Jesus’ Fourth Way: On the Christian Understanding of the Faith in Politics and Public Life

Jesus’ Fourth Way:  On the Christian Understanding of  the Faith in Politics and Public Life

Many of us are familiar with Walter Wink’s terminology of Jesus’ “Third Way.”  Wink came up with that phrase to describe Jesus approach to the use of violence.  He means that Jesus does not permit the use of violence but neither is he passive.  Rather, he advocated a third way, a way of active, assertive, creative, non-violent resistance to evil.  Wink is right about that, and by using the phrase “Jesus’ Fourth Way” I in no way mean to disagree with Wink’s presentation of Jesus’ “Third Way” of relating to questions of violence.  Rather, I heard something on the radio recently that made me think that we need to develop a concept of Jesus’ “Fourth Way” to describe Jesus’ position on the relationship of faith to politics and public life.  I came up with this notion when, in the space of not more than ten minutes, I heard in a broadcast on the progressive talk radio station in Seattle descriptions of three possible approaches to the question of the relationship of faith to politics and public life all of which I am convinced are wrong and none of which, I am convinced, reflect Jesus’ position on the subject. No one on that broadcast suggested a fourth way, what I am here calling the Fourth Way of Jesus.

Three False Ways

To understand Jesus’ Fourth Way we need to start with an understanding of the three ways I heard described on the radio that I am convinced do not represent Jesus’ position on our current subject.  The first of them doesn’t even pretend to reflect Jesus’ position on the matter.  It is the way of scientism, the way of philosophical materialism and atheism.  The host of the radio show I heard, David Bender, a progressive talking head type, advocates this position.  He pointed to a real phenomenon, the attack on science by the Christian ultra-right, and he insisted that public policy must be based on sound science.  He’s right about that of course, and I wouldn’t have had a problem with what he said if he had stopped there.  He didn’t.  He went on to recommend to everyone in America a book by Sam Harris titled Letter to a Christian Nation.  Sam Harris is one of the so-called “new atheists” who vociferously condemns all religion because the only religion he knows is bad religion.  Like others of his ilk--Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchins, and others—he builds up a straw man, a caricature of  faith that the religious right of all traditions makes it all too easy for him to do, then knocks it down with simplistic contentions that all religious faith is as absurd as the straw man that he has created.  For this first way of approaching the question of the role of religion in politics and public life religion must have no role whatsoever because the only contribution religion can make to the public dialogue is obscurantist and destructive.

The second way of approaching the question of faith and politics has much the same result as the first but gets there by an entirely different route.  This second way was expressed by a man who called in to the radio program I was listening to.  He identified himself as a “progressive Christian.”  He then proclaimed that we must keep politics out of religion because when we mix politics with religion we “water down” the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  I wondered if he has ever read the Gospels, but more about that below.  This notion that we must not mix faith and politics is something that we church professionals in the so-called mainline traditions hear all the time, or at least we did until fairly recently.  It is an expression of the corruption of Christianity that began with the Constantinian compromise in the fourth century CE.  When Christianity became the official faith of the Roman Empire it warped the Gospel of Jesus Christ into something that wasn’t about this world but only about life in an imagined next world.  Christianity came to be about saving souls for heaven not saving lives here on earth.  That’s where this notion that we must not mix faith and politics comes from.  It has the effect not only of removing politics from the faith, it removes the faith from politics.  Faith and politics become separate realms with no points of intersection.  Faith becomes mute on issues of public discussion, a result of which David Bender and Sam Harris would heartily approve.

The third way, the third approach to the relationship between religion on the one hand and questions of politics and public life on the other, has the virtue of recognizing that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is inherently political; but it totally misunderstands what the politics of the Gospel of Jesus Christ are.  This is the approach of the religious right and of the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, especially Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, who pander to the religious right.  They insist on faith being involved in politics.  They insist that churches and people of faith be heard in the public arena.  Fair enough.  They’re right about that, but they’re wrong about nearly everything else.  They reduce Christianity to a very narrow, archaic, and oppressive set of rules mostly about sexual behavior.  To hear Santorum talk you’d think that Jesus spent all his time condemning abortion and gay people.  Never mind that Jesus is not reported in the Gospels to have said a single word on either subject.  The reactionary Christianity of these candidates equates Christianity with allegiance to and support for the American empire, never mind that when the first followers of Jesus said “Jesus Christ is Lord” they meant “and Caesar isn’t.”  The Christian right and its political toadies like Santorum and Gingrich discredit the role of Christianity in politics by using the faith to advocate destructive policies on issues about which Jesus said nothing and ignoring everything Jesus did say about justice and peace.

