https://americancynic.net/Atom Feed for 'queer' Features2018-08-10T03:51:42ZAmer Canishttps://americancynic.net/about/tag:americancynic.net,2014-04-24:/log/2014/4/24/loving_v_utah_and_mormonisms_embarrassing_saga_of_marriage_law/Loving v. Utah and Mormonism's Embarrassing Saga of Marital Policy2014-04-24T16:16:07Z2018-08-03T20:33:45Z<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_kitchen_v_herbert">Kitchen v. Herbert</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
The State’s prohibition of the Plaintiffs' right to choose a same-sex marriage partner renders their fundamental right to marry as meaningless as if the State recognized the Plaintiffs' right to bear arms but not their right to buy bullets.
</blockquote>
<div class="attribution">
— Judge Robert Shelby<br>
<cite>Kitchen v. Herbert</cite>
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</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>April 10 was the 47th anniversary of the date <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia"><em>Loving v. Virginia</em></a><sup class="footnote">[<a id="_footnoteref_1" class="footnote" href="#_footnotedef_1" title="View footnote.">1</a>]</sup> was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. <em>Loving</em> was the landmark case which found miscegenation laws (those laws which prohibited interracial marriages) to be unconstitutional. April 10 also happened to be the date the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_v._Herbert"><em>Kitchen v. Herbert</em></a>,<sup class="footnote">[<a id="_footnoteref_2" class="footnote" href="#_footnotedef_2" title="View footnote.">2</a>]</sup> the case challenging Utah’s constitutional prohibition of same-sex marriages.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>Almost 66% of Utah’s voters approved <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Constitutional_Amendment_3">Amendment 3</a> in 2004. The amendment defines marriage as consisting “only of the legal union between a man and a woman,” as a preemptive measure to defend the state’s marriage statutes against constitutional challenge. On December 20, 2013, a Federal District Court ruled in <em>Kitchen</em> that the amendment violated the rights to due process and equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, on a rational basis alone.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>In the conclusion of his ruling, Judge Robert Shelby found the state’s contentions in <em>Loving</em> to be “almost identical to the assertions made by the State of Utah in support of Utah’s laws prohibiting same-sex marriage.” He found those assertions to be unconvincing:</p>
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<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Anti-miscegenation laws in Virginia and elsewhere were designed to, and did, deprive a targeted minority of the full measure of human dignity and liberty by denying them the freedom to marry the partner of their choice. Utah’s Amendment 3 achieves the same result.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>Rather than protecting or supporting the families of opposite-sex couples, Amendment 3 perpetuates inequality by holding that the families and relationships of same-sex couples are not now, nor ever will be, worthy of recognition. Amendment 3 does not thereby elevate the status of opposite-sex marriage; it merely demeans the dignity of same-sex couples.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p><span class="line-through">Judge Shelby’s ruling was appealed, and the parties are currently waiting on the Tenth Circuit Court in Denver to make a decision. If it is appealed again, there is a chance that the case will be selected to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court which could finally establish some national precedent on the matter.</span></p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>Judge Shelby’s ruling was appealed, providing an opportunity for the Tenth Circuit Court in Denver to consider the validity of marriage bans for the first time. That court found the appellants' justifications to fail the strict scrutiny test, affirming the district court’s ruling “that Amendment 3 and similar statutory enactments do not withstand constitutional scrutiny.” In October, the Supreme Court denied without comment the writ of certiorari leaving the appellate court’s mandate in effect: same-sex marriages are valid and must be recognized in the State of Utah. (On June 26, 2015, in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obergefell_v._Hodges"><em>Obergefell v. Hodges</em></a>, the Supreme Court found it to be unconstitutional to deny marriages to same-sex couples making such marriages available and recognized throughout the union.)</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>Legal analogies between interracial couples' right to marry and same-sex couples' right to marry have been made almost since the Supreme Court ruled on <em>Loving</em> in 1967. In her celebrated and comprehensive history of miscegenation law, <em>What Comes Naturally</em>, Peggy Pascoe mentioned such an analogy being dismissed by the Minnesota Supreme Court in 1971. It wasn’t until a ruling by the Hawaii Supreme Court in 1993 that courts began taking the same-sex analogy to <em>Loving</em> seriously:</p>
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<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
“After the Hawaii ruling, both the energy of the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage and the number of court cases that accompanied it grew by leaps and bounds. Over the next decade, several judges issued rulings overturning state bans, and they used the parallel to <em>Loving v. Virginia</em> to do so.” (299-300)
