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"If we are to prevent the meaning of marriage from being changed forever, our nation must enact a constitutional amendment to protect marriage in America," President George Bush said February 24. However, opponents of the amendment argue that the definition of marriage is only a matter of semantics. Geoffrey Nunberg argued in the New York Times that what really matters is "the way ordinary people use the word." If through civil unions (as endorsed by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry) gay couples can obtain the benefits of marriage, what difference does the word marriage make?

Quite a bit, say a number of Christian leaders who support civil unions but oppose same-sex marriage. They see civil unions as a means of economic justice—but not just for homosexuals. In fact, they would rather see such legislation avoid mention of sexuality altogether.

"It may well be that for the sake of public justice we need to recognize different kinds of households, but I would never start that by primary reference to so-called gay households." said Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, professor of psychology and philosophy at Eastern University. "[Civil unions] could include things like single people looking after aging parents. It could include, as in my own family, two bachelor brothers and a sister who ran a farm their whole life." Defined this way, she says, civil unions would actually preserve the uniqueness of marriage.

Clarifying the issue
People can call anything they want marriage, says James Skillen, president of the Center for Public Justice, but "humans aren't free to change the structure of reality. One of the central things about marriage, which is that it's grounded in heterosexual intercourse, is something that gay people can't have."

For Fuller Theological Seminary president Richard Mouw, gay marriage is much more than an oxymoron. "It is not only inappropriate, but it is dangerously sinful to describe a relationship between two persons of the same gender as a marriage," he said. "And the state simply ought not to legislate that kind of arrangement and build that kind of arrangement into our system of social life."

Christians should not shy away from making theology the center of their thinking and argument against same-sex marriage, said Mouw. Marriage, he says, "isn't created by human contracts, but it is something that was created by God as a life long faithful partnership between a man and a woman. One of the major goals that marriage serves is to propagate the human race and to promote healthy families within that propagation, but also to model the mental faithfulness between God and his people, and Christ and his church."

Gay marriage fallout
But theological arguments aren't the only ones that civil union supporters are using in their case against gay marriage.

"As a Christian feminist, here's what worries me: It may well be that, irony of ironies, in promoting gay households we may be promoting misogyny." said Van Leeuwen. "People who are gay-positive tend to think that whatever is good for gays is automatically good for people who care about justice for women." But most gay couples raising children are women. "We know from lots of intercultural and cross-cultural research that the most egalitarian societies and families are the ones where fathers are involved in hands-on nurtured childcare," she said. She acknowledges that the "gender injustice" of fatherlessness is already a problem in today's society without gay marriage, but added, "I don't think we should add to the possibility that there would be more of it."

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March (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48