Proposition 8

It was semi-refreshing news last week that a three-judge panel of the 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 to declare that California’s Prop 8 violates the civil rights of folks like me. The “semi-“ part of this news is about the dissenting judge’s vote. Generally I approve of dissent. Democracy works best when we all can speak what’s in our hearts. However, I’ve spent much of my nearly eight decades overhearing the comments of folks who think folks like me should be snuffed, or at least denied the rights and privileges of ordinary American citizens. I quake at this glimpse into the thought processes of that third judge. I’d thought judges were folks who’d gotten farther along than most of us toward balance and fairness.

On the other hand, I sometimes wonder if a lot of this bru-ha-ha could have been avoided if we’d all understood two things. The first is that “Civil Union” is a very sweet phrase. It can describe a kind of marriage more rewarding than the “only-one-person-can-wear-the-pants-in-this-relationship” kind of marriage that all too many folks settle into. We might do well to adopt it as the defining phrase for the legal and financial aspect of marriage for all of us. If a couple seriously agrees to attempt the discipline of a truly civil union, with all the on-going consideration of the other this would demand of both parties, there might be less incivility in marriage, and fewer divorces. When divorce is unavoidable the parting partners might more readily be restored as friends.

This should work, if the license issued or cancelled gives us equally the thousand or so federally sanctioned economic and political benefits that married couples today get from the feds. Certainly it should not give some of us only what our particular state grants us, while others get the whole enchilada.

After getting that license, we might go to our houses of worship to share this pledge with beloved family and friends for a marriage ceremony, if those traditions are meaningful to us. Certainly we wouldn’t want to coerce anyone to marry us who would prefer to have us snuffed.

This society was, after all, from the time it was defined by our Constitution, one that claimed it would not coerce anyone into believing or disbelieving any particular religious doctrine. Though we have not always lived up to that fine sentiment.

This brings up the second thing that might have helped us avoid much of this mess, the beliefs of the “Pilgrims”. Every Thanksgiving we honor, in caricature, the Plymouth Colonists, who ended up contributing in a profound way to our Constitution’s First Amendment.

The Mayflower passenger roster was about 40% made up of church separatists (later known as "Pilgrims") who played a critical role in the middle of the Atlantic, averting a mutiny against the captain. The crew would have turned the ship toward disaster in trying to return to England across the stormy Atlantic in November. As a result of this skillful negotiation, at landfall our Pilgrims were put in charge of organizing the colony. The “Mayflower Compact” deeply influenced the writing of both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. 

The Pilgrims were deeply religious, but their “separatism" was about keeping the secular affairs of state and the strictures of church separate. Mentioned specifically in their doctrine is belief that marriage is not a sacrament, as claimed by other Christian sects. It is merely an economic pledge to protect spouse and children. This was one of the “heresies” that brought persecution and imprisonment on them in England, first under a Catholic king, and then under Church of England and Puritan regimes. These Separatists thought of themselves as First Century Christians hewing to a doctrine preceding later accretions of more imperialistic intent.

Our democracy is trumpeted around the world as the best form of governance for all people whatever their religious bent. So we must include our forebears' insight that, whatever religious constrictions might apply, marriage is a secular matter that has legal and financial consequences impacting a couple’s inheritance rights, taxes, passports etc. quite separate from their religious affiliations. Not allowing some loving unions the same Federal financial and legal benefits as others makes no sense if this really is to be a model for governance worldwide, as our politicians claim.

We still have a long struggle ahead, all the way to the U.S Supreme Court.