</blockquote>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>In an essay she wrote for <em>History News Network</em>, “<a href="http://hnn.us/article/4708">Why the Ugly Rhetoric Against Gay Marriage Is Familiar to this Historian of Miscegenation,</a>” Pascoe argued that in order to understand the current debate over same-sex marriage it is first necessary to understand the history of American miscegenation laws, “because both supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage come to this debate, knowing or unknowingly, wielding rhetorical tools forged during the history of miscegenation law.” She also noted that, “The arguments white supremacists used to justify for miscegenation laws—​that interracial marriages were contrary to God’s will or somehow unnatural—​are echoed today by the most conservative opponents of same-sex marriage.”</p>
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<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_heteronormativity_for_time_and_all_eternity">Heteronormativity for Time and All Eternity</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph">
<p>And indeed the opponents of same-sex marriage are almost invariably religious and motivated by an adherence to what they believe to be divine revelations and/or a philosophy of natural law. In the <em>Kitchen</em> appeal, a coalition of Christian churches filed a 42-page amicus brief in support of the state.<sup class="footnote">[<a id="_footnoteref_3" class="footnote" href="#_footnotedef_3" title="View footnote.">3</a>]</sup> The brief represents something of an ecumenical wonder, bringing together in the battle against same-sex marriage the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the National Association of Evangelicals, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Lutheran Church—​Missouri Synod.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>Apparently if there is anything Catholics, Mormons, Evangelicals, Lutherans, and Southern Baptists all agree on, it is that the sexes of would-be spouses are important and should be regulated by the state.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) appears to have the strongest motivation to preserve a traditional definition of marriage in Utah. Not only because of that church’s deep ties to Utah, but also because family occupies an unusually important position in Mormon thought. Unlike other Christian sects who marry “until death do us part,” Mormon couples partake in an ordinance of “celestial marriage” in which they are sealed during a temple ceremony “for time and eternity.”</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>To Mormons, family is not merely the fundamental unit of society here on earth. It is also an everlasting institution, a cosmic matrix underlying the very purpose of life and eternal progression: we were spirit children of Heavenly Father and Mother in our pre-earth existence; we gain physical bodies, faith, and families in this, our mortal life; after physical death, our bodies and families will be raised into exalted existence, like God was in his body, at the time of the resurrection to progress evermore and perhaps begin the cycle anew.<sup class="footnote">[<a id="_footnoteref_4" class="footnote" href="#_footnotedef_4" title="View footnote.">4</a>]</sup></p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>In 1995, the LDS First Presidency released a statement reaffirming the importance of the family and emphasizing that marriage is between a man and a woman (“The family is ordained of God. Marriage between man and woman is essential to His eternal plan”). That statement, titled “<a href="https://www.lds.org/topics/family-proclamation">The Family: A Proclamation to the World</a>”, is cited on page 10 of the amicus brief filed in the <em>Kitchen</em> appeal to demonstrate, strangely enough, that for Mormons “homosexuality is remote from teachings about marriage and family” in order to argue against “the suggestion that religious support for husband-wife marriage is rooted in anti-homosexual animus.”</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>The Church’s interest in the state definition and regulation of marriage may be explained by a fear expressed succinctly on page 19 of the religious brief: “if the meaning of marriage is changed in concept, the cultural significance attached to marriage will also change in practice.”</p>
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<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_freedoms_and_restrictions_in_the_history_of_mormon_marriage">Freedoms and Restrictions in the History of Mormon Marriage</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph">
<p>But there was a time when the Mormons were condemned for having too liberal a view of marriage and family. In nineteenth-century Utah “celestial marriage” was a euphemism for “plural marriage,” a practice in which some Mormon men would take multiple wives. At that time, plural marriage was taught as being essential to eternal progression, just as opposite-sex marriage is proclaimed by the Church to be essential today.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>In 1866 Brigham Young, the second president of the LDS Church and himself a great fan of the doctrine of plural marriage, delivered a brief defense of polygamy in which he stated, “The only men who become gods, even the Sons of God, are those who enter into polygamy.” In that same sermon, Young declared that if Utah was not admitted as a state to the union until it outlawed polygamy “then, we shall never be admitted.”⁠<sup class="footnote">[<a id="_footnoteref_5" class="footnote" href="#_footnotedef_5" title="View footnote.">5</a>]</sup></p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>Faced with increasing social pressure and ruinous repression by the federal government (particularly the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmunds%E2%80%93Tucker_Act">Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887</a>), the Church leaders' courageous defiance was set aside in favor of practicality. In 1890 Wilford Woodruff, the fourth president of the Church, after claiming to have received a revelation from Jesus Christ on the matter, issued <a href="https://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/od/1?lang=eng#">`The Manifesto'</a> which ended the practice of plural marriage by the Church. Utah was admitted as the 45th U.S. state a little over five years after the manifesto was issued.