Can the State force Gay Marriage on Australia
Image via WikipediaThere is a “cognitive dissonance” between ingrained “habits of homophobia” in Australian culture, on the one hand, and a recognition that “overt bigotry is no longer acceptable in the public square,” on the other.
Some seek to resolve this dissonance by holding fast to their homophobic prejudices, by drawing similarities between the re-definition of marriage and the kind of human engineering attempted by totalitarian states. Others see this as virulent homophobic rhetoric.
Yet crying “homophobia” is a cheap calumny, a crypto-totalitarian bully’s smear that impresses no serious person.
What was marriage like under totalitarianism?
Under Polish Communism, Catholic couples — which is to say, just about everyone — got “married” twice. Because marriages in the Catholic Church were not recognized by the Communist state, believers had two “weddings.”
The first was a civil procedure, carried out in a dingy bureaucratic office with a state (Communist-party) apparatchik presiding. Many treated the state “wedding” with such unrestrained if blithe contempt that the presiding apparatchik had had to admonish people to take the business at hand seriously. A warning from the nanny-state many declined to take seriously.
The entire business was a farce, regarded as such by virtually all concerned. Many were married, in every meaningful sense of that term, in Wawel Cathedral by a Polish priest whom the world would later know as Pope John Paul II.
Australians will say, “It can’t happen here.” But it can, and it may. Before Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s signature signed the New York’s new marriage law, the New York Times published an editorial decrying the “religious exemptions” that had been written into the marriage law at the last moment. Those exemptions do, in fact, undercut the logic of the entire redefinition of marriage in the New York law — can you imagine any other “exemption for bigotry” being granted, in any other case of what the law declares to be a fundamental right?
Either the recently enacted New York marriage law is nonsense, or its religious opponents are bigots whose prejudices should not be given the protection of law.
It’s a matter of cognitive dissonance to try to have it both ways. The logic of their position requires them to try and strip away religious and other exemptions from recognizing “gay marriage.”
Should those pressures succeed, the Church will be forced to get out of the marriage business — as it has been forced in some states (USA) to stop providing foster care for children and young people. Priests and pastors will no longer function as officials of the state when witnessing marriages.
So what will Catholics other pastors and other adherents of biblical morality do? They’ll have a civil “wedding” that will be a farce, just like that endured by the polish people in the 1960’s. And then they’ll really get married in church.
A redefinition of “marriage” that puts Christian communities and their pastors outside the boundaries of the law for purposes of marriage — will be to reduce state-recognized “marriage” to a sad joke.
And that brings us to the totalitarian temptation. Modern totalitarian systems were, at bottom, attempts to remake reality by redefining reality and remaking human beings in the process. Coercive state power was essential to this process, because reality doesn’t yield easily to remaking, and neither do people.
In the lands Communism tried to remake, the human instinct for justice — justice that is rooted in reality rather than ephemeral opinion — was too strong to change the way tastemakers change fashions in the arts. Men and women had to be coerced into accepting, however sullenly, the Communist New Order, which was a new metaphysical, epistemological, and moral order — a New Order of reality, a new set of “truths,” and a new way of living “in harmony with society,” as late-bureaucratic Communist claptrap had it.
The 21st-century state’s attempt to redefine marriage is just such an attempt to redefine reality — in this case, a reality that existed before the state, for marriage as the union of a man and a woman ordered to mutual love and procreation is a human reality that existed before the state. And a just state is obliged to recognize, not redefine, it.
Moreover, marriage and the families that are built around marriage constitute one of the basic elements of civil society, that free space of free associations whose boundaries the just state must respect.
If the 21st-century democratic state attempts to redefine something it has neither the capacity nor the authority to refine, it can only do so coercively. That redefinition, and its legal enforcement, is a grave encroachment into civil society.
If the state can redefine marriage and enforce that redefinition, it can do so with the doctor-patient relationship, the lawyer-client relationship, the parent-child relationship, the confessor-penitent relationship, and virtually every other relationship that is woven into the texture of civil society.
In doing so, the state does serious damage to the democratic project. Concurrently, it reduces what it tries to substitute for reality to farce. That’s what those virulent religious bigots have been trying to point out.
