The recent vote to legalise same-sex marriage in the Republic of Ireland was momentous. The final tally settled matters of law. But, emotions remain raw and exposed, while theology faces unsettling questions.
Can these new civic values cohabit with customary Catholic thought? What way forward? Full-on opposition? Unconditional surrender? As someone, admittedly, looking on from abroad, at the very least I hope for healing.
In this spirit of hope and healing, the Catholic ideal of “life” may play a constructive role. This is why to embrace and enhance the value of life means that we should also embrace gay marriage.
At first, this proposition may seem odd, even oxymoronic. After all, doesn’t the very idea of gay marriage contradict the meaning of “marriage”? Marriage’s purpose is procreation. So, since gay couples can’t procreate, they can’t, mustn’t, be invited to marry. True enough.
Yet, these days, everyone knows of geriatric, or otherwise childless, heterosexual unions, being recognised as “marriages” in full sight of the law and church. This apparent contradiction is revealing. What gives?
We rightly recognise, indeed, celebrate, these non-procreative heterosexual unions because we have always known, however tacitly, how they too make “life”. They make “life” in its “community” sense, not biologically.
The life such couples make ripples out into the community in circles of relatives, friends, co-workers, and so. But, why don’t we celebrate their creation of a flourishing “life together” in community with equal gusto?
Pro-life marriages
Put otherwise, why does the biological function of marriage get exclusive rights to define the term, while effectively relegating the community notion of marriage to a distant second?
Gay marriage corrects this imbalance. Gay unions are “pro-life” because they too create those committed together “lives” in community. Consider two admittedly extreme examples, devised to pose the question of which comes closer to being a real “marriage”?
First, imagine a heterosexual union blessed with numerous children, but where the couple has made no “life” in the community together. Second, picture a same-sex, and childless, union but where the couple has made a rich, intimate life together. Which is the “real” marriage?
However extreme these two cases, is it obvious which “marriage” better serves the interests of “life”? On the one side, biological lives, but no “life”. On the other side, “a life” in community, but no lives.
The first couple remains two individuals, separated into worlds of their own. They have not made “a life”. But, the second has done so, childless though they are. Is theirs the poorer marriage for it?
Making a life
I acknowledge the validity of arguments on either side. But, in refocusing the conception of marriage on to the community idea of “making a life” I am trying to recall marriage that has, tacitly or not, always been foundational in Catholic conceptions of marriage, even if often overlooked or minimised in the interests of procreation.
Ironically, gay marriage inclines us all to recall the idea of marriage as “making a life” in community.
A little reflection shows us how we undervalue the community idea of marriage as making “a life”. Many couples may seem ill-matched by conventional standards. She’s tall, he’s short; she’s black, he’s white; she’s ravishing, he’s nerdy; he’s extroverted, she’s not.
Such “mismatches” elicit a common reaction: “What does she see in him?” (Or vice versa.) True enough. Yet, they do see something, but that “something” is hidden from the public eye. It is their secret, their victory and the kernel of their intimacy.
That, incidentally, is why divorce is so often felt to be a “defeat”. They don’t see that “something” any more. What these conventionally ill-matched couples often “see” then, and tacitly ‘know,’ is they could “make a life” together.” They “know” behind that screen of powerful compulsions is hidden someone they would trust with their lives, and together with whom they would make a “life”. Inside the crazy whirl of violent yearnings, a deep species-wisdom lurks, with one purpose, to make “a life”.
Gay marriage, like any marriage in community, represents a will to make such “a life” together. And, that’s why gay marriage is pro-life.
Ivan Strenski is emeritus professor of religious studies at the University of California, Riverside