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>While the LDS Church experimented with marriage freedoms in the number of wives, it also historically restricted freedoms based on race. From the presidency of Brigham Young until 1978, the Church did not ordain black men to its priesthood or allow black members to participate in temple sealing ordinances — blacks were excluded from celestial marriage and the postmortal exaltation for which it is essential.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mormons combined contemporary justifications for slavery and apartheid, such as the theory that black skin was a divine curse marking out the descendants of Cain, with their own doctrine of premortal existence and agency to develop an especially vicious justification for racism: blacks were to be disenfranchised, and it was their own fault by their own choosing.<sup class="footnote">[<a id="_footnoteref_6" class="footnote" href="#_footnotedef_6" title="View footnote.">6</a>]</sup></p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>The Church’s race realism, while tenuously implementable in the United States, was completely useless when the Church began proselytizing in ethnically mixed populations such as in Brazil. This practical difficulty combined with increasing political pressure since the Civil Rights Movement forced the Church to abandon its racist policies. In June 1978, the Church leadership received a revelation which removed the racial restrictions on priesthood membership and access to the temple including celestial marriage — over ten years after <em>Loving v. Virginia</em>.<sup class="footnote">[<a id="_footnoteref_7" class="footnote" href="#_footnotedef_7" title="View footnote.">7</a>]</sup></p>
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</div>
</div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph">
<p>With their efforts to exclude same-sex couples from both celestial and mortal marriage (the 1995 Proclamation, California’s Proposition 8, Utah’s Amendment 3, etc.), the men who lead the LDS Church today seem determined to continue the Mormon tradition of teaching divine principles of marriage which it is later forced to rescind.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>If I were a Mormon, the thing that would frustrate me the most is how completely unnecessary the emphasis on heteronormative marriage is to the doctrine of celestial marriage. It would be much less painful (and more consistent with the Church’s pro-family rhetoric) to make room in the Celestial Kingdom for same-sex families than it is to kick against the goads of a changing culture. It is embarrassing for an organization lead by purported prophets, seers, and revelators to repeatedly exhibit such shortsightedness.</p>
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</div>
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<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_references_and_notes">References and Notes</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Pascoe, Peggy. <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/690508927"><em>What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America</em></a>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Tanner, Jerald, and Sandra Tanner. <a href="http://www.utlm.org/onlinebooks/curseofcain_contents.htm"><em>Curse of Cain?: Racism in the Mormon Church</em></a>. Salt Lake City, UT: Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 2004. <a href="http://www.utlm.org/onlinebooks/curseofcain_contents.htm" class="bare">http://www.utlm.org/onlinebooks/curseofcain_contents.htm</a></p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “<a href="https://www.lds.org/topics/race-and-the-priesthood?lang=eng">Race and Priesthood</a>”. <a href="https://www.lds.org/topics/race-and-the-priesthood?lang=eng" class="bare">https://www.lds.org/topics/race-and-the-priesthood?lang=eng</a></p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>Young, Brigham. “<a href="http://jod.mrm.org/11/266">Delegate Hooper—Beneficial Effects of Polygamy—Final Redemption of Cain</a>”. <em>Journal of Discourses</em> 11 (1866): 266-272. <a href="http://jod.mrm.org/11/266" class="bare">http://jod.mrm.org/11/266</a></p>
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<div id="footnotes">
<hr>
<div class="footnote" id="_footnotedef_1">
<a href="#_footnoteref_1">1</a>. <em>Loving v. Virginia</em>, 388 U.S. 1 (1967)
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<div class="footnote" id="_footnotedef_2">
<a href="#_footnoteref_2">2</a>. <em>Kitchen v. Herbert</em>, 961 F.Supp.2d 1181 (D. Utah 2013), _affirmed_ 755 F.3d 1193 (10th Cir. 2014); <em>stay granted</em>, 134 S.Ct. 893 (2014); <em>petition for certiorari denied</em>, No. 14-124, 2014 WL 3841263 (Oct. 6, 2014)
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<div class="footnote" id="_footnotedef_3">
<a href="#_footnoteref_3">3</a>. The brief is available in several formats at archive.org: “<a href="https://archive.org/details/Gov.uscourts.ca10.13-4078Kitchen-v.-Herbert-Doc.-01019200417">Brief if Amici Curiae United States Conference of Catholic Bishops; National Association of Evangelicals; The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention; and Lutheran Church—​Missouri Synod In Support of Defendants-Appellants and Supporting Reversal, Case Nos. 13-4178, 14-5003, 14-5006, United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit (February 10, 2014)</a>”
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<div class="footnote" id="_footnotedef_4">
<a href="#_footnoteref_4">4</a>. For an example of teaching on these topics, see the 1909 statement issued by the First Presidency, “<a href="https://www.lds.org/ensign/2002/02/the-origin-of-man?lang=eng">The Origin of Man</a>”, in which President Joseph F. Smith taught that “man, as a spirit, was begotten and born of heavenly parents, and reared to maturity in the eternal mansions of the Father, prior to coming upon the earth in a temporal body to undergo an experience in mortality.”
