This morning I gave a sermon on marriage equality in connection with Referendum 74, the ballot measure in Washington state that seeks to repeal the law enacted earlier this year removing discrimination against gay and lesbian couples from the law of the state. It's worth posting here.
On Marriage
Equality
Rev. Tom Sorenson,
Pastor
October 14, 2012
Scripture: Mark 10:1-9; Luke 10:25-37
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations
of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our
redeemer. Amen.
At its August meeting the
Cabinet of this church adopted a resolution in support of marriage equality and
urged the friends and members of the church to vote “Yes” on Referendum 74 to
preserve the right of all couples in Washington to marry. The actual vote for marriage equality of
“Approved.” Please read your ballot very
carefully. Now, I don’t know what
position each of you holds on that issue, although I suspect, or maybe just
hope, that most of you support marriage equality and intend to vote “Approved”
on Ref. 74. I also know, however, that
the forces seeking to preserve discrimination in the marriage laws of our state
will spend a huge amount of money trying to convince people to vote “No”
(actually “Rejected”) on Ref. 74, that some of their material will try to
convince people that there is a biblical view of marriage, that that supposed
biblical view is the only moral view, and that that supposed biblical view
should continue to be enshrined in the secular laws of our society. You may even hear the ludicrous claim that
the purpose of marriage is only to have children, a claim that makes my
marriage to Jane and several of your marriages illegitimate, a claim I bother
with further here. If you haven’t heard
those things already, you will. You will
hear them in broadcast ads, and you may hear them from some of your friends and
family. So I want to address those
assertions (other than the absurd one about children that doesn’t deserve
further comment) this morning in a way that may give you tools for responding
to them when you hear them.
So let’s start with the basic
premise of those who seek to have their personal moral views preserved in the
law, namely, that traditional marriage between a man and a woman is “the
biblical view of marriage”. To put the
matter quite simply, there is no single view of marriage in the Bible. Nowhere does the Bible say in so many words
that only a marriage between one man and one women is sanctioned by God, as the
anti-marriage equality forces contend.
The Bible accepts without criticism many types of marital
arrangements. I’ll cite just one
example, the story of Jacob, one of the great Hebrew patriarchs. He wanted to marry Rachel. He essentially bought her from her father by
working for him for seven years, the Bible there viewing the man’s daughters as
his property that he could sell as he might sell a mule. The father tricked Jacob into marrying his
other daughter Leah instead, so Jacob worked for the father another seven years
so he could buy Rachel. Then he stayed
married to both of them at the same time, fathering children by both of them. In this story, and in others, the Bible
approves of men having multiple wives and even at the same time having concubines,
that is, women with whom they have sexual relations to whom they are not
married while the men are married to someone else..
We can quite easily see the
Bible’s approving of those marital relationships as expressions of ancient
cultural norms that we do not accept and that we consider to be immoral
today. But what about the passage we
heard from Mark this morning? There
Jesus cites Genesis, saying: “God made
them male and female. For this reason a
man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two
shall become one flesh.” Isn’t that a
biblical mandate for one man one woman marriage, and only that kind of
marriage? The anti-marriage equality
forces say that it is. But if the Bible
approving of Jacob being married to two sisters at the same time, and for that
matter of their father essentially selling his daughters to him, is an
expression of ancient cultural norms that we no longer accept, why isn’t this
passage the same thing? I am convinced
that that is precisely what it is. It
states an obvious biological reality—humans come in two main varieties, male
and female. (We know today that that is
an oversimplification of human biological reality, but we need not go into that
issue this morning.) Some people then
draw a cultural conclusion from that statement of biological reality, namely,
that marriage is only between a man and a woman. The passage, however, doesn’t expressly rule
out other marriage possibilities. It
just describes what the ancient world took to be the human norm. Yes, we are (mostly) male and female. That is biological reality, but must we
really accept as the will and word of God the cultural conclusion that the
ancient world drew from that reality?
I am convinced that we need not
accept that ancient cultural conclusion.
We know, as the ancient world did not, that human sexuality comes in
many different forms. For some, sexual
attraction to a person of the same gender is natural. But there’s an even more important
consideration. What is marriage really
about? Is it about sex? Well, to some extent, yes. Sexual intimacy can be and often is an
important and wonderful part of the intimacy between two people. But surely marriage is about more than
sex. Marriage is about a much broader
intimacy than mere sexual intimacy.
Marriage is about mutual commitment, loyalty, care, and support. In other words, it is about love. Love the way Paul described it in 1
Corinthians 13, part of which was the text for our choir’s anthem this morning,
love that is giving of the self to the other and considering the other as much
as one considers oneself. Love as
sharing your life with another and the other sharing her or his life with
you. Love as being there for each other
in the good times and in the bad times. Marriage
is an institution that solemnizes that relationship, that celebrates it, and
that seeks to protect it. And the gender
of the people involved has nothing to do with that kind of intimacy. That relationship can exist equally well
between a man and a woman, a man and a man, or a woman and a woman. The ancient world that produced the Bible may
not have known that truth, but we do.
