'Can We Talk' About Gay Marriage?

Richard Mouw is a highly respected evangelical Christian leader and President of one of the finest evangelical seminaries in the world. When he speaks I want to listen. And what he writes I like to read.

Recently, Newsweek magazine published a brief essay by Mouw whose purpose is to invite evangelicals and those who are angry with them to begin talking more respectfully to each other. He hopes to gain a better hearing for his more responsibly biblical perspective on social issues than the fundamentalism of which he and his colleages are often accused, and especially for his support of California's recent ban on same sex marriage.

Mouw offers his apologia in the form of reminders that heterosexual marriage is the biblical norm and that the Bible frowns on sexual intimacy outside of marriage, but that it also supports racial justice, gender equality, peacemaking, and care for the environment. The implication is that buying the whole package is not as bad a deal as non-evangelicals make it out to be. Mouw goes on to acknowledge that while the Bible cannot be the sole basis for public policy (contra the position of a lot of his fellow evangelicals), he seems to want to make an exception in the case of same sex marriage, in which the issues "go deep." The big issues for him are the impact on children of a culture that supports gay relationships as the norm, and the right of evangelical Christians to stand up for tradition on this issue without being denigrated as purveyors of hate speech.

I have long regarded Richard Mouw's evangelicalism as worthy of serious attention and appreciation. Most of the things that I myself want to find in the Bible, Mouw's writings assure me are already there. And some of the things I wish were not in the Bible these same writings put in a broader context than that of the proof-texting upon which fundamentalists still depend. Still and all, it really is a stretch to invoke the Bible as a foundation for seeking racial justice and gender equality; most of us who have worked for both have had to do so by relativizing too many biblical passages for comfort. And then there was Jesus, handing out swords rather than negotiating peace treaties. Not to mention the God who is still threatening the total destruction of the environment he once promised Noah he would not mess with again.

As for male-female cleaving, it's a good arrangement when fruitfulness and multiplication are the order of the day, but I know very few people who any longer hold that generating offspring is the sine qua non of the marriage relationship. And while I agree with Richard Mouw that people are better off confining their sexual activity to one partner, I cannot see the number of frowns toward the alternative that he apparently sees in the Bible. After all, Solomon got away with 700 concubines, give or take a few dozen. And where would Islam be today without Sarah's handing Hagar over to her aged but still potent and fertile husband? Neither do I see much support in the Good Book for the kind of deep, one-on-one sexual intimacy that Mouw and I also believe to be a huge positive for heterosexuals' quality of life. Jesus skipped it altogether, and Paul saw the need for it as at best embarrassing and at worst downright dangerous.

What I most respect about Mouw's evangelicalism is his seeking to distinguish the message of the whole Bible from the diverse messages that are embedded in its myriad passages. That is exactly the sort of thing that theologians like me have been trying to do for a professional lifetime and getting skewered by evangelicals as one of "those liberals" for trying to do it. It is good to see really competent evangelicals engaged in the same struggle that my kind is to present a holistic biblical message unsullied by the morally outrageous (e.g., Isaac's almost-sacrifice) and theologically stupid (e.g., paying off the Devil) passages that more than occasionally fill the Bible's books, chapters, and verses.

So: can we talk? Sure. But please, not about whether or not there are passages in the Bible that support this or that particular view on this or that particular social issue. Pick your perspective and your issue, and we can all line up biblical texts to support it. Let's talk instead about our respective visions of the whole of the Bible --- its overarching understanding, intent, and message, as the church at various times and in sundry ways has adapted it to its own situations --- and about how we are to adapt it to ours. Mouw's vision and mine differ somewhat. But we do not differ about the importance of listening to one another. I especially hope we non-evangelicals can resolve our differences with evangelicals over their imposing a particular biblical vision by misusing the constitutional gift of initiative and referendum. In both sexual and in legislative activity, there is a big difference between a proposal and a proposition.

Gay Divorce

While Barack Obama was taking the oath of office, my wife and I were helping our daughter recover from a severe bronchial infection and trying to keep things less scary for our grandaughter in the process. Happily, the infection is cleared up; our grandaughter is cheered up; and though we are back home in Texas we are still catching up on the huge week and more that we missed. Enough is still being written about the Washington hoopla to make additions superfluous here, for the time being anyway. But in wading through our accumulated newspapers (it is still hard for me to enjoy them online) I came across a recent development in our town that is worth a little attention right now, and a lot more later.

A Dallas man has petitioned for dissolution of the marriage made official under the laws of the State of Massachusetts between himself and his male partner. He is running into difficulty because of a legal dilemma framed by no less august a figure than the Attorney General of the State of Texas. As the latter sees the matter, gays cannot get divorces in Texas because Texas law does not permit them to get married in the first place. What is especially troubling about this bizarre position is how quickly it morphs legal considerations into metaphysical ones. Basically, its argument goes like this: you can't dissolve what doesn't exist. There cannot be a broken covenant when there never was a covenant to begin with.

Fortunately, if the United States Supreme Court eventually weighs in on whatever constitutional issues may be at stake in cases like this one, the justices will not have to get into the philosophical quagmire of deciding what it means to exist and not to exist. It will be enough for these learned folk to try to figure out, among other things, whether there are any incongruities between Article Four, section 1 of the U.S. Constitution and the federal government's 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. The former reads: "Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State." The latter says that no state has to honor the law of any other state with respect to same sex marriage, and in doing so denigrates gay marriage in a distinctively preemptory way.

One thing that this Dallas case might bring about, if its petitioner doesn't give up on Texas and head back to Massachusetts to get his divorce, is a High Court resolution of the incongruities between these two legal standards that I am not alone in wondering about. And if the former should eventually be permitted to trump the latter, as I believe it should, both gay marriage and gay divorce should become less subject to legislative and legalistic sophistry than they now are. Both will have to be acknowledged as here to stay, everywhere and for a long, long time.

The larger question is not about which relationships, otherwise healthy, should and should not be legal. It is about which otherwise healthy relationships --- the qualification is important --- do and do not have integrity. (I have no brief to make, by way of illustration, for legalizing paid for, one night stand relationships; they aren't healthy and they have no praiseworthy integrity.) About real, intense, and healthy relationships, the question is whether the law should be held captive by the wishes of a majority whose will in the case of homosexuality borders on the tyrannical.

Gay relationships, and yes, gay sex, but more importantly gay commitments, gay partnerships, gay covenants, gay marriage, and now, tragically, gay divorce --- do in fact exist, Texas legal opinion to the contrary notwithstanding. They do not and will not exist in anything like the numbers that gay-bashers fear with an apprehension bordering on the pathological, but they do exist. As a whole, they are about as healthy and unhealthy as heterosexual relationships are, and they are as deserving of the law's protection as the latter now receive. If Texans cannot abide gays getting married within their own borders, they at least should respect the fact that folks elsewhere will be having fewer and fewer difficulties with married --- and divorced --- gays in their own midsts.

I have come away from a first look into this Dallas case with the feeling that it is time once again, from a Christian perspective, to look at some of our current ideas of what marriage is and is not, and to run a check on just how well those ideas hold up when the question of gay relationships, gay marriage, and gay divorce comes up. Before you read the next column, you might want to consider sending the kids off to a G rated flick.