The Fourth Way of Jesus

Which brings us to Jesus’ Fourth Way.  Jesus’ Fourth Way rejects the secularism and the atheism of the first way of course.  Jesus’ Fourth Way is solidly grounded in his faith in God and in his discernment, which Christians take, or at least should take, as valid for all of his followers, of God’s will for God’s people.  John’s Gospel reports Jesus as saying “my kingdom is not from this world.”  John 18:36 NRSV  He meant that the Kingdom of God that he came to proclaim and to institute arises not from this world but from God.  It is founded upon God.  It comes from God and is incomprehensible without God.  Jesus’ Fourth Way is a way of faith in the spiritual dimension of reality, of faith in God.

Jesus’ fourth way also rejects the notion that faith has no place in politics or in the discussion of matters of public import that is common to the first and second ways discussed above.  The Gospel of Jesus Christ is political to its core.  To understand how and why the Gospel of Jesus Christ is political we have first to understand what political means.  Political is not necessarily the same thing as partisan.  Political refers to the way human beings order their life together in communities, in societies, in villages, towns, cities, and nations.  A Gospel that was not political would be a Gospel that didn’t care about how we humans order our life together, and that would hardly be a Gospel at all. 

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is political.  How can a Gospel that has as its central image the Kingdom of God not be political?  It can't. It is political.  Radically political.  We have already noted that when Jesus’ earliest followers said “Jesus Christ is Lord” they meant “and Caesar is not.”  “Lord” was a political term in the ancient world.  It meant the person to whom one owed allegiance, the person from whom one took direction, the person one pledged to obey and to follow.  “Lord” was title that the Roman emperors claimed.  It was therefore a political title.  The first Christians gave that title to Jesus, and when they did they were making a radically political statement.

Nearly everything Jesus said and did had political overtones.  We often miss those overtones because we are not sufficiently familiar with the social and political context of the Gospels.  When, for example, we read of an exorcism at Mark 5:1-13 in which Jesus asks an unclean spirit that is possessing and tormenting a poor soul what its name is and the spirit responds “Our name is legion, for we are many,” Jesus exorcises the spirits, lets them inhabit some nearby pigs, and the pigs then run into the sea and drown we miss the obvious political meaning of the story because we forget that in Jesus’ world a “legion” was a large unit of the Roman army.  We don’t hear the story saying that God wants to free Israel from the Romans the way Jesus freed this possessed man of his demon, but that is what it says.  We don’t hear the story saying what all of Jesus’ first audience would have heard the story saying.  We don’t hear it as political, but it is political at its core.  

All sorts of other things that Jesus said and did were political too.  He treated women as people of worth and dignity.  Doing that was radically counter-cultural in his world, and anything that is counter-cultural is political because it criticizes and upends the social and political norms of a society.  Jesus’ driving the money changers and the sellers of sacrificial animals out of the temple was political, for it was a symbolic overthrowing of the power of the Jewish religious leaders who collaborated with the Romans and who oppressed the people with their temple tax and the other burdensome requirements that they laid upon the people.  Jesus said “blessed are the peacemakers,” which is a thoroughly political statement that condemns the war makers who ran the world in his time and who run it in ours.  Jesus said “blessed are you who are poor,” which is a radically political statement because it elevates the people upon whose subservience and poverty the privilege and the wealth of the elite rested.  Jesus said “blessed are the meek,” which is a radically political statement because it condemns the proud and the powerful whom the world honored in his day and honors in ours.  The examples could go on and on. 

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is political.  Jesus said nothing at all about homosexuality or about abortion, but he said a great deal about justice.  Jesus knew and proclaimed a God whose primary characteristic is love, with love (agape) understood not as a sentimental emotion but as a giving of the self for the sake of the other.  Justice is the social aspect of love.  Love that does not go out from itself and become a matter of justice is a stunted and incomplete kind of love.  The love Jesus taught and lived was anything but stunted and incomplete.  It included justice, and justice is a radically political concept.  The love that Jesus proclaimed is therefore necessarily and unavoidably political. 

So those Christians who say they want to separate politics from faith misunderstand the Christian faith.  The Christian faith is never only political of course.  It is also always personal, but a Christianity that shuns politics is a stunted and incomplete Christianity.  It isn’t fully Christian because the Gospel of Jesus Christ is political. 

