Barack Obama’s speech in New Hampshire this week brought back some troubling old doubts about his respect for the integrity of the political system. In his speech, Barack Obama declared that he is opposed to same-sex marriage, stating that he thinks that gays and lesbians should not be allowed to marry because of his belief that marriage is a religious bond.
I wrote about Obama’s problem with equal marriage rights back in December, but I was still surprised to hear him justifying discrimination in this way. I suppose that I had built up a positive image of Barack Obama in my mind that was not completely based in reality.
It isn’t an abstract issue. There are real people whose lives are being disrupted because of the discriminatory system that Barack Obama supports. Just ten houses down the street from me is a couple who are expecting their second child some time this month. They want to get married, but they can’t, because they’re both women. My son goes to school with the son of another lesbian couple here in town who are prohibited from getting married because of the religiously-based positions of politicians like Barack Obama.
It bothers me that the same man who so consistently complains about discrimination against himself can turn around and practice exclusionary prejudice against others. The system of restricted civil unions for some couples, but full marriage rights for others, of relatively free systems in some states, but outright denial or rights in other states, ought to remind Barack Obama of another system of discrimination in American history: Jim Crow. Barack Obama is arguing for the same kind of separate but equal legal system that created racial segregation in American schools, only he’s applying it to marriage instead of education. Just like the proponents of racial segregation, Obama is citing religion as a justification for keeping full rights from all.
I don’t see what religion has to do with it. What business does Barack Obama have going around making speeches declaring that some Americans will just have to be denied legal rights because of other people’s religious beliefs? Senator Obama is not running for Ayatollah. He’s running for President of the United States, and he’s supposed to uphold and defend the Constitution, not the Church. The Constitution clearly states that all people must receive equal protection under the law. Obama knows this – he’s taught constitutional law. Apparently, he just cares more about what’s preached at his church than what’s placed in the Constitution.
Even if we were to agree to Obama’s suggestion that the religious beliefs of some people can justify taking away the legal rights of other people, how would we pick which religious group to obey? Some churches forbid same-sex marriage, but other churches regard same-sex marriage as a sacrament – a religious bond. What makes Barack Obama think that he as President should give sanction to the beliefs of some churches while denying sanction to the beliefs of other churches?
The truth is that marriage is a social bond. Marriage existed before religion was invented, and it continues to exist outside of religion. Some groups of people have added a religious component to wedding ceremonies, but that component is secondary, not primary, and far from universal. Barack Obama’s insistence that marriage is primarily religious shows a cultural narrowness on his part that I had not expected.
I am married. My wife is religious, but I am not. I want to know, if Barack Obama really thinks that marriage is a religious bond, how he can explain my marriage. Does he think that my marriage is illegitimate? I’ve posted a blog entry on Barack Obama’s campaign web site with this question, and I’m curious to see what the response will be.
What occurs to me after rediscovering Barack Obama’s prejudiced attitude against same-sex marriage is that discrimination leads to discrimination. In order to justify his position in favor of withholding equal marriage rights from all couples, Senator Obama retreats to a limited, contorted definition of marriage that excludes not only gays and lesbians, but non-religious Americans as well, and perhaps even people in marriages of mixed religion.
Barack Obama’s position may be convenient in an electoral sense, given the way that it honors the power of the bigotry that many Americans still cherish. it is, nonetheless legally and morally wrong.
marriage is a religious issue, and government shouldn’t interfere. why do they? government out of marriage! no more recognition, paid for by my tax dollars, of church ceremony!
So then Vynce, you think that I’m not married? You think that non-religious people can’t get married?
I’m not religious. I got married. I didn’t get married for religious reasons. I got married because I wanted a permanent, legally-sanctioned relationship with the woman who is my wife. I didn’t get married to pay tribute to God or Jesus or any church.
Marriage is a social institution with legal backing. The religious stuff is just extra sprinkles that some people choose to put on top. It has nothing to do with the core institution of marriage.
I am sick and tired of religious people like Barack Obama telling me that my marriage is a religious bond. It is not!
Marriage means making a family. If two people commit to each other with or without a marriage license, they have made themselves into a family. (the medieval church did recognize the ability of individuals to enter into matrimony without church–remember that famous Dutch painting commemorating a private marriage with the woman pregnant in a green dress?). But this is not the leave-it-to-Beaver nuclear family with one daddy, one mommy and little ones that are geneticallly theirs the religious right drools over. The defination of family is changing. First we had the Partridge Family, made of two divorcees and their respctive offspring, now the idea of family is widening, so that people who have long defined themselves privately as family are now looking for public recognition of the validity of their relationships. Our social insitutions have yet to keep up with real life.
The religious–or maybe I should say spiritual–nature of sexuality has long been recognized. Look up hieros gamos. It was only with the advent of male-centric militaristic religions that sexuality became compartmentalized and relegated to procreation or pornography. Historically that was a time when slavery and marriage became indistingishable; brides were the spoils of war. I would argue that a true marriage does put spirituality and sexuality back together. I would also argue that anyone who is both a gardener and a political activist has plenty of spirituality.
Who married you, J. Clifford?
Was it a religious authority acting as an agent of government?
