Here’s what Lisa Miller wrote:
“Marriage” in America refers to two separate things, a religious institution and a civil one, though it is most often enacted as a messy conflation of the two. As a civil institution, marriage offers practical benefits to both partners: contractual rights having to do with taxes; insurance; the care and custody of children; visitation rights; and inheritance. As a religious institution, marriage offers something else: a commitment of both partners before God to love, honor and cherish each other — in sick and in health, for richer and poorer — in accordance with God’s will. In a religious marriage, two people promise to take care of each other, profoundly, the way they believe God cares for them.
And here’s the response of Glenn Stanton, director of global family formation studies at Focus on the Family:
In claiming that marriage in America is actually two separate things, Lisa Miller is simply making things up at this point. This statement has no foundation in actuality whatsoever. When I speak at secular universities across the country on why same-sex “marriage” and parenting are not good ideas, I regularly hear this same argument — that we already have different kinds of marriage, religious and civil. This is worth answering, not because it is a good argument, but precisely because it is as ignorant as it is popular.
There’s an easy way to demonstrate the hole in this idea for people who think it reasonable. Encourage them to marry someone in any house of worship, in a ceremony officiated by any minister. Then encourage the new couple to file their next tax return jointly. Good bet the IRS will contact them shortly, stating the agency has no record of the marriage. Have the couple kindly explain to the IRS agent that they opted for the religious kind of marriage Lisa Miller wrote about in Newsweek and see what the agent says. Challenge them to find any public entity that will recognize the marriage.
You see, anyone can get married in a church, synagogue, mosque or temple. Members of the predominantly gay Metropolitan Community Church “marry” same-sex couples all the time. But if those couples don’t receive licenses from the county courthouse, the whole exercise is moot, and it won’t matter how fabulous the religious ceremony was or how much the mother of the bride wept at the beauty of it all.
This license is much more than a piece of paper or a mere formality. It represents the government’s deep interest in a couple’s marital status because marriage does important things that every society needs. Marriage regulates sexual relationships — those from which babies could come forth — and is the best way societies have to ensure that the people who create the babies have a durable relationship sufficient to usher these children into healthy and productive adulthood. All societies have need for this. Significantly, one of the most consistent findings of modern social science is that among children who grow up apart from their mother or father experience greater rates of poverty, crime, drug abuse, educational failure, teen pregnancy, physical and sexual abuse, and physical and mental illness.
All cultures — ancient and contemporary, primitive and developed, religious and secular — have recognized marriage as the first and most fundamental social institution. Aristotle (never to be confused with the fathers of the Church) wrote quite some time ago:
“In the first place there must be a union of those who cannot exist without other; namely of male and female … [thus] the first thing to arise is the family. But when several families are united … that society is the village ... and the most natural form of the village appears to be that of a colony from the family, composed of the children and grandchildren who are said to be suckled with the same milk.”
Churches in America play no role in regulating or licensing marriages. But the state must ... and does so because natural marriage is the most important and primary civil union.
