Grace & Peace!
The purpose of marriage is to unite a man and woman in their common goal of establishing a family.
Jmcrae, I don’t mean to get too off topic here, but you must realize that this an understanding of what marriage has
become, not what marriage* always has been*. Evidence suggests that marriage was a private matter for much of the first millennium and was largely understood along the lines of Roman civil law. Marriage was largely a social obligation and often not so much about the people getting married as the uniting of the families to which those people belonged–the civil/social/political/economic dimensions of marriage are paramount. There was no standard liturgy, and while many wrote of procreation as a part of marriage, there does not seem to have been any general trend toward a mysticisation of the marriage rite, the message being that marriage is about this world, not the next (which accords with the gospels). Lateran 2 sums it up when clerical marriage is condmned: a priest should not “indulge in marriage and impurities.” The “and” there is telling. Marriage and impurity (which, in this context, must refer to sex), in the eyes of the medieval church, went hand in hand. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves by a couple centuries, because marriage does not properly become the business of the church until the turn of the second millennium, at which point Church blessing of a marriage becomes obligatory, it assumes the nature of a sacrament and the beginnings of a standardized marriage rite enter the liturgical books in earnest. But even then, the practices of clandestine marriage (a holdover from the time when marriage was private and civil) and concubinage were not dealt with until Trent, and were only dealt the final death blow at Vatican I, I believe.
The shift seems to have been occassioned by a movement from
civil authority to place questions of inheritance, property rights, wills, etc. in the hands of the church. Given that marriage was, for the most part, about property and inheritance (creating and maintaining legacies, as well as expanding or cementing business and political ties) marriage also came under the purview of the church.
It isn’t until much much later (the 18th century has been suggested by some) that the idea of marrying someone you love gains any sort of wide purchase in the public imagination. At which point, the civil/social/economic/political purposes of marriage begin to take a back seat to individual desire and romance. Which, in many ways, is the logical consequence of the much earlier repeal of Roman civil penalties for childless couples or single people–because the church valued asceticism and celibacy.
All of which is why the idea of traditional marriage as it is currently articulated simply doesn’t make sense. It’s not traditional in the least–it’s a child of 20th century fantasizing. Marriage as it is now is the result of a process of change and growth that has been going on for millennia. It is, moreover, not the end of the process. We do ourselves and history an injustice when we believe ourselves, our times, our culture to be the inevitable sum of history. That is not an argument for gay marriage–you’ll see in these posts that I make no such argument. It is just an appeal for historical perspective and the dismantling of fantasy juggernauts.
As Stephen pointed out above, two people of the same sex getting “married” has no chance of achieving that goal in any realistic way. Instead, one of them puts on a wedding dress and one of them puts on a tux, and they play-act a wedding, and then, nothing happens, because it isn’t physically possible for them to become united in holy matrimony.
I suspect that you consider a married couple a family only when they have children and not when they get married.
It may not be possible for my partner and I to be united in holy matrimony. But that’s fine. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again–I don’t
want a rite performed over us which is just a watered down version of heterosexual marriage. I don’t think that respects our relationship, and I don’t think it respects heterosexual relationships–I don’t understand the impulse that says all loving relationships must look the same and be the same when not all loving relationships *are *the same, and admit
significant differences. But that my partner and I can covenant with each other, like David and Jonathan, that our souls can be knit together (i.e. united by this covenant) by God’s grace like David’s and Jonathan’s were, is happily not dependent on the rite of marriage (as scripture demonstrates).
Under the Mercy,
Mark
All is Grace and Mercy! Deo Gratias!
