Professional bigot Maggie Gallagher continues to weave her web of anti-gay lies and illogic:
She said the government regulates such religious authorities’ ability to perform marriages because the state didn’t create marriage and doesn’t create marriages. Rather, legal authorities merely recognize and regulate an institution that already exists and is rooted deeply in the society’s history and traditions.
Of course, the ancient Romans and other heathens got married and understood marriage to be a legal status long before there was even such as thing as “Christian” marriage (or Christians, for that matter). In fact, it was the ancient Romans who invented the metallic wedding ring.
Government is in the marriage business because encouraging the best environment for raising and protecting children is a benefit to society at large, Gallagher noted. That’s why the institution has special legal privileges and responsibilities attached to it that aren’t given to other intimate adult relationships.
“There’s a reason the government has always been involved in marriage but not in baptism or my priest’s vow of celibacy,” Gallagher, who describes herself as an “orthodox Catholic,” said. “Marriage is not a sacrament that has only religious implications, like baptism.”
Put aside Gallagher’s unethical and anti-intellectual regurgitation of the malicious “kid’s do best” lie. Note instead the precedent lie, the deliberate (and laughable) suggestion that it was the church that invented “marriage” in the first place. That marriage was originally and always conceived strictly as a religious sacrament. And that it was only after the “social” benefits (including, apparently, coverture and spousal rape) of church-crafted “traditional” marriage were realized that the government then decided — “for the children” — to get in on the act.
A facially absurd thesis contradicted by both ancient and modern history. A purported model that is the exact opposite of current practice. All neatly packaged and peddled to redneck illiterates for the sake of rationalizing their backward beliefs.
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Oh, sorry, I still owe you a “comment left elsewhere,” don’t I?
Well, I found Gallagher’s screeches via Box Turtle Bulletin:
Oddly, I could be persuaded to support this idea. If the government were to allow churches to define marriage and then recognized and enforced those religiously distinctive marriage contracts, gay people could marry in every state of the union and in any nearly every city that had a Unitarian Universalist fellowship, a Quaker meeting, or a United Church of Christ congregation.
To which I commented:
Of course, one could just as easily turn around and say that the government will issue marriage licenses to all, but let the religious groups craft a new, additional and exclusive status just for themselves.
Call it “holy matrimony,” “covenant wedding,” “sacramental union” or “zoop-de-do.” Whatever you like. And they can have it all to themselves. But marriage stays a government institution subject to constitutional standards of equal protection and due process.
Think Gallagher would go for that?
Me neither.
Because when they say it’s “all about marriage,” they lie. When they say it’s “all about the children,” they lie. Whenever they insist it’s about anything other than un-Christian hatred of others, they lie.
More thoughts from Americans United.
4 responses so far ↓
Link jen // Jun 23, 2008 at 9:37 am
So, the woman claims that marriage isn't "only" a religious sacrament, despite the fact that it was a legal status long before it was religious (at all, much less a Christian institution).
But she also says the US government ought to allow *churches* to decide who can and cannot marry, then grant legal status to anyone the church decides to call "married".
So basically, she thinks the state should recognize any partnership a church accepts, but that it's wrong for the state to make up its own mind what partnerships it will legally recognize.
1) Wonder what she plans to do about all those FLDS "spiritual marriages"?
2) Does she really think it's okay that my ability to marry will depend on whether I live near (or can travel to) an accepting church? Whether I'm willing to set foot *in* that church? (Tough luck if you're an atheist that wants to marry. . . )
3) Has she heard the phrase "separation of church and state"?
4) Does she plan to put a limit on what's really a "church"? Or can I form my own branch of the Church of Monday Night Football and start marrying off any group of 2 or more who beat the point spread on an upcoming game?
5) Will her next suggestion be that courts should only recognize a divorce authorized by a local church?
Link dolphin // Jun 23, 2008 at 8:22 pm
Sounds like this is more about Kip’s hatred of Christians then vice versa
Interesting thesis. Care to defend it? What specifically in this post indicates a hatred for Christians or "everyone who doesn’t act or think exactly like him."
Makes me glad that I’m no longer a libertarian.
So you determine your political ideologies based on your agreement or disagreement with individuals who share the label versus actual policy positions? How quaint.
Link Tom Chatt // Jun 24, 2008 at 12:34 am
Kip, I have to admit that, aside from her "it's only about the children and nothing else" fixation, I think most of what Gallagher said was actually reasonable and correct. I completely agree with the first quote of hers that you pulled out. Marriage is a social institution that exists independently of the state's recognition of it. Note you seem to have taken her as claiming that the church "invented" marriage, but she never actually said that, at least in the article you cited. She said that it arose as a social institution and a tradition prior to the state being involved, which I believe is true. Certainly in the history of American law, it is true that Americans were marrying first, and state regulation came later. (Read "Public Vows" by Nancy Cott, for instance, if you want a good history of marriage and the law.)
I like to point it that what is on the table for Californians in November is not whether gay marriage should exist, or whether the citizens morally approve of it, but only whether the state should recognize gay marriages equally to straight ones. The citizens are not being asked (and do not get to say) whether gay people can marry. We can marry, and we have been marrying. I, for instance, married my husband seven years ago. We just don't have a license granting state recognition of our marriage. But our friends, family, neighbors, and church family witnessed our vows, and they along with most of our society understand us as a married couple.
Gallagher's biggest non-sequitur, I think, is that she asserts that marriage exists prior to the state's regulation of it, but then she talks as if the state is *creating* gay marriage. That's nonsense. Just as it did with straight marriage, the state recognition of gay marriage is merely catching up to an already-existing social practice.
Link KipEsquire // Jun 24, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Tom,
While I respect your "higher semantics" about what the word "marry" does and does not mean to you personally, the cold truth is that without that piece of paper (or some legal equivalent), your subjective opinion that you are "married" doesn't add up to a hill of beans in, e.g., an ICU, a probate court, an immigration office or any other context where legal status matters.
Cheers…
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