Marriage
Delivered to the Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara
September 21, 2008
Claude worked hard, usually ten or twelve hours a day, six days a week. He worked as a cashier at Old Man Forrester’s Dry Goods Emporium in the bustling, dynamic city that was New Orleans just before the eighteen hundreds became the nineteen hundreds.
It was hard work, but Claude was a happy man. He had worked himself up in the business bit by bit over the years and was now one of Old Man Forrester’s most trusted employees. He had been putting a bit by here and there along the way and would soon have enough money saved to think about buying a modest little house somewhere and getting married.
Claude worked those long hours with a faint smile on his face, sometimes humming happily to himself under his breath. His co-workers al made fun of him, but Claude barely noticed – in case you haven’t guessed it, Claude was in love.
He had met Betsy at a dance down by the water several months earlier. He had been too shy to ask her to dance at the time, but he did finally introduce himself, and standing there with his rumpled hat in his hands as he shuffled from foot to foot, Betsy thought she had never seen such a sweet man in all her life. They went for a walk that night, a long, long walk through neighborhoods that were beginning to fall asleep. Like so many couples before them, they didn’t notice the time. The train of love had hit them and they only had eyes for each other.
The very next morning Claude started working even harder and saving even more aggressively. He was getting ready for the future, even though he didn’t ask Betsy to marry him until several weeks later when he had bought a simple little ring made out of real gold.
But when they went to the courthouse to get married, everything fell apart, and in the end Claude had to be dragged from the courthouse by a crowd of bailiffs. You see, Claude was white, Betsy was black and their marriage was against the law. Marriage between a white person and any other person who had even “one drop” of African blood in their veins was illegal, a crime against God and decency and all of civilization.
Betsy and Claude went home to the little shack they now shared, and sometime later that night, they sent for a doctor. Claude must have used up almost all of his savings to make it worth the good doctor’s while, but by morning the doctor had opened up both Betsy and Claude’s veins, transfusing Betsy’s blood into Claude’s body.
Bandages still spotted with red, they went back to the courthouse that morning and demanded to be married. And so they were. It was all perfectly legal now that Claude was black too.
How’s that “for better or for worse?”
Claude and Betsy could have just kept living together. But they wanted to be married, really and truly married. They weren’t trying to make a political statement or gain the advantages of the more than one thousand tax and legal benefits that married couples get. They wanted to say, “I do.”
But of course the State didn’t see it that way at all, and Claude and Betsy had inadvertently issued a very direct challenge to the standing social order they were born into. You see, marriage had primarily been about three things for a long time, and love only came into it if one was very lucky.
Marriage was all about the Three P’s. It was about protecting the idea that women were property. By pooling all economic resources under the “protection” of the husband, women in marriage effectively became economic chips to be bought and sold between families, and all their years or unpaid work in the home was much cheaper than paying a servant to do it. The second “P” was for procreation. Married people were supposed to have babies, and child labor, whether on farms or in factories, was an essential survival strategy. Finally, marriage was about patriarchy. Every single wrinkle in marriage law was designed to insure the unchallenged power and authority of men. For example, did you know that until the 1970s women were required by law to have sex with their husbands any time they demanded it?
Betsy and Claude didn’t care about any of this. They didn’t care about the institution of marriage and anyway, they didn’t want to live in an institution, but in a relationship. The fact that Betsy was black was so terrifying to the pillars of society was because “just as restricting marriage to one man and one woman is an essential symbol of male superiority, restricting marriage to one race was an essential symbol of white superiority.” Our President Teddy Roosevelt was so frightened of the threat posed by interracial marriage that he described it as “racial suicide.”[1]
The good news is that despite that super-heated hysterics that invariably arise whenever the nature of marriage and relationships change or evolves in some way, the sky doesn’t fall, the world doesn’t end – and people are living in happier and more fulfilling relationships than at any other time in Western history. For example, that after the legalization of divorce suicide rates among married women dropped by 20% and the rate of men killed by their wives dropped by two thirds.[2] Yet at the time, ministers and politicians warned that “allowing divorce was tantamount to polygamy, thereby throwing the whole community into general prostitution, making us all loathsome, abandoned wretches, the offspring of So-dom and Go-morrah.”[3]
Divorce is a terrible thing, and I wish every marriage could thrive – but not every marriage does thrive, we do have divorce, and look, none of us has been turned into a pillar of salt. It is interesting to note that statistically speaking, born again Christians are just as likely to divorce as the rest of us.[4]
But despite all of this craziness, marriage survives. Even now, with so many choices open to us, over 90% of Americans will marry at some point in their lives. We humans need to be heard and affirmed by the society we live in. For many of us the promise of a good marriage remains at the very center of our hopes, dreams and our lives. “It remains the highest expression of commitment in our culture and comes packaged with exacting expectations about responsibility, fidelity and intimacy.”[5] Marriage still has the power to hold people together when they would otherwise give up, it still has the power to join families and communities together in ways that nothing else does, and the words, “I do” still resonate with a force that never seems to diminish.