The New Testament contains that
passage that we heard about a man leaving father and mother and becoming one
with his wife that merely reflects ancient cultural norms, but it also has
another passage that expresses what is for me an actual divine truth. That truth appears, among other places, at
the beginning of the Parable of the Good Samaritan that we also heard this
morning. We know it as the Great
Commandment. It reads: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all
your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your
neighbor as yourself.” In Luke, after he
approves of that saying, Jesus immediately tells the Parable of the Good
Samaritan to make the point that all people are our neighbors, including
especially the ones our culture despises and rejects as Jesus’ culture despised
and rejected Samaritans. How can we who
belong to the heterosexual majority, for whom marriage to a member of the other
sex is life-giving and makes us whole, say that we love our neighbor as
ourselves when we deny marriage to our neighbors for whom it is an intimate
relationship with a person of the same sex that is life-giving and makes them
whole? We can’t. If we truly love our gay and lesbian
neighbors, we can no longer deny to them the rights, the obligations, and the
public recognition that marriage confers.
There are a couple other things
that I want to mention that you might find helpful in discussing this issue
with friends and family on the other side.
The first is that in our culture there really are two aspects of
marriage that we tend to lump together but that can easily be, and sometimes
are, separated. First, marriage has a
civil, legal significance. State and
federal laws contain dozens upon dozens of provisions that mention and depend
on marriage. We find them in tax law,
estate law, domestic relations law, and in regulations about who can visit a
patient in an intensive care unit among many, many other legal provisions. Marriage in this legal sense involves getting
a license from the state, doing some kind of ceremony that can be either before
a minister or before a judge, and filing the completed certificate of marriage
with the state. It can be a purely
secular matter, as it is when the couple is married by a judge. Then, for some people but not for all,
marriage also has a spiritual or religious dimension. This is the dimension that we recognize and
celebrate when we do a wedding in the church.
There the couple pledges their love and commitment to each other not
only before a representative of the law and human witnesses but before
God. We ask God to bless the union of
the two people, and then see God as a participant in their relationship,
sanctifying it and blessing it. These
two aspects of marriage are separated when people get married before a judge
but not by a minister in a church.
Religious objections, misguided as they may be, may apply to the
spiritual, religious aspect of marriage.
But in a nation that supposedly is committed to separation of church and
state, there is no reason why those objections, misguided as they may be,
should apply to the secular, legal aspect of marriage. If a church doesn’t want to bless those
unions, OK. It’s their loss, but they
are free not to marry same gender couples.
It is however wholly inappropriate for that church to try to force its
religious beliefs about marriage onto secular society and its law. Ref. 74 will not force any church to perform
a marriage to which it objects and specifically preserves their right not to,
so there is no reason why religious objections, misguided as they may be,
should be imposed on the secular law, and it is inappropriate for them to be.
Finally, one more argument that
anti forces raise that we need to dispose of.
It is the argument that same gender couples in Washington already have
most of the rights provided by marriage under our law of civil unions, so there
is no need to extend marriage to include them.
The anti-marriage forces are actually running a television ad these days
that says that Ref. 74 is not about
equality. That’s a lie. Here’s why.
It is true that most if not quite all of the rights and responsibilities
of marriage are provided by the civil union law; but what we have is separate
legal provisions based on the gender of the people in a relationship. Much of our country used to have separate
school systems based on the race of the people in the school. In 1954 the US Supreme Court ruled those
separate systems unconstitutional because, as the Court said, separate is not equal. Separate is inherently unequal. Separate says you’re different. Separate says you’re less. Marriage, and not something less than
marriage or even something with just a different name than marriage, is how our
culture says that it values a committed relationship between two people. Not civil unions. Marriage.
If we call the committed relationship between two people of the same
gender a civil union but not a marriage we are necessarily and unavoidably
saying that that relationship is less and is valued less than the identical
relationship between a man and a woman.
Civil union is better than nothing, but it isn’t equal to marriage. It is separate, and it is inherently
unequal. That’s why the existence of the
civil union law does not make extending marriage to same gender couples unnecessary. And yes, Ref. 74 is about equality.
We are an Open and Affirming
church. Our Cabinet has endorsed
marriage equality and urged us to vote Approved on Ref. 74. You are of course free to make your own
decision on the issue, but I urge you
to vote Approved on Ref. 74. (“Approved”
on Ref. 74 is the vote for marriage
equality. Please read your ballot
carefully, as it can be a bit confusing which vote is for the marriage equality
law and which vote is against it.) I
hope some of the things I have mentioned here will help you make up your mind
if you haven’t already done so and will help you respond to the claims of the
anti-marriage equality forces in our state.
God blesses all of God’s children regardless of sexual orientation. My prayer this morning is that the marriage
law of our state will at last recognize the equality of all people that God
already knows. Amen.
