The political thrust of the gay community in the United States over the last five years or so has focused on a number of inequities, most visibly the legal recognition of same-sex marriage. That there should be resistance to this is hardly surprising, given the explosive rise of fundamentalist Christian sects and ideology and their effect on public life. Students of pre-modern history, however, must find it ironic that some of the most vociferous resistance to such recognition is coming from a combination of pulpits in the Roman Catholic and Mormon churches, neither institution being exactly famous for its consistency in addressing questions of marital legitimacy in the past.

I used to think it was widely known that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints had traded its early insistence on polygamy for the fiscal and social benefits of Utah’s full membership in the United States and to protect the holdings of the Mormon church; apparently, it is not. What is now labelled “The Manifesto” was written and issued publicly in direct response to an Act of the federal government that specifically reversed the corporate status of the church and gave the government the right to seize its assets, due to the church’s religious tenets approving and recommending plural marriage. The Edmunds-Tucker Act (1887) had been in force for two years before the president of the ruling council of the church, a man named Woodruff, began to refuse permission for new plural marriages, and three years before an official statement, the Manifesto, was issued. But issuance of the Manifesto, supposedly written as a result of a ‘revelation’ Woodruff had in September of 1890, led directly to Utah’s admission to the Union in 1896 after forty-nine years as a territory and after several wars had been fought on its soil. The Manifesto did not end the practice of plural marriage – it merely removed official approval. As those who watch the news know, various offshoots of the main Mormon tree still practice polygamy, and aside from the rogue sects there are numerous settlements throughout the desert Southwest of Mormons who claim membership in the mother organization but practice plural marriage more or less openly.

Turning to the Roman Catholic Church, it’s almost too easy to point to the hierarchy’s hypocrisy on issues of marriage and sexuality. Over the last decade the church has paid out billions of dollars in damages awards in child molestation cases throughout North America, most of them involving (male) priests and (male) pubescent or pre-pubescent parishioners but not a few involving (male) priests and (female) parishioners of tender years; and hardly a month goes by without the revelation of another priest or prelate having fathered one or more illegitimate children. At this very moment, the President of Paraguay, who was a bishop until 2007 when he resigned to enter politics, stands accused by three different women of fathering their children while bound in theory by vows of chastity. The church has in most instances responded to these revelations by removing and re-assigning the priests involved, and the known history of this most cowardly of all possible reactions stretches back nearly fifty years in both North America and Europe. It sometimes seems as though Rome believes the world has yet to invent the movable type necessary for newspapers.

Taking these two religious powerhouses together, it beggars belief that they should have joined forces as they did, as early as the 1980s, to resist calls for marriage equality for gays and lesbians. But when the challenge to a state law limiting marriage to mixed-gender couples arose in Hawaii in 1990, there they were, the Romans and the Mormons, creating anti-equality organizations with innocuous and socially responsible-sounding names like “Hawaii Future Today” and “Alliance for Traditional Marriage”. The latter group, oddly, saw no irony in its name even though Hawaii has a long native tradition of same-sex pairings, called aikane, known at all social levels from the lowest to the highest in traditional Hawaiian culture.

Even before that, however, there had been rumblings. As early as 1916, the openly gay social theorist and agitator Edward Carpenter suggested in his book My Days and Dreams that the absence of a marital equivalent for same-sex couples was deleterious to both homosexuals specifically and society in general. This was a remarkably courageous stand to take publicly at a time when homosexual relations were punishable by imprisonment. The earliest American legal challenge that I can find is Baker v. Nelson, filed in Minnesota courts in 1970, and taken to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which ruled that the law limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples did not violate the Constitution. It went to the U. S. Supreme Court on appeal, and was dismissed “for want of a substantial federal question.” Because it reached the Court through mandatory appellate review and not certiorari, the summary dismissal was a decision on the merits and established the case as controlling precedent in 1973. (The case figured in the pre-confirmation questioning this year of Justice Sonia Sotomayor by Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa.)

In the heady post-Stonewall years, pressure for equalization of marriage began to build, slowly at first. The Metropolitan Community Church, having been founded on principles of gay equality and congregational inclusionism, was performing same-sex marriage ceremonies and giving the married couples validating certificates in the early 1970s, in the understanding that although the marriages were not yet recognized by law the commitment made by two individuals should be honored at least within their religious community if not outside it.

The seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church, which include matrimony, were not established until the twenty-fourth session of the Council of Trent, in 1562, during the reign of Pope Pius IV. In other words, for approximately three-quarters of Christian history, matrimony was not considered any more sacred than the rest of the Church’s ceremonial – blessing the harvest, for example. During that time, a marriage could be and frequently was blessed by a priest; from the early 13^th century that ritual blessing was considered to be necessary for the validity of the union, and there was certainly an evolving form of service for the blessing, but the marriage itself was simply a private contract between two parties in most of Christian Europe. My co-editor Mr. Ridge, who has scholarly expertise in this area, clarified this point in a note to me as follows:

While The Council of Trent made matrimony an official sacrament, it had been generally considered one since the 4th Lateran Council (1215), which co-opted marriage as its sole prerogative, thus implicitly sacramentalizing it. Until then marriages did not require a religious ceremony, though they were regularly performed in a chapel, nor was marriage a sacrament except insofar as any oath was. The 4th Lateran transferred consent (in theory) from the couple’s family to the couple itself, and it became their oath, rather than the contract, that united them. The Church had been working to change attitudes for over a century (its first move in this direction was to impose a celibate clergy) but met strong resistance, especially from the nobility, who saw the Church as interfering in what they considered basically a financial matter, because (a) like same-sex marriage to day, it flew in the face of long-established tradition, and (b) it was not easy to justify as a sacrament something about which Paul says “Better to marry than to burn.”

