it has a life apart from the laws. And so, as Wedgwood puts it, marriage is "a traditional way of life imbued with social meaning, held in place by law."

This is a point, Wedgwood notes, that opponents of same-sex marriage tend to stress. But Wedgwood argues that if we look closely at the social meaning of marriage, it actually gives a further argument in favor of marriage equality, in addition to the legal argument that tends to be what progressives on this issue focus one. Here's how Wedgwood puts it:

So what exactly is this (social) meaning? Since it consists of generally shared understandings and expectations, it can not include any controversial doctrines (such as the traditional Christian belief that marriage symbolizes the union of Christ and His church). It must consist in more mundane and less controversial assumptions about what married life is normally (though not always) like. These assumptions seem to include the following: normally, marriage involves sexual intimacy (which in heterosexual couples often leads to childbirth); it involves the couple’s cooperation in dealing with the domestic and economic necessities of life (including raising children if they have any); and it is entered into with a mutual long-term commitment to sustaining the relationship.


At least until quite recently, it was also part of this social meaning that every marriage was the union of one man and one woman.

But while it is important to make this last concession on pain of living in denial, Wedgwood doesn't think this fact about the traditional understanding of marriage can carry the weight that opponents of marriage equality want to give it.

And why not? Here's where Wedgwood's argument gets interesting. For Wedgwood, to understand which features of the traditional social meaning of an institution are most important, we need to know what benefit is conveyed by the existence of an institution defined in this way. And for Wedgwood, the benefit is a communicative one. Here's how he puts it:

...by marrying, a couple can give a signal to their community that they wish their relationship to be viewed in the light of these generally shared assumptions about what married life is like....In this way, marriage’s social meaning makes it possible for couples to communicate information about their relationships in a particularly effective way. This is important because people do not only care about tangible benefits (such as money or health care or the like); they care about intangible benefits as well. In particular, people care deeply about how they are regarded by others — which inevitably depends on the information about them that is shared in their community.

What the social meaning of marriage does is enable couples to communicate something to the broader society that it would be much more difficult to otherwise communicate efficiently: "This is how we'd like to be regarded and treated by our neighbors, our friends and family, our community, and the broader society."  The "this" might be a bit more involved than Wedgwood indicates in his sketch. I supect it generally involves the communication of a commitment to sexual and romantic fidelity which leads society to view sexual activity--and the cultivation of romantic feelings even when they don't involve sex--with someone other than the spouse in a different light than such activity would be viewed if the couple weren't marriage.

But such details aside, Wedgwood's makes the very interesting point that a person's sex is well-established and readily communicated apart from the institution of marriage. You don't need marriage to communicate that. And so the communicative benefit of marriage is in no special way served by hanging on to the old assumption that married couples are comprised of one man and one woman.

More profoundly, he notes that the traditional social meaning of marriage has changed over time based on considerations of justice. Notably, the marital partnership used to be generally understood as a hierarchical one in which the woman is subordinated to her husband. Marriage is not superfluous for communicating such a message--but we've decided that such a message is one that shouldn't be communicated let alone practiced, because fairness dictates against such subordination. And so justice has led us to change our social understanding of marriage in ways that substantively effects what is communicated by it.

The capacity of gay and lesbian couples to signal society about how they want to be regarded is compromised when these couples are denied access to the institution of marriage. And you need a compelling reason to deny a social benefit available to some that is denied to others. In this case, then, social justice issues speak in favor of changing the social meaning of marriage, but in a way that eliminates none of the communicative benefits of marriage--since matters of gender are so effectively and efficiently communicated in the absence of the marital institution.

Put another way, more of the communicative function of marriage was lost when we stopped treating the marital relationship as hierarchical than will be lost by extending marriage to same-sex couples, since in the latter case nothing is really lost at all. Instead, the capacity to have access to that mode of communication is just made more broadly available.

Overall, this strikes me as a significant argument. I think Wedgwood may underappreciate the extent to which prominent defenders of marriage equality already reach beyond the legal arguments and consider the social meanings of marriage. While it is true that a tactical interest in distinguishing civil marriage from religious marriage has led to a focus on the legal dimensions of the civic institution, there are plenty of defenders of same-sex marriage who pay serious attention to broader social concerns. Andrew Sullivan, for example, has long stressed the social impact of being denied, as a gay man, participation in an institution of such weighty social significance. Jonathan Rauch has long pointed out the social effects that same-sex marriage can have--an argument that goes well beyond equal access to a set of legal rights. More generally, gays and lesbians generally know that "marriage" entails a social recognition of the couple as a united pair, a "family"--and one of the main reasons they want access to marriage is for the sake of having their intimate partnerships appreciated publicly as the family units that they experience them to be.