Christianity is necessarily political because the Gospel of Jesus Christ is political, but that doesn’t mean of course that any politics professed by one who claims to be Christian are truly Christian politics.  Truly Christian politics are politics that reflect the values and the teachings of Jesus Christ.  That means that truly Christian politics reject violence as a tool of public policy because Jesus rejected violence in all aspects of life.  Truly Christian politics are politics that call a society as a society and not merely as individuals to care for the poor, the vulnerable, and the marginalized.  Truly Christian politics are politics of justice that extend beyond mere charity (as important as charity is in an unjust world) and seek so to structure society in a way that all are cared for, all have enough.  Truly Christian politics are not the politics of radical individualism but of social conscience.  Truly Christian politics have, in a great phrase from the Catholic social teaching, a preferential option for the poor.  Truly Christian politics value every individual even as they recognize that none of us lives in total isolation, none of us has acquired whatever we have acquired entirely alone, and that from those to whom much is given much is required.  Truly Christian politics are the politics not merely of justice as due process but of distributive justice, justice that sees that all have enough because none have too much at the expense of those who have less.

That is Jesus’ Fourth Way.  It is the way of faith.  That faith is political.  Those politics are about peace and justice, indeed about peace through justice.  Jesus’ Fourth Way is the way of justice and peace grounded in faith.  It rejects atheism and secularism.  It rejects an apolitical distortion of the Gospel.  It works for, indeed it demands, peace and justice for all people.  That is Jesus’ Fourth Way.  It must be the way of the Christian too.

Jesus’ Fourth Way and American Politics

It must be made perfectly clear that no political party in the United States today truly advocates Jesus’ Fourth Way.  No political party in the United States today, at least none of any prominence or any possibility of influencing public policy, truly reflects Jesus’ Fourth Way.  We have only two really significant political parties in this country, and my purpose here is definitely not to advocate one of them over the other.  Neither of them so reflects Jesus’ Fourth Way that I can endorse either of them without reservation.  Perhaps most significantly from the perspective of Jesus’ Fourth Way, both of them advocate and readily resort to the use of violence as a tool of American public policy, both at home and abroad.  Neither of them advocates the creation of a truly adequate social safety net for the poor and the vulnerable supported by a fair system of taxation that recognizes that those who have benefited most from the structures of our society, our political system, and our economy must pay the most back to their country for the building of systems of care and justice. 

There are significant differences between our two major political parties.  I personally believe that one of them is worse than the other, and you can probably guess which one I think that is.  Yet that isn’t really the point here.  The point is that so few in our country seem really to understand the appropriate relationship between faith and politics, and so few seem to understand the politics of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Most Americans who advocate for peace and justice aren’t Christians.  Most vocal, self-proclaimed politically active Christians focus primarily upon issues related to sexual morality about which Jesus said nothing and support a political party and candidates whose policies benefit only the wealthy, which is a profoundly un-Christian kind of politics.  We desperately need to reclaim Jesus’ Fourth Way, and we need to do it now.  

On the Separation of Church and State

          I recently read this report on a statement Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum made regarding separation of church and state.  According to a report on The Huffington Post Santorum said:

"I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state are absolute," he told 'This Week' host George Stephanopoulos. "The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country...to say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes me want to throw up."

This report appeared under the banner headline “Santorum:  Separation of Church and State ‘Makes Me Want To Throw Up.’”  The next day Santorum tried to clarify his position on separation of church and state by saying that the state has no right to tell the church what to do, a clarification that really doesn't help much.  I think the policies that Rick Santorum advocates are so destructive as almost to call his mental competence into question; but this headline, which to some extent at least misrepresents what Santorum apparently actually said, and what Santorum actually did say (according to this report) raise the question of separation of church and state in our country in a particularly stark way.  As both the Huffington Post headline and Santorum’s comments demonstrate, that concept is widely misunderstood.  It is, however, a concept that is so central to the American way of government and of life that understanding it is vitally important for all Americans.  Perhaps this essay can contribute to that understanding.