Catholic teaching to this day stresses that the Church does not marry a couple; the people involved marry each other and the priest witnesses and blesses the union, and is free to withhold that blessing for any number of reasons. This is a point that the Church chooses not to bring forward in the current debate about same-sex marriage.

In the Eastern rite, where the priest does perform the marriage, one of the prescribed hymns in the modern service praises Saints Serge and Bacchus and holds them up as a model of love and fidelity; it was almost certainly written before the year 520.

If I may quote a better introduction to the religious history than I could manage on my own:

In a book widely criticised even prior to its publication by those who found cause for displeasure in its thesis, John Boswell gathered the research findings of the last twelve years of his tragically foreshortened life. Published just weeks prior to his death, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe is a meticulous account of his discovery and translation of not one but dozens of liturgical manuscripts in Greek, Latin, Slavonic and Russian honoring and sanctifying relationships between two persons of the same sex (generally, but not quite exclusively, male). The manuscripts, stored for centuries in archives as diverse as the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Vatican Library, the Monastery of St Catherine at Mount Sinai, and the National Library of Belgrade, witness to a continuity of liturgical tradition across the great divides of church, state and language over many centuries. The following words or close variants, for example, appear in manuscripts printed in full [in the original languages as well as in translation] in Boswell's appendices dating from the 9th to 16th centuries in Greek, the 12th century in Italo-Greek, and the 11th to possibly 17th centuries in Slavonic:

“O Lord our God, who madest humankind after thine image and likeness, and gavest them power of life everlasting, who approved it when thy holy apostles Philip and Bartholomew were united…, and who didst approve that thy holy martyrs Serge and Bacchus should be united, bless also these thy servants, N. and N., joined not by nature but in the way of faith.” (Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe by John Boswell, Villard, 1994) [http://gaybookreviews.info/review/3289/709]

Much of the objection to Boswell’s thesis revolves around the language of the ceremonies, which refers to the participants as either two “brothers” or two “sisters”. This is objection by literalism. During the period his research covers, it was standard language in both contracts and daily life to refer to one’s wedded mate as either “brother” or “sister”, the implication being that the two partners were siblings in Christ, married rather than burning. Although it is true that the phrase “become as one flesh” does not appear in these ceremonies, that is not necessarily a signal that the partners were expected to remain celibate in their union. This leads to a secondary objection to the idea of the contractors living together as sexual mates, posited partially on the “brotherly” language and partially on the inability of most heterosexuals to picture in their minds a marital relationship between two sexually mature men. Again, this is a literalist position for moderns to take and I find both of these dismissals unconvincing, particularly in light of the way the Church has dealt with contemporary sexual misdeeds, turning a blind eye to what the hierarchy has been proven to know was happening.

Those proponents of “traditional” marriage who link marriage and religion do not have the facts on their side, no matter how stridently they may insist. Marriage is now and always has been simply a contract between the parties. It may be blessed by a religious organization; there may be a ceremony for that blessing; but there is no basis for claiming that the relationship is exclusively the province of religious authorities. The conflation of secular and religious roles in most religious ceremonies simply muddies the waters. In every marriage ceremony in America, the officiant, whether a religious figure or a secular one, is constrained to recite his or her authority for performing the act, and the language is straightforward: “By virtue of the authority vested in me by the State of _____, I now pronounce you...” etc. The State regulates marriage now and has since modern States came into existence. Religious figures who join two people in marriage act in a dual capacity, and can act in that capacity only with the State’s express permission . The choice to be married in a religious ceremony is a conscious one, and it is simply not possible in countries where there is genuine separation of church and state. In France, for example, the actual marriage is performed at City Hall; there may be a religious ceremony blessing the marriage before or after, but the marriage becomes valid the instant the civil official pronounces it so and would have no legal standing without it.

There is also the problem of the evolving definition of “traditional”. I deeply resent the fact that the religious right has taken a perfectly serviceable word and twisted it to its own uses. Calling something “traditional” now has become shorthand for “this is what I believe based on my religious background and you can go to hell if you disagree”. Certainly, that is not what tradition used to imply. There are those who use the term “traditional” with reference only to the culture of the United States, of course, but they are a minority in the contemporary chorus of disapproval. And the application of “traditional” to a single definition of marriage is similarly dishonest, since the tradition of marriage in religious literature and secular law varies from period to period. Is a traditional marriage one where the man has three hundred wives and six hundred concubines, like Solomon? Is a traditional marriage one that involves four wives and one husband, as is permitted in many Islamic nations? Is it a relationship that involves one man and as many wives as he can support, as the Mormons originally arranged it? Does it involve a widow and her brother-in-law? Can it be entered into by two first cousins? Can it unite a girl of twelve and a man of 78? All these are marriage combinations that have at one time been common, and some of them are still being practiced.