If so doesn’t that conflict with your liberal views on the seperation of church and state?
Why should government recognize religious sprinkles even if they mimic social/legal institutions?
If government think it’s important its citizens enter legally-sanctioned relationships, let government set up a civil marriage system, so religious people can sprinkle their sprinkles in private.
The way it worked in the state where I was married, Yo.be: first you get a blood test, wait for the results, and bring the results to the state marriage license office. I think the test is for syphilis, not the most common STD, but one which can damage offspring. (So here is a state interest in limiting sexually transmitted disease and protecting the legally recognized partner and the offspring from contracting a disease.) You pay the fee and they give you a piece of paper. Then someone who is legally authorized to sign the paper, like a pastor or government official, has to sign it within a certain length of time, saying the date when the marriage took place, and they return the form to the government office. Then after a month or so the office sends you some kind of certificate, semi-suitable for framing, that is not a marriage license. If you want the real marriage license you can send the state office some more money and they will send you one. Then when you start a new job and you want to have your spouse covered under the employer’s health insurance, you can check the box and they will deduct the additional amount from your paycheck, also if there is a life insurance the employer provides, the spouse can be the beneficiary. If the spouse dies or has an extended illness, or there is a death in their family, of course you will be expected to attend the funeral and the employer will allow time off or family leave if you are legally married.
jclifford: first of all, you are changing my statements of an ideal world (such as “governement should not be a part of marriage”) to those of a real world (like “i am married”)
i never said your marriage was a religious bond; i never said that it was not governmentally recognized, or unreal. I said it should not be governmentally recognized, and i believe that. i believe there is and should be a distinct governmental recognition of a contract between you and yours. i believe that there should be a distinct social notion of couplehood that is not so easy to confuse with the religious notion, exactly so that people don’t conflate one with another and tell you what is or isn’t “OK” in your marriage, becaus ethey will know that you don’t have the same notion of marriage that they do; which would be scads easier f they were two (or three) separate thigns to start with.
that said, i don’t believe such a world is possible, at this point. i think it is too late to separate people’s notions of marriage into legal, social, and religious, using distinct words. so we’re stuck witha quagmire for the rest of my life, at the least.
as i beleive the legal contract among adults to throw their lot in together in a number of ways — involving having power of attorney for each other, medical visitation rights, the establishment of next-of-kin, and so forth — should be available to any group of adults, whether two or wight, one sex or more than one, of various colors and native languages and places of residence if they so desire; and as i believe that such a system will never be a part of this nation’s culture unless it is calle dmarriage; thus i believe that government must extend the right to marry whomever so consents to all adults.
but the marriage that Barack Obama talks about (and i admit that this makes me nervous about him) is to me no more interesting than the baptism he most likely went through. I do not want the state to recognize the adulthood implied by a bar mitzvah or a confirmation; just because a religion recognizes you as an adult at that pint doesn’t mean law should. so why should government recognize this other religious ceremony? why should they have any part?
When I was 17 years old, I was witness to an arranged marriage. The bride was not in love with the groom and vice versa; nor was the bride pregnant. I later thought to myself, do they really have a commitment, a marriage or a trust for one another just because a piece of paper says so? Then I began to question the meaning of love. If I were to write on a piece of paper that I love God, does that mean I really love God? Absolutely not. Love, trust and commitment must come from the heart or else their is no marriage. What about those who are “married” to their careers? Do they truly love what they are doing? Or have not real affection and are completely miserable? So what does marriage really mean if it is not from the heart.
By the way, is God going to punish my friends because they are not “in love” with each other and because they are now divorced?
When a friend wanted to end her 20+ year marriage, some of her in-laws said they understood, but others said, “20 years! Gosh, that’s quite an investment you’re throwing away.†My friend responded defensively, “What am I? A stock certificate???” She’s a human being with feelings and no longer “in love”. She was simply living in an empty, meaningless marriage.
What marriage means, functionally, is that the couple has more legal rights than unmarried couples. That’s what makes it so important that Barack Obama doesn’t want to offer genuinely equal rights to all couples. Barack Obama wants separate but equal, which will be inherently unequal.
Right, and don’t forget the kids involved in this.
It’s all very well to sit around and debate the theory of marriage as if it’s never applied to anything but penis and vagina (whoever heard of companies marrying or such anyway), but there are the rights.
Was it 183 rights marriage gives?
If a gay couple has a child and the biological parent dies, the kid goes to that person’s relative, not their other parent. How is that stability or morality?
That there’s any debate over the matter at all is ridiculous. It’s not the religion part we’re looking at, it’s the political part. If someone was refusing to marry people on account of different ethnicities it would be easy to see it’s dumb.
If we were to take the Man + Woman thing seriously we’d need genitalia and genetics tests, and limits on just how masculine or feminine a woman or man can be.
Obviously people with only the X chromosome should only marry XXY men. And XXX women are stuck unmarried since Y doesn’t exist by itself.
If he’s arguing that the government shouldn’t allow same-sex marriage because marriage is religious, he’s also calling for discrimination against religion.
What about the religions that perform same-sex marriage? Apparently the government gets to tell them what sacred rites they can and can not perform. Not cool.