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<div class="footnote" id="_footnotedef_5">
<a href="#_footnoteref_5">5</a>. Young, “Beneficial Effects of Polygamy,” 269.
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<div class="footnote" id="_footnotedef_6">
<a href="#_footnoteref_6">6</a>. For many quotations by Mormon leaders on the curse of Cain and the premortal justification of racism, see Tanner, <em>Curse of Cain?</em>
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<div class="footnote" id="_footnotedef_7">
<a href="#_footnoteref_7">7</a>. “<a href="https://www.lds.org/topics/race-and-the-priesthood?lang=eng">Race and Priesthood.</a>”
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</div>A look at Utah's fight over Amendment 3 including its parallels to Loving v. Virginia and the Mormon Church's unenviable position as it once again finds itself clinging to an antiquated notion of marriage.tag:americancynic.net,2012-05-25:/log/2012/5/25/jesus_and_samesex_marriage/Jesus on [Same-Sex] Marriage2012-05-25T20:06:48Z2018-08-10T03:51:42Z<div class="paragraph">
<p>There is no consensus as to what the purpose of marriage is. But whatever its purpose, it is political. Private friendships, romances, sexual partners, economic alliances, housemates and other relationships are sometimes subject to legal agreements of lease and contract. But more often they are informal and mutually beneficial arrangements. Marriage is all these relationships made public and explicit. It benefits from social recognition and acceptance in return for public accountability in ways that previously private (and often implicit) vows of commitment that create new families do not.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>Marriage is how society — or its body of political representatives — controls its reproduction: who can legitimately rear children and inherit property. The state traditionally subsidizes favourable families and de-legitimizes (and sometimes criminalizes) unfavourable forms based on age, ethnicity, gender, consanguinity, number of spouses, or whatever other criteria creeps into the imagination of the masses and our masters as constituting a proper or “natural” union.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>The twentieth century saw the end of so-called miscegenation laws; laws which were the result of a confused project to restrict the reproduction of American society based on ethnicity and skin color. For those who see through the distorted logic of racism, there remains no comprehensible reason to exclude families from social recognition based on arbitrary notions of “race” that too often grab hold of humanity’s haunted mind. Likewise it is no easy task for many of us to understand those who currently wish to restrict marriage based on gender.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>President Obama recently evoked his Christianity in prompting his <a href="/log/2012/5/25/obama_on_same-sex_marriage/">change of heart about same-sex marriage</a>. Others have been known to appeal to Christianity to argue against same-sex marriage. In <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/readme/2003/07/abolish_marriage.html">his 2003 argument for privatizing marriage</a>, one commentator wrote of the gay marriage debate, “It’s going to get ugly. And then it’s going to get boring.” Well, it’s gotten boring. Nay, beyond boring, it’s gotten frustratingly monotonous watching marginalized groups clamor for acceptance from their oppressors while all sides explain what Jesus would do.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>I can think of one vaguely philosophic, though not very compelling, argument against abstract homosexuality. That is an argument from teleology: since men and women are endowed with some complementary bits, they are naturally meant to pair off. That argument not only assumes a binary gender, but to apply it to marriage is to presuppose that the sole purpose of marriage is sex and biological reproduction. Nobody takes that position. Despite those apparent weaknesses, Jesus does use such a teleological argument against divorce in the accounts of Matthew and Mark:</p>
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<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”</p>
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</blockquote>
<div class="attribution">
— <a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+19&version=NIV">Matthew 19:3-6</a>
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</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>One great thing about Jesus' responses to the Pharisees is that he often confounds them by intentionally quoting passages of the Old Testament out of context (there’s a lesson there about sacralizing a book). In Genesis (<a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+2%3A24&version=NIV">2:24</a>), which Jesus is quoting, the reason men and women are compelled to unite as ‘one flesh’ is because Woman was originally made from Adam’s rib. It’s an explanation for marriage, or at least of sexual union. Jesus divorces (pun!) the explanation (the rib story) from the result (the drive to sexual union) and substitutes the less etiological gender binary of Genesis 1:27 (‘male and female He created them’) as an explanation.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>In Genesis 2, God separates Woman from Adam, and later men and women rejoin themselves in sexual union. In Matthew 19 Jesus ignores the mythology and reverses this story: “Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” Now it is God doing the joining and people doing the separating. I’ll give my high-level interpretation: Men and women are attracted to each other not because of some imaginative creation myth, but because that is the nature of mammals with their sexuality and whatnot. Society will reproduce itself both biologically and culturally -- “Life finds a way,” as one chaos theorist put it. <sup class="footnote">[<a id="_footnoteref_1" class="footnote" href="#_footnotedef_1" title="View footnote.">1</a>]</sup> Even well-meaning attempts at regulating reproduction by establishing legal institutions to control who can legitimately begin or dissolve a family aren’t a part of Jesus' vision of society.