At one time people couldn’t marry an in-law or a relative of a godparent of a cousin’s child without a dispensation from the Church. This was true in Europe until well after the end of the Middle Ages, when such dispensations were common, since almost the entire nobility of Europe were related to each other by marriage within three or four degrees of separation. It was true in Russia throughout the nineteenth century, and may still be forbidden by the Orthodox Church, although I don’t know.

What, then, is “traditional” about insisting that marriage is (a) for procreation only and (b) between one man and one woman only, beyond the bigotry?

The recent defeat of marriage equalization legislation in Maine showed us two things. The first is that the gap between acceptance and resistance is narrowing: the Maine referendum passed by a not-very-wide difference of a little over 5% between the yes and no votes. (The gap between yes and no votes on Proposition 8 in California last year was similarly narrow.) The second is that the opponents of same-sex marriage really have nothing to plead their case beyond “tradition”. Although “tradition” seems to be uppermost in their minds when they talk about marriage, the arguments they use in their anti-equality campaigns focus more intensely on the supposed harmful effect of same-sex marriage on two populations: heterosexual marriages and children. Their advertising stressed over and over again the absolute lie that approving same-sex marriage would mean children would be “taught gay marriage” in school as early as kindergarten, and that approving same-sex marriage would “destroy” traditional heterosexual marriage, presumably taking up the slack because the current 50% (national) divorce rate isn’t doing it quickly enough.

Well, here is some hot news for opponents of marriage equality. There is not a single State in the U.S. where the grade school curriculum “teaches” anything about marriage. Frankly, I wonder at these people’s lack of confidence in their precious infants, since my observation of young children over the years leads me to believe that they are much more resilient and tolerant than their parents when presented with exceptions to the generality. Parents who are not intelligent enough to figure out how to answer a question like “Why are Jimmy and Bob getting married?” should be stripped of their parental rights. The response is as simple as the question: “You know how Mommy and Daddy love each other? Well, that’s how Jimmy and Bob love each other, so they’re going to get married, too, just like Mommy and Daddy.” And I’m willing to bet that the child will answer: “Oh. Okay. Can I have some chocolate milk? And a pony?”

And the second bit of hot news is that if I or any of my fellow same-sex-attracted folks feel the desire or need to marry, it won’t be to a straight person. We are no more a threat to straight marriage than we are to children. People who are having difficulty in their straight marriages currently manage to have it without our interference; I believe this situation will continue in the future, regardless of whether same-sex marriage is nationally possible. And I think it’s telling that the States with the lowest divorce rates in the U.S. currently are those States where same-sex marriage has been legalized, while the places with the highest divorce rates are the States with the highest populations of fundamentalist Christian churchgoers. It is no aberration that Gov. Sanford of South Carolina is currently living alone in the Governor’s Mansion while his wife has moved to a separate residence with their children because of his widely publicized affair with an Argentine television personality. Nor is it unusual that one of the great creative voices of the conservative wing of the Republican Party, Newt Gingrich, is currently married to his third wife, having served divorce papers on his second while she was in hospital recuperating from cancer surgery. These are not marriages that have been threatened by same-sex unions.

A half-dozen countries have legislated marriage equality. The next to join this group will probably be Portugal, where the incoming government made marriage equality a prominent part of its campaign. Argentina is in the process of joining the movement toward full citizenship of its gay population by way of court decisions, an appellate court there having recently ruled that denying same-sex couples the right to marry was an unconstitutional infringement.

I hold no hope for the Obama Administration’s making any substantive move against the Defense of Marriage Act. President Obama has been quoted as saying that he thinks gay marriage should be legal, but the quotation dates to the period before he was seated in the Illinois Legislature; since setting his sights on national office, his position has moved toward the right; he campaigned nationally with the stated position that civil unions for gay people were his preferred solution to equality, thus explicitly approving the separate-but-equal doctrine that his parents would have fought and proving that regressive positions are not the exclusive province of the Republicans; and in the last year he has not opened his mouth on the subject, although his Department of Justice went to court recently and defended DOMA with an incredibly insulting brief that managed implicitly to compare same-sex marriage to incest, pedophilia and bestiality. His spokesman took cover behind the (arguably untrue) statement that the Administration was constrained to defend any law on the books whether they agreed with it or not, but there was widespread, and justified, outrage in the gay community over the language used to defend that law.

No, if there is going to be progress on same-sex marriage in the U.S., it will have to come from the courts and the State legislatures. The appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court does not seem to point to any leftward leaning so far, but there is plenty of time. Meanwhile, State Supreme Courts have the option of ruling in favor of same-sex marriage, and there are three States – New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island – where the issue is not dead in the legislatures. Add to this the determination of activists in California to bring the issue before the voters in next year’s election, and in every election going forward until it is finally approved. Finally, add the five States where marriage is already gender-neutral. I hope that I will see national marriage equality in my lifetime. But I’m not laying any bets.