“Sanctity" is a word that gets thrown around an awful lot in certain theological debates, but rarely does it show up in legal arguments. Well, unless same-sex couples want to get married, that is. While you're not likely to hear arguments about the sanctity of medical insurance, or the sanctity of tax cuts, the sanctity of marriage takes center stage when same-sex couples start clamoring for their right to enter some sort of legally recognized union. Then, suddenly, what seems to be a purely legal issue becomes a heinous attack on the sanctity of an ancient cultural institution, or so its opponents say. (Although the recognize that there are other threats as well.)

Of course, gay-marriage advocates insist that this simply isn't the case – gay marriage won't have any effect on heterosexual unions, they say. The sanctity of marriage is safe, they claim. Well sort of.

The modern institution of marriage is a chimera in the truest sense of the word. On the one hand, it's a religious union of two people which grants them certain rights: the ability to have sexual intercourse without the risk of damnation being the primary one, and the "legitimacy" of the children of the union being another. On the other hand, the secular government confers a huge list of purely legal benefits to married couples. While a member of your local clergy could easily tell you what the pros and cons of marriage are in an afternoon, you need an accountant, a tax lawyer, and a contract lawyer to explain the secular benefits.

The recent court cases brought against the States regarding gay marriage are strictly concerned with these legal benefits – they're not demanding that these unions be recognized by the local clergy, which is something the courts can't actually force them to do (religious freedom and all).

The problem is, taken as a purely secular bond, which is the only way our government should be allowed to treat it, marriage is not a sacred institution. By definition, a secular institution cannot be considered sacred, and a secular government cannot confer sanctity on anything – there isn't a single use of the word that doesn't connote religiosity. Arguing that a secular government can bestow the status of "sanctity" on any institution is as ridiculous as arguing that the government should decide what sort of activities a person could wind up going to Hell over. It's a demarcation issue.

The earliest historical records of marriage are from a time when religion and governance were not two separate concepts. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, one of the major acts of God was to bestow law upon his people. The language used to describe the Covenants between Man and God were written in the same style as any other contracts that existed in the middle-east. But, the separation between church and state mandates that institutions be separated into two different categories, which in turn become either the provenance of the government (contract law, for instance) or the church (sin and salvation, for example). Your pastor can't tell you what your obligations are with regard to you business dealings, and your government can't tell you if your going to Hell or not.

Marriage is a bizarre institution precisely because, unlike other ancient traditions, it has been allowed to encompass both the sacred and the secular. If the government didn't provide any benefits to married couples, there wouldn't be anything to sue over. What would be the point, without the tax, insurance, and inheritance advantages? Any lawsuit which sought to force the Catholic church to recognize same-sex unions, for example, would be thrown right out of court.

It was simply for expediency's sake that the religious institution of marriage was allowed to serve as the linchpin for these benefits. If a gay couple wants to obtain the rights and privileges of legal marriage, they need to hire a couple of good lawyers and spend a good deal of cash – which is exactly what straight couples would have to do, if it wasn't for the fact that all of these things come automatically after filing a few papers with the county.

The suggestion that gay couples having the same access to that short-cut method of securing the legal benefits that married couples enjoy will somehow cause the union between a man and a women to lose its sacred status is ridiculous. So why is that argument still being made?

There can be only one reason, although, there are two different motives. To put it simply, when opponents of gay marriage start talking about its threat to the sanctity of heterosexual unions, they are confusing the two separate aspects of marriage, the secular and the spiritual. Now, either they're either doing that because they haven't thought clearly about exactly what marriage is, and are unable to appreciate the differences between the two realms in which it exists; or, they don't actually believe that a purely secular state should exist.

In spite of the fact that some interested parties seem to openly support the separation of church and state (or at least don't speak out against it) make no mistake: The self-proclaimed defenders of "sanctity" do not believe in the doctrine of separation. As we have seen, there is no logically consistent way for them to claim that they do.

Now, the demarcation question is one that has been dealt with exhaustively elsewhere, both for and against. We will not deal with it here. But, the evidence cannot be denied: The elephant in the room that none of the participants in the gay-marriage debate almost always fail to mention – the fundamental point of all of the histrionics surrounding this argument is quite simply the separation of church and state. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

-B. C. Silvia
-2/4/2004