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>As usual the Pharisees don’t quite catch that Jesus just reversed their assumptions and they continue their line of legal questioning: “Well if God did not intend divorce, then why did Moses allow it?” (Matthew 19:7). Jesus responds the same way he did in the Sermon on the Mount, by <a href="/log/2012/4/29/authority_or_autonomy/">replacing law with morality</a>. Moses told you not to murder; I tell you not to be angry. Moses told you not to commit adultery; I tell you not to lust. Moses told you to keep your oaths; I tell you not to make oaths, simply say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Moses said an eye for an eye; I say give to those who steal from you. Moses said love your neighbor; I say love your enemy. <strong>Moses told you to be civilized about divorce; I tell you that divorce is tantamount to adultery</strong> (compare <a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+5&version=NIV">Matthew 5:31</a> and <a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+5&version=NIV">Matthew 19:8-9</a>).</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>To his disciples, marriage without divorce essentially made marriage unworkable (“if this is the case, then it is neither profitable nor advisable to marry” — which is what Diogenes was trying to say all along). Jesus' response was, “then don’t get married.” Actually he said that not everybody could accept the teaching, but some will renounce marriage “for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.” As an aside, I’ve always thought that his analogy about the eunuchs would be a good slogan for Linux: “And there be Unix which have made themselves Unix for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.”</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>So, even though Jesus uses the limited gender-binary language of Genesis, his answer here can also be applied to the question of same-sex marriage: Don’t let legal institutions separate what God has joined. More generally, don’t let the state supplant your morality with its laws by dictating what kind of society you will produce and reproduce. I cannot see how gender similarities or differences play into that teaching.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>Elsewhere Jesus took an even more explicit stance on marriage:</p>
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<div class="quoteblock">
<blockquote>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>The Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. “Teacher,” they said, “Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for him. Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh. Finally, the woman died. Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?”</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. <strong>At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage</strong>; they will be like the angels in heaven. But about the resurrection of the dead—​have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”</p>
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</blockquote>
<div class="attribution">
— <a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+22&version=NIV">Matthew 22:23-31</a>
</div>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Whatever literal resurrection the Sadducees had in mind which gave rise to paradoxes like the widow being married to all of her husbands in heaven, their vision was not the same as the one Jesus had been teaching in which “people will neither marry nor be given in marriage.”<sup class="footnote">[<a id="_footnoteref_2" class="footnote" href="#_footnotedef_2" title="View footnote.">2</a>]</sup> It’s clear that whatever the concerns of the Life that Jesus taught, marriage is not one of them. As such, I do not believe it is consistent for anyone to appeal to Jesus' teachings to decide who should or should not be included in the legal institution of marriage, unless the answer is nobody. An appeal to Jesus in order to justify extending or denying the state privilege of marriage to certain populations requires ignoring the few things he is recorded as saying on the subject.</p>
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<div id="footnotes">
<hr>
<div class="footnote" id="_footnotedef_1">
<a href="#_footnoteref_1">1</a>. Okay, a fictional mathematician: Ian Malcolm from Michael Crichton’s <em>Jurassic Park</em>. In the motion picture adaptation, Dr. Malcom warns about the folly of trying to control the park’s population by cloning only female dinosaurs: “Life breaks free, expands to new territories, and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously …​ I’m simply saying that life finds a way.”
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<div class="footnote" id="_footnotedef_2">
<a href="#_footnoteref_2">2</a>. Luke offers something of an explanation as to what Jesus meant by ‘they will be like angels’: “Jesus replied, ‘The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in that age and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection.’” (Luke 20:34-36)
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</div>I hate how people try to appeal to Jesus to support their own ideas of who should or should not be candidates for marriage. Jesus' teachings do not so easily lend themselves to those who would rule over their neighbors.