Debate Topics About Divorce

[Madison Rapelyea]

Justunder a year ago, I wrote a post entitled The Institution of Marriage, Same-Sex Unions, and Procreation on the subject of same-sex marriage. With the topic such a live one, I frequently get asked follow-up questions and wanted a single place to direct people where such questions could be addressed. This is my attempt to provide such a place.

Further to this, the love and commitment of individual couples has always had a rather uneasy relationship to marriage as an institution. While married couples are typically expected to get married in large part on the basis of a love for and a willing commitment to each other, the institution of marriage exists not to affirm this love and willing commitment as such, but to create something more certain and lasting beyond that. Marriage typically places considerable restrictions upon love. It places limitations and pressures upon our choices of suitable partners. It denies us the right to have sexual relationships with persons we might love outside of marriage bonds.

For many, the institution of marriage is designed to make it very difficult and costly for them to get out of a relationship with someone that they stopped loving many years ago and may now positively detest. While it begins with a willing commitment of two persons to each other, marriage renders that commitment something objective and binding upon the persons, even should the commitment become an unwilling one. The flipside of the romantic grounding of marriage upon love and willing commitment is a strong divorce culture, because for a significant percentage of marriages, what began as a willing and loving commitment will not always remain that way.

What the framing of such a question reveals is that the re-imagining of marriage taking place in many quarters does not merely rest with the issue of whether two men or two women can marry each other just like a man and a woman. Rather, the very sort of thing that marriage itself is is in the process of being re-imagined. As I have argued elsewhere, marriage is ceasing to be about institutional norms and public values and is gradually moving towards a more privatized lifestyle consumer model.

The legalization of inter-racial marriage is frequently taken as an analogy for the present same-sex marriage debates. The contrast between the two examples is illuminating, however. There was general agreement that an inter-racial marriage was a possible entity. The debate was purely over whether the possibility should be a legal one. However, there is not the same agreement that a same-sex marriage is a possible entity.

The prohibition of inter-racial marriage discriminated on the basis of skin colour, which, relative to the nature and ends of marriage, is a very bad reason upon which to discriminate. However, in discriminating between the committed sexual partnerships of same-sex couples and couples of the opposite sex there are many more grounds upon which to discriminate and, relative to the ends and nature of marriage, a strong argument can be made that they are good ones.

As it functions in contemporary discourse, especially surrounding gender, sexuality, and forms of relationships, egalitarianism tends to be a self-asserting dogma, often making it impervious to reasonable discourse. I firmly agree with egalitarianism on the point that, when things are truly equal relative to a particular end, they should be treated equally. We should never discriminate between persons or entities on the basis of irrelevant criteria. However, when we are trying to have a debate about the natures and ends of particular realities and which criteria are relevant in particular contexts, to speak about equality merely begs the question.

I do not believe that they should. However, there are ways to grant or secure such rights without redefining marriage. To redefine an institution as fundamental to human society as marriage for the sole purpose of addressing such problems is extreme overkill. More troubling, the suggestion that one not infrequently encounters that it would be a sufficient rationale for doing so betrays an alarmingly hollow view of what marriage actually stands for.

The Christian teaching on subjects such as marriage, gender, and sexuality are extensive. Most of this teaching takes a positive form, filling out such realities as sexual dimorphism with meaning and purpose, rather than the negative form of prohibiting particular behaviours (although there is plenty of that too). One of the problems with the assumption that Jesus never spoke to the subject of same-sex marriage is that, rather than taking our bearings from close attention to the positive teaching, it presumes that our answers would only be found in the form of negative prohibitions. However, the positive statements that Jesus makes about marriage clearly reveal that he is speaking about something quite different from same-sex relationships.

No. One does not have to exclude LGBT persons from those to whom we owe equitable treatment and recognition of personal dignity in order to oppose same-sex marriage. Opposition to same-sex marriage can be quite consistent with support for civil rights for LGBT persons more generally. The arguments that I have raised against same-sex marriage here and elsewhere do not presuppose opposition of homosexual relations, nor even to their recognition by society. The question that we are addressing here is not about the morality of homosexual practice (a question that must be addressed in its own place), but about the meaning of marriage.

A further and absolutely crucial difference between divorce and same-sex marriage is that divorce has never pretended to be anything other than a tragic sign that something has gone seriously wrong somewhere and that something sought for was not successfully attained. However, same-sex marriage takes much of the same value system of which divorce was a symptom and calls us both to celebrate it and to present it as integral to the meaning of marriage. Divorce typically acknowledges the compromises and the sacrifices that it is making: same-sex marriage strenuously denies them.

However, I have yet to see a convincing reason why legalizing same-sex marriage will open a legal door to polygamy. Nor, more importantly, is there much of a cultural desire for it: the will of our society is running in very different directions. Even if polygamy were made possible, it would be fringe in contrast to same-sex marriage, which is in the mainstream. The following are a few reasons why polygamy goes against the zeitgeist.

3. Polygamous groups tend to be highly procreative and polygamous families tend to place a lot of emphasis on children. Marriage is oriented towards the production of a new generation, not mere sexual gratification or romantic companionship. Once again, this is directly contrary to the current trend.

4. Polygamous marriages tend to challenge the sentimental nuclear ideal of the family, expanding the family beyond a unitary bond of affection and making it far more of a public and communal reality that transcends and limits the will and entitlement of those within it.

I have encountered suggestions that a lowering of the divorce rate in some countries where same-sex marriage has been introduced is evidence for such a strengthening. Beyond the fact that divorce rates are complicated things to interpret, given the difference in the duration of the marriages involved, it must be recognized that divorce rates have generally dropped because far fewer people are marrying in the first place. When only those who are most committed to the institution bother to get married in the first place, a decline in the rate of divorce is exactly what we should expect to see. The more telling figure is the percentage of the population that marries in the first place.

It should be stressed that the task of securing these social goods and inclusion does not primarily rest on the shoulders of the law or the government, but upon the family, church, and a host of other civic institutions, and also upon business and the economy. As society privileges forms of relationships and commitments that are much conducive to the broader social good there will always be forms of discrimination. However, the justifiable social privileging of marriage does not mean that unmarried persons need be socially alienated. Society has often sought ways to invest itself in the lives of those who are not members of its primary institutions and to ensure that, in turn, these persons are invested in the social order in various ways.

This vested interest, however, does not exist in the case of sexual relations between two persons of the same sex. Although friends and relatives may value and desire to celebrate the love and intimacy of the same-sex couple, the fact that the couple will be sleeping together is irrelevant to the wider society: it is a principally private fact.

The problem that attends civil partnerships is that they typically connect the enjoyment of social benefits to the presence of a sexual relationship. However, the positive ways that committed same-sex partnerships can serve the wider social good are not ultimately contingent upon their sexual dimension. For this reason, it is unjustly discriminatory to withhold the same privileges from couples prepared to make a commitment to each other without a sexual element. The presence of a sexual relationship would be an irrelevant criterion on which to discriminate.

The truth that cannot be acknowledged is that sexual relations between members of the same sex are not, in fact, equal in value and significance to those between men and women. This is not to deny the great level of intimacy and commitment that can exist between same-sex couples, but to make the surprisingly controversial point that the objective meaning and value of sexual relations between men and women goes so much beyond mere private intimacy. It is for this reason that they should be privileged, not merely over same-sex relationships, but also over the important relationships enjoyed by the rest of us who are unmarried.

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