The concept of separation of church and state is a product of Enlightenment rationalism.  The norm in Europe before the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (and indeed the norm in Europe even today in one form or another) was for the church to be anything but separate from the state.  In the German principalities of the Reformation, for example, the choice the local ruler made about which version of Christianity to accept determined what the faith was for the people he ruled.  In Orthodox eastern Europe and Russia, there was an intimate relationship between the local Orthodox church and the state.  In Russia, the situation with which I am most familiar, the Russian Orthodox Church was one of the major buttresses of autocracy, and the autocracy gave a privileged position to and protected the Russian Orthodox Church.  An intimate relationship of mutual support if not outright legal establishment was the normal relationship between church and state in all of Europe.  In Great Britain the monarch was, and is, the titular head of the church.  Religious freedom for the people was unheard of and would have been considered a very strange concept by most Europeans.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment were reacting against religion in general and Christianity in particular in most of their thinking and especially in the way they replaced faith with human reason as the arbiter of truth in all matters.  In the Enlightenment the notion of individual freedom of conscience appeared virtually for the first time.  The notion was articulated and gained at least some popular acceptance that faith was a personal matter that the government had no business trying to determine for people.  The Enlightenment rationalists also thought that established churches exerted a deleterious influence on government, keeping it from making rational decisions.  The notion that church and state should be separate developed as a way of protecting the individual from dictation by the state in matters of faith and to protect the state from control by a church.

The United States Constitution is above all else a product of Enlightenment rationalism.  The notion that it primarily a Christian document is utter nonsense that no serious student of history can possibly maintain.  It is the product of a cultural and intellectual movement, the Enlightenment, that was as much as anything else a reaction against Christianity as Christianity had come to be in the Europe of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 
The US Constitution never uses the phrase “separation of church and state,” but it has two provisions that the US courts have held establish the doctrine of separation of church and state as a central principle of US constitutional law.  The first is contained in the body of the Constitution as originally written.  Article 6 of the Constitution states, among other things, that no “religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”  This provision meant that no person could be excluded from public office or (probably) from public employment in the federal government because of the person's faith or lack of faith.  The second provision appears in the First Amendment to the Constitution.  That Amendment states, among other things, that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  The federal courts have established a huge and complex body of case law interpreting this provision of the First Amendment, both of the so-called anti-establishment clause (the first clause of the sentence) and the so-called free exercise clause (the second clause of the sentence).  At the risk of oversimplification we can say that the thrust of that case law is that the government must allow the widest possible exercise of religion compatible with public order and decency and that no governmental entity may enact or adopt laws, regulations, or practices that tend to favor any religion over any other religion or over no religion. 

What does that mean for the role of religion in American life?  It means first of all that the government must pretty much stay out of religious issues.  It means that the government may not force any person to belong to or to follow any religion or faith tradition.  It means that all persons in this country are free to accept and to follow any religion they want or to accept and to follow no religion at all.  With regard to politics it means that no person may be legally disqualified from running for public office because of the position that person holds on religious matters, either because he accepts a particular religion or because she does not.

Now we need to consider what separation of church and state does not mean in our country.  It does not mean that citizens and candidates for public office must keep their religious beliefs out of their policy positions.  All political positions are based on some system of values.  Even if a particular politician is really concerned with nothing but gaining power for himself he is still operating from a system of values.  The only value may be the politician’s personal power, but to that politician that is still a value.  Separation of church and state in no way means, and indeed in no way can mean, that politicians must detach their policy positions from their values, whatever those values may be and regardless of whether those values are grounded in a religion or in something else.  Let’s take abortion as an example.  Many people are opposed to abortion on moral grounds that stem in their understanding from their religious faith.  It is perfectly appropriate for those people to support public policies that limit or even outlaw abortion.  We may or may not share their value on this issue.  We may or may not agree with them that Christianity or some other faith tradition requires this kind of opposition to abortion and that public policy should severely limit or ban abortion.  The fact remains that it is perfectly legitimate for a person to advocate public policies on abortion that reflect their values and support politicians who share those values. 

What would be illegitimate under the doctrine of separation of church and state as it has developed in this country would be for the government to look only to the teachings of a particular religion in making its policy decisions.  It would be inappropriate for the US government to ban abortion because abortion violates the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, for example.  It would not be inappropriate for a particular representative or senator to vote to prohibit abortion because abortion violates her conscience even if her conscience is informed by or based upon the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.  I admit that we’re talking about a fine line here.  Just to continue using the Roman Catholic Church as an example, it is impermissible for the US government to let the Vatican dictate public policy to it or for the government to abdicate its responsibility for creating public policy and give Vatican decrees the power of law.  It would be inappropriate for the Senate to pass a rule allowing Senators to speak only in favor of laws consistent with Vatican policies or teachings.  It is not inappropriate for individual Senators to support bills that reflect Vatican policies or teachings and to oppose bills that violate those policies or teachings.  But what if the American electorate, to create an absurd and impossible hypothetical, voted into office only Senators who committed to supporting only bills that the Vatican endorsed?  Those Senators keeping their campaign promise and voting only for bills that the Vatican endorsed would not be violating the doctrine of separation of church and state.  They would merely be acting in the public arena on the basis of their values, which is what every politician does in any event.