My own argument about the meaning of the term "marriage" also goes beyond understanding it as a legal arrangement. In brief, my view is that marriage in its core meaning refers to a certain way of being related to another person. As such, this core meaning is not lost if marriage is available to partners whose personal characteristics (such as their gender) don't prevent them from relating to each other in this marital way. If infertility does not prevent a couple from being related in the marital way, it follows that procreative potential is not an essential feature of the marital relationship--and barring such a feature, same-sex couples can relate in all the meaningful ways that heterosexual married couples relate.

But even if defenders of marriage equality are already aware of the social dimension of marriage and its significance for the debate, Wedgwood has nicely articulated an important point and stressed an aspect of the issue that might have gone underappreciated.

So what should we make of his argument? Is it convincing? I suspect that critics of Wedgwood are most likely to question whether the specific communicative function that he highlights is really the chief benefit of marriage as a social institution. Some, such as Margaret Somerville, locate the chief good of marriage not in a benefit enjoyed by the married couple, but in a benefit enjoyed by the broader society. Specifically, she thinks that what marriage does is symbolically honor the procreative pair-bond, lifting it up for special social recognition and support. This singling out of the life-producing pair-bond for special recognition is, on her view, supposed to help promote certain social values that she believes it is good for society to have. Jean Bethke Elshtain offers an argument along similar lines in a 1991 Commonweal essay, "Against Gay Marriage".

Obviously, Wedgwood's perspective doesn't directly take on arguments like this (which could be independently challenged in terms of society's willingness to, among other things, marry heterosexual octagenarians). But I think his perspective raises important difficulties for Somerville and others like her, by bringing to the table further concerns that would need to be weighed against whatever social values are supposedly promoted by denying marriage equality.

Specifically, refusing equal access to the individual goods that marriage affords--such as the communicative goods Wedgwood identifies--impacts the values inculcated within a society. Most would agree, I think, that valuing equality--both equality under the law and equal access to participation in less tangible social goods--is good for society. And there is symbolic damage to our social respect for equality when sexual minorities are denied participation in such a core social institution as marriage. We shape our social values when we legitimize such social marginalization. We symbolically vindicate differential treatment based on unchosen sexuality. The value that equality is granted in society is correspondingly diminished.

Is there any value promoted by limiting marriage to procreative couples that is so significant, so crucial to promote--and so impossible to promote in any other way--that it justifies such a sacrifice in society's regard for equality?

That, it seems to me, is the question that opponents of marriage equality need to answer. And I doubt very much that any good answer favoring inequality is forthcoming.

Giving a Human Face to the Marriage Equality Issue

In the video behow, my cousins (Phil is my first cousin) stand up for marriage equality and speak out against the proposed Minnesota State Constitutional Amendment which would exclude same-sex couples from equal access to civil marriage rights--in effecting writing legal discrimination into the constitution of that state (as has already been done here in Oklahoma and elsewhere). Take a moment to watch, and feel free to share.

Lutheran Marriage--Expanding on Comments Made on Another Blog

For those interested, I left a lengthy comment concerning Martin Luther's views about marriage on polycarp's blog, "The Church of Jesus Christ," in response to a blog post considering whether the government should stay out of the marriage business.

Luther, for those unfamiliar with his thought on this matter, would have likely found this to be the entirely wrong question. For him, the regulation of marriage was properly a civil matter, and it was the church that should stay out of the marriage business--except as witness and support to the married couple. As far as the establishment of a marriage goes, Luther thought that this was done by the married couple, not by the church or by the state. This is the point I make (although in greater detail) on ploycarp's blog.

So--let individuals marry (which happens when they make a commitment to one another to be spouses); let the state regulate those marriages in a manner consistent with the natural rights of persons and the interests of a well-ordered society; and let the church witness, celebrate, and support the marital unions that individuals make with one another.

This "division of labor" in the marriage business does not by itself resolve the disputes about marriage--concerning, for example, how wide the divorce escape hatch should be, whether same-sex couples should have the right to marry, etc. To settle these matters, we need a fuller understanding of the rights of individuals with respect to the creation (and dissolution) of marital bonds--their scope and limits.

But that it is a matter of individual rights on the Lutheran view is very important. Marriage is not an institution of the church or of the state but a matter of individual rights--rights which impose moral constraints on what both church and state may legitimately do in relation to marriage.

And this means that, for example, the question of same-sex marriage must be settled by asking whether same sex couples have the right to establish a marital commitment with one another. If they do, then the state has a moral responsibility to include them within the legal regulative structures of civil marriage. If they do, then churches are morally in the wrong when they discriminate against same-sex couples by refusing to celebrate and support the bonds they have forged, even though they routinely celebrate and support those forged by heterosexual partners.