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.