Which brings us back to Rick Santorum and the Huffington Post’s somewhat misleading headline.  The first thing to say about that item is that the headline misquotes Santorum.  The headlines has it that Santorum said that separation of church and state makes him want to throw up.  He didn’t say that, or if he did he said it only indirectly.  Santorum’s statement (at least as it was quoted in the Huffington Post) has three elements.  They are, in the order in which they appear in that statement:

1.      “I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state are (sic) absolute."

2.      “The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.

3.      “To say that people of faith have no role in the public square?  You bet that makes me want to throw up.”

The first thing to say about this statement is that Santorum misunderstands the doctrine of separation of church and state.  He seems here to take it to mean two things.  The first is that “the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state.”  Whether or not separation of church and state actually mean that depends on what is meant by “can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state.”  Under the doctrine of separation of church and state the state cannot allow any church to dictate to it what its policies shall be.  The church, any church, may express its position of matters of public policy.  It may lobby Congress in support of positions it supports.  My own United Church of Christ does that all the time.  Any law that sought to prohibit that kind of participation by a church in the public political process would violate both the free exercise clause of the First Amendment and that Amendment’s guarantee of  the freedoms of speech and of petitioning the government for redress of grievances. 

The second thing Santorum seems to take separation of church and state to mean is that “people of faith [can] have no role in the public square.”  Santorum may hear criticism of his extremist social views that are grounded in what seems to be an extremist conservative Catholicism as an attempt to keep people of faith from having a role in the public square, but surely that’s not what they are.  People of faith, like Santorum, have every right to speak their mind in the public square.  The rest of us have every right to disagree with them, to call their extremist positions extremist, to say our faith leads us to a different conclusion.  Disagreeing with someone is not the same thing as trying to deny her the right to speak her mind, to express her opinions, on matters of public interest.  So Santorum pretty clearly does not understand the doctrine of separation of church and state.

Yet it does no one any good for the Huffington Post or anyone else to misrepresent what Santorum or any other public figure actually said.  Santorum didn’t say “separation of church and state makes me want to throw up,” as the Huffington Post headline says he did.  He said that the notion that people of faith may have no voice in the public square makes him want to throw up.  That position makes me want to throw up too, to adopt for the moment Santorum’s rather coarse way of putting it.  Santorum apparently misunderstands separation of church and state to mean that people of faith may have no voice in the public square, but that’s not what it means.  So Santorum said only indirectly that separation of church and state makes him sick.  What he said was that a particular misunderstanding of the meaning of separation of church and state makes him sick. 

I know that headlines are not the place for nuance, but this Huffington Post headline creates a real possibility of misunderstanding.  People with a better understanding of separation of church and state will read the headline, and perhaps only the headline, and get a false impression of what Santorum actually thinks.  We don’t need to create a false impression of what Santorum really thinks in order to discredit him.  What he actually thinks is plenty bizarre enough to discredit him.  Misleading headlines like this one simply create an opening for Santorum and his ilk to scream that they aren’t getting a fair shake from the “liberal” press.

Separation of church and state is indeed a foundational concept in US law.  It is one of the bulwarks of whatever freedom we have left.  After Citizens United v. FEC our political freedom, our right to vote, doesn’t mean very much.  Our elections have been delivered over to control by those with huge amounts of money, but our freedoms of speech and of religion still mean something.  Separation of church and state is essential to our maintaining those freedoms.  The state has no right to tell us what we must believe.  It has no right to advantage any religion over any other, or over atheism for that matter.  We must not let politicians like Rick Santorum distort the meaning of that doctrine, and it doesn’t help in that effort for us to misrepresent even a little bit what they say.