That’s all well and good of course, but as we all know, no matter how beautiful and heart-felt the ceremony, actually living out a good relationship is an entirely different matter!
I know a couple that epitomize what I want my marriage to look like. They’ve been together for over twenty years now, and their relationship has faced plenty of challenges, plenty of fights and tears and almost giving up on one another. But somehow, despite all their differences, they are one of the healthiest couple I know. I just finished reading a very useful book called, “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work”, by psychologist John Gottman. Now I normally take self-help books with a grain of salt, but I couldn’t help but sit up and take notice when I realized that my friends’ relationship embodies all the things Gottman’s research has identified as so important to any healthy relationship.
First of all, they know one another through and through. They may not always like one another all the time or agree about everything, but they do know one another. Each knows what the other likes to eat, what their favorite movies are and what time they start to get cranky if they stay up to late. Each knows who will forget to take out the garbage and who will remember to wash the dishes. Each knows what the other loves and hates about morning traffic, morning radio and everything that happens after that.
They also genuinely like one another. Gottman writes that, “fondness and admiration are two of the most crucial elements in a rewarding and long-lasting romance. Although my friends are often driven to distraction by one another’s personality flaws, they still feel that the person they are with is worthy of love ad respect.”[6]
My friends pay attention to one another, especially when times are tough. They turn toward one another instead of away when they are angry, afraid or stressed out, and they frequently remember to say, “I love you.”
They are very different people in some ways, one shy and quiet, the other the very epitome of a social butterfly, bursting at the seams with energy and action – but they love this about one another even when it is irritating, and they always hold up the others dreams with as much energy as they pursue their own. They have worked hard over these last twenty years to solve the problems in their relationship that are solvable and to learn to accept and cope with the problems that aren’t – 69% of all the challenges any relationship must face simply boil down to personality differences that are not ever going to go away. My friends have learned how to “love, honor and negotiate.”[7]
Finally, my friends create shared meaning together. They talk, share and even argue about the things that matter most to them, “What is life for?” “What do I believe?” “How should we live?” “A crucial goal of any relationship is to create an atmosphere that encourages each person to talk honestly about his or her convictions”, and my friends, encouraged by their Unitarian Universalist values, do that very well indeed.
They don’t get it right all the time and I’m sure there have been plenty of times when one or the other of them was ready to just give up on the whole thing and walk away – but they’ve made it. Theirs is one of the most inspiring and beautiful relationships I have ever seen, and I look to their relationship for clues about how to better support my own marriage.
But guess what? My friends Eddy and Glenn, who embody a loving marriage better than almost anyone I know, are both men, and thus are not allowed to marry in Colorado.
They have carried one another’s dreams for all these years, yet in some states Glenn might not even be allowed to visit Eddy in the hospital, to decide where he should be buried or what his headstone should read, if something terrible were to happen. A company Glenn was working for even rewrote their healthcare policies to specifically prevent same sex couples like Eddy and Glenn from sharing health insurance the way “married” people do. Glenn tells me this was not an attack on same sex couples generally so much as a way for the company to cut costs, but the reason couples like Glenn and Eddy were singled out is because our society still sees their relationships as being somehow less than heterosexual relationships.
