Straight Marriage Ban

A poll conducted last week by The Boston Globe shows that Massachusetts residents of voting age are evenly divided on the issue of gay marriage: 47 percent register in support, 47 percent in opposition, and 6 percent, like myself, are still working it out.

I’m not “still working it out” because I’m having trouble reconciling the social, moral or ethical consequences which may or may not exist in allowing the state to marry two homosexual individuals. It is my belief that there are no so such consequences, just as there weren’t when the laws preventing the marriage of couples of mixed race were overturned, despite similar fervent outcry on the contrary. Nor is it that I’m having trouble reconciling my personal religious definition of marriage—in the Anglican tradition, the union of a man and a woman before God—with the idea of homosexuals entering civil marriage.

I am not experiencing that trouble because I have realized—as I believe it would aid many of us in the Commonwealth to realize—that our religious beliefs legally have absolutely no bearing on the situation whatsoever.

In fact, that’s why I am “still working it out:” this social earthquake on Beacon Hill, the shocks of which are being felt across the nation, has sparked a completely different question in my head than whether the state should extend civil marriage to homosexuals. Instead I’ve been wondering what business the Commonwealth has in “marrying” anyone—gay or straight—at all.

Before you pen that acidulous letter about how we’re all blind ultra-liberal children of privilege/zealot communists bent on societal destruction, read on: I would actually propose that the Commonwealth “marry” no one—as it has no business trafficking in areas with such religious implication and passion—and rather secure the right of civil union for all of its citizens, leaving the churches/synagogues/temples to decide their definition of marriage.

(You may now continue writing the aforementioned scathing letter.)

To me it seems that the term “civil marriage” is something of an oxymoron to begin with. That word “marriage”—so rife and saturated with religious connotation and emotion, “civil” or not—is on the large part the thing that is preventing people from extending the civil rights contained therein to their fellow citizens, despite the fact that such an ecclesiastical term has no place in a government that values a separation of church and state. For the traditional definitions of religion to determine the contemporary endowment of civil rights is counterintuitive to our freedom to and from religion and simply can’t be allowed. If civil marriage is as “wholly secular” as the infamous Supreme Court decision intones, then it makes about as much sense for priests to be invested with the civil power and authority of the state as it would to allow our Supreme Court Justices to perform first communions on the side.

Indeed, it is not a discussion of religious precedent or personal moral persuasion that we are having today in the Commonwealth but strictly a semantic discussion of whether the rights guaranteed to the straight can be legally denied to the gay, and constitutionally they cannot. If the word “marriage” and its religious connotation are the primary obstacles to the extension of these rights, then let us remove this troublesome word from our laws and endow all of our citizens with the same right to form a civil union with an other in the eyes of the Commonwealth, leaving the terms and conditions of the covenant of marriage where they belong: under the auspices of the church.

Peter C. Mulcahy ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Wigglesworth Hall.