Separate Is Not Equal

     Washington state, where I live and work, is about to remove the discriminatory provisions from its marriage law and allow same gender couples to marry.  Really to marry. Not have a “domestic partnership,” which they have been able to do in our state for a while now.  Wed.  Get married.  Have the same legally recognized relationship as my wife and I and so many other mixed-gender couples have.  There’s still a bitter fight ahead.  Once Governor Gregoire signs marriage equality into law the forces of discrimination will mount a referendum campaign to repeal the new law, making the same old tired, baseless claims about the sanctity of mixed-gender marriage and how allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry will not only undermine the institution of marriage, it will undermine the very underpinnings of society itself.  Those claims have been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked elsewhere, and I won’t do it again here.  There is, however, one issue that needs to be addressed.  It is the issue of what the United States Supreme Court said in 1954 about the claim that separate can be equal.

     The landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, wasn’t about same gender marriage.  It was about racial segregation in public schools.  American apartheid in the South had created two separate systems of public schools, one for white students and one for Black students.  Children of school age from kindergarten to high school graduation (and beyond in the segregated universities) were prohibited from going to school together.  American racism, perhaps the most basic of the skeletons in America’s closet, insisted that the races be kept separate.  Frankly, I can’t tell you why.  I think American racists just hated Black people because of their identifiable racial characteristics.  As this segregation came under attack from those Americans who saw the evil in racial segregation, the racists who had established and maintained the racially segregated schools in the South tried to defend the segregation by saying that although the schools for white children and for Black children were separate, they were equal.  Therefore there was no meaningful discrimination in the segregation.  “Separate but equal” became the rallying cry of a dying racism, of the dying Jim Crow South.

     In 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the United States Supreme Court took a very careful look at the claim of the racists that these separate schools did not constitute discrimination because the schools were equal.  Of course, the schools weren’t equal.  The schools for Black children were underfunded, housed in run down facilities, used out of date textbooks that were handed down from the white schools, and were substandard in myriad other ways as well.  Yet Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the court, did not decide the case primarily on the basis of the factual inequality of the two school systems.  He decided it because he saw that, as the court put it, separate is inherently unequal.  The point of the Brown decision was that the very separation of the races itself constitutes discrimination.  Separate cannot be equal precisely because it is separate.  The separation says to the minority group you are not equal.  You have to be treated differently.  You have to be kept apart.  Separate is inherently, unavoidably unequal.

     Today many people say that they support equal rights for gay and lesbian couples, but.  Whenever you hear a “but” in a sentence like that, be suspicious.  Here the “but” goes “but I don’t want it to be called marriage.  Marriage is for a man and a woman.  Call it something else.”  Some people argue for what they say are equal rights for gay and lesbian people but insist on separating same-gender marriages from mixed-gender marriages by calling same-gender marriages something different than we call mixed-gender marriages.  We’re all for equality, they say, but.  But just don’t call it marriage.  Call it something else.

     Well, that position brings us right back to the Jim Crow South and separate but “equal” schools.  Racially segregated school systems were ruled unconstitutional precisely because they were separate.  No amount of equality in the quality of the schools (assuming that such ever existed, which it did not) could have saved segregated schools.  They were unequal by the very fact of their separateness.  The schools for Black children were unequal precisely because they were other, because they said to Black people you are other, you are different, you don’t deserve what we white people have.  It is exactly the same thing when it comes to calling something that has all of the legal rights and obligations of marriage something other than marriage.  Telling same-gender couples that you really do have equal rights, but you just can’t call your relationship what we mixed-gender couples can call ours creates inequality by the very difference it creates between the relationships of different classes of people. 

     Marriage has long been the social standard for loving, committed relationships to which the state gives legal recognition and which we have long said form the basis of a stable society.  We don’t ask people “Do you have equal rights and obligations with people who are married?”  We ask “are you married?”  A couple may have all of the legal rights and obligations of marriage; but if they nonetheless have to answer that question no, in the eyes of society they are not equal to people who can answer that question yes.  Giving same-gender couples all of the legal rights and obligations of marriage but not calling their relationship a marriage says to them you are almost on a par with us straight people, but not quite.  It says we’re still going to keep you one notch below us in social standing.  We’ll do better by you than we have in the past, but we can’t quite bring ourselves to grant you the full equality that you seek.

     Brown v. Board of Education established fifty-five years ago that legal distinctions that separate classes of people on the basis of some inherent characteristic of their humanity create unequal classes of people.  Separate is not equal.  Separate cannot be equal.  Gay and lesbian couples will never be the equal of heterosexual couples until they can marry.  Marry, not create a domestic partnership, not create something called by any name other than marriage.  I think most Americans now get it about schools segregated on the basis of race being inherently unequal.  It’s about time we figured out the same thing about legal relationships segregated on the basis of sexual orientation.