The philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-84), a homosexual, once told an interviewer the salient difference, as he saw it, between straight and gay couples. Heterosexuals had models of union to follow; homosexuals had to invent their own.

A lot has changed in the 30 years since Foucault’s death. Gay couples still need to be inventive. But straight couples can no longer draw on past experience and its models of life without considerable inventive adaptation. Oh, Michel, if only you could see us: we’re all gay now.

How come? In a radically pluralist society, the institution of civil marriage itself has become divorced from a social consensus on its underpinnings. Hence, it is a weak guarantor of stability. Just because a couple is married, one can no longer take certain values and ideals as a given.

Even those couples that want to enjoy lifelong monogamy cannot find a model in the past. Just over 100 years ago, lifelong European marriage lasted an average of 16 years, not 50. A couple that wants to spend a quarter century together after retirement is in almost uncharted territory.

None of this means that marriage today cannot be a rich, rewarding experience that fulfils deeply human needs. But the values that give its profound meanings – about love, sacrifice and sexuality – don’t arise from the institution of civil marriage. The latter provides a framework of rights and duties.

The positive content of marriage, however, is infused by the couple and its community.

It is a grave mistake to believe that this positive content has been the same in all societies and it’s only the prospect of gay marriage that will change a fundamental definition.

In certain Amerindian societies, marriage could include two sisters married to the same man. Among the Nayar of India, it used to be the case that several brothers could be married to the same woman. Abdul Aziz Al Saud is said to have been married to 22 wives. Among some Shiite Muslims, the idea of temporary marriage – even for one night only – is licit.

Is anyone seriously suggesting that any one of those arrangements is fundamentally the same as the marriage enjoyed by Ċensu and Maria Tabone for 70 years? The very same institution except for the addition of one or two killer apps? That all parties to these marriages really thought of themselves as ‘one flesh’ in the same sense?

Of course not. The full meaning of marriage isn’t generated by the institution itself. It draws on a web of wider social meanings.

The full meaning of marriage isn’t generated by the institution itself

Those Christian leaders, like Mgr Charles Scicluna, who describe the millennial record of marriage as of a heterosexual couple becoming ‘one flesh’ misunderstand one aspect of the Gospel passage from where that phrase is taken. Jesus was not summing up the historical record (not even that recorded in the Old Testament). He was prophetically inciting a second human sexual revolution (the first being the invention of marriage itself lifelong monogamy and the kind of society that would sustain it. (From a strictly Christian point of view, the calls for ‘free love’ and celebration of serial monogamy are a reactionary backlash.)

My point isn’t that, given the variety of the human record, therefore anything goes.

My own view is the record is full of fantasies of power and gender identity that are incongruent with deep human satisfaction. But I would emphasise that the sheer human variety is remarkable enough to include, say, woman to woman marriage among the Nuer of the Sudanin the 1930s. The definition of marriage is a vexed question among anthropologists.

Keeping this wide variety in mind, we can see that the gay marriage debate is missing one of the central issues. If there’s anything that’s a contradiction in terms, it’s ‘civil marriage’ in a radically pluralist society.

An institution that is supposed to cater for people of all religions and none can provide a legal framework of rights and duties; but it cannot provide the positive content that gives marriage its vital ideals.

‘Civil marriage’ is a civil union in all but name. It is true that the status of marriage obliges recognition in other states; a civil union does not. But that is simply to add another legal privilege, not more meaningfulness.

The meaningfulness of a civil marriage ceremony is not provided by the institution. It is given by the marrying couple and their friends. Anyone who’s ever attended such a ceremony knows how much the ritual, music and readings for the ceremony may range from the sublime to the corny and ridiculous – precisely because a civil ceremony has to be open to all of those.

We continue to call it marriage out of habit. But marriage proper involves a whole set of ideals that we must subscribe to and live by. Those ideals – which include the meaning of love, sacrifice, and death – cannot be provided by a State institution, which necessarily must be insipid enough to include very different and incompatible ideals and attitudes (as otherwise it would be imposing a world view it has no authority to impose).

Yes, institutionalising ‘gay marriage’ will consolidate the social process by which civil marriage has become, effectively, a civil union. But the process has been proceeding for a long time, by stealth, with most of us complicit and is probably irreversible by any government in our lifetime.

ranierfsadni@europe.com

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