The People of California recently made same sex marriage legal, and this has predictably ignited all the usual hysterics. As that thundering prophet of bigotry James Dobson remarked, “Barring a miracle, the family as it has been known for more than five millennia will crumble, presaging the fall of Western civilization itself.”[8]
As social historian E.J. Graff observes, apocalyptic prophecies like Dobson’s “are usually based on the idea that changing a given rules changes the definition of marriage. And of course, they’re right: define marriage as a lifetime commitment, and divorce flouts that very definition. Define marriage as a vehicle for legitimate procreation and contraception violates that definition. Define marriage as a complete union of economic interests and allowing women to own property violates that definition. But define marriage as a commitment to live up to the rigorous demands of love, to care for one another as best as you humanely can, then all these possibilities – divorce, contraception, feminism, marriage between two women or men – are necessary to respect the human spirit.”[9]
And out of such a heady struggle between the institution of marriage as it has been in the past and the reality of what marriage is becoming now was Proposition 8 born. The so-called, “California Marriage Protection Act” which we will be called to vote on this November, would make all same sex marriage illegal once again. And not all supporters of proposition 8 are bigots, not by a long shot. Many supporters of proposition 8 are solidly behind the idea of same sex civil unions, which confer all the same legal and tax benefits as so-called “traditional” marriage, while reserving the title of “Marriage” for heterosexual couples.
This argument makes a certain kind of sense. If all same sex couples want is the benefits that the legal institution of marriage confers then why not just give it to them. Then everyone would be equal, right? This is a similar argument to the ones used to propagate the pernicious laws of the Jim Crow era: “hey you’ve got bathrooms and restaurants and places to sit on the bus or in movie theatres – you’ve got everything white people have – so what’s the problem?”
The problem with “separate but equal” is that separate has never been equal! I cannot think of a single example in American history where this kind of separate has been anything but profoundly unequal. Besides, many of the same sex couples who do want to marry want to marry for the very same reasons that Claude and Betsy did – because they love one another, because they want to make a special kind of public commitment to one another and because they want the society they live in to respect and affirm that love and commitment. They’re not interested in “marriage-lite” and I don’t blame them.
The last ceremony of union I celebrated in Denver was for a young, working class lesbian couple. They had heard somewhere that Unitarians were open to same sex marriage, but they weren’t sure, having been pretty harshly rejected by the churches they had always thought of as home. I will always remember the way Tina’s eyes filled with tears when, after listening to their shy and hesitant request that I marry them, I replied, “Of course! Of course I will do this for you.” As they left, one of those beautiful young women, so deeply in love, said, “Thank you. You don’t know how good it feels to find a church that won’t turn us away or tell us our love isn’t the right kind of love. Thank you.”
Their wedding ceremony was by far the most traditional one I have ever performed. They were an old fashioned couple despite their relative youth, and needed a ceremony that put their relationship squarely in the tradition of all the marriages that had come before them and all the marriages, good and bad, that had ultimately brought them together with a handful of friends to my sanctuary on that Sunday afternoon in the Springtime. They weren’t making a political statement, they weren’t thinking about the “issue” of same sex marriage and they weren’t even too upset that the State of Colorado would not recognize their union. They wanted to celebrate their love in the presence of the God they believed in and the friends who believed in them. They wanted their love and commitment to be every bit as “real” as anybody else’s and to be recognized as such by the wider community in which they live. But most of all, they wanted to say, “I do.”
My Unitarian Universalist values call me to stand always on the side of love, and for me that means standing up and speaking up for every person’s right to express that love freely and fully – whether through marriage or not. On October 12th, our congregation will vote on whether or not to pass a congregational resolution supporting the rights of same sex couples to marry, and in the end it all comes down to this: when our Episcopal, Methodist, UCC and other sisters congregations start taking out ads supporting marriage equality – will our name be there with them or not? Will we stand for the right of all the Eddy and Glenn’s of this world, and of this congregation to live out their love for one another in marriage or will we just stand silently by and let history take its course? We are a welcoming congregation, and now is one of those times where we have to ask ourselves exactly what that means. Now is one of those times where we have to choose. May our process reflect the depth of our respect and love for one another even when we disagree and may our decision embody the noblest of our Unitarian Universalist values.
[1] E.J. Graff, What is Marriage For? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999) p. 159
[2] Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005) p. 293
[3] E.J. Graff, What is Marriage For? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999) p. 252
[4] Ibid. p. 287
[5] Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005) p. 309
[6] John Gottman, The Seven Principles for making Marriage Work (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999) p. 63
[7] Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005) p. 311
[8] Ibid. p. 273
[9] E.J. Graff, What is Marriage For? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999) p. 252