by Jack Rogers
Vice President & Professor of Theology (1990-2000)
San Francisco Theological Seminary
Introduction
I am honored to participate in the first Schloming Memorial Lectureship. I very much appreciate the manner in which Editor Howard Weaver has laid out for us the background of the March 7 ballot measure we are discussing. I resonate with many of the concerns that my friend Professor Newton Malony has ably articulated. I warmly second his description of our friendship. I oppose the ballot initiative and value this opportunity to give reasons for my opposition.
No state in the United States recognizes marriage except between a man and a woman. There is currently no federal statue that includes sexual orientation in civil rights law. Why then do we need this law? This new law appears to me to be a pre-emptive strike to prevent same-sex couples and their children from receiving the civil benefits that heterosexual couples enjoy.
In 1791, the Presbytery of Hanover in Virginia solved the problem by reflecting on the nature of marriage. It determined that marriage was constituted "in the sight of God" and "by the mutual consent of the Parties." Therefore if slaves lived a Christian life of fidelity to one another and to their children they could be accepted into the church without the legal formality of marriage.
The presbytery then extended this logic to the issue of divorce. If a couple were forcibly separated by the sale or removal of one of the spouses, the remaining slave could take "another companion" as if "the other were dead" and remain in the church. This idea of the "moral equivalent" of death was later applied to the issue of divorce in the Presbyterian Church as a whole. In the 1950s the Presbyterian Churches North and South amended the Westminster Confession to allow divorced and remarried persons to be office bearers in the church. It was done on the grounds that "Anything that kills love and deals death to the spirit of the union" is the moral equivalent of death.
It seems to me that we need to reflect seriously on the notion of the moral equivalent of marriage. To be perfectly honest, I don't care what you call it -- marriage, domestic partnership, holy union. It is not the form I am interested in but the function. It seems to me that it is in the best interest of the state, and of the church, to recognize and encourage persons who are willing to make life-long commitments to each other and to children they raise. It also seems to me that people who exhibit such fidelity and stability deserve the same benefits that heterosexual people do who enter into a marriage.
There are many parallels in history to our present attempts to exclude a certain class of people from the rights and benefits of marriage. In 1948 the California Supreme Court overturned a law barring marriage between people of different races. As recently as 1948, forty of the then 48 states banned interracial marriage. The notion that marriage was only for people of the same race has been a deeply ingrained bias in American society. But we have changed our minds. Most people would concede that the change has been beneficial to society.
Marriage has also defined in such a way as to deny women their full civil and human rights. Into the early twentieth century, women could not own property. If a woman inherited money from her family it became the property of her husband. Women were not allowed to vote, of course, until 1920. Higher education was denied women. The normal state for women was to marry and bear children. They were to be silent partners, allowing all public functions to their husbands. We have changed our minds. Most people would concede that the change has been for the benefit of society.
In 1931, a committee of the Federal Council of Churches recommended that parents consider using artificial means of birth control. The Southern Presbyterian Church, in indignation, withdrew from the Council. The PCUSA remained a member but advised the council to "hold its peace on questions of delicacy and morality."
Three decades later, the Presbyterian Church had clarified its attitude about the primary purpose of marriage. By 1960, Presbyterians had adopted the posture that the primary purpose of marriage was personal fulfillment. It was for the mutual comfort, encouragement, and up building of the persons involved. Therefore birth control could be accepted. In 1960, both Presbyterian denominations issued a joint statement approving of birth control.
Recent efforts to limit the benefits of marriage to heterosexual couples are grounded in the older view that the primary purpose of marriage is the procreation of children. In the recent Vermont case regarding the rights of homosexual couples, the Vermont Assistant Attorney General Eve Jacobs-Carnahan, defended limiting the right of marriage to that between a man and a woman by arguing that the purpose of marriage was biological procreation.
The groups pushing hardest for passage of the Definition of Marriage act in California are the Mormon Church and the Roman Catholic Church. The Mormon Church is alleged to have contributed 40% of the funds toward recent marriage-limitation initiatives in other states. Both the Mormons and the Roman Catholics still deny women full participation in the life of their churches. The primary purpose of marriage for them is still for women to bear and care for children and for men to exercise public leadership. They have a vested interest in defining marriage in such a way as to maintain their limited and limiting vision of the purpose of marriage.
Cohabiting, living together without being married, has risen from 430,000 couples in 1960 to 4.1 million couples in 1997. While some view living together as a sort of trial marriage, 40 percent of those cohabiting do not marry. We live in an era of family disruption that leads sociologists to talk of an emerging culture of "serial marriage" and "non-marriage."
**None of these alarming trends has been caused by homosexuals who want to marry. None of these trends will be solved by denying same-sex couples domestic partnership rights.** In a culture of non-marriage it is very ironic that we are spending great amounts of money and energy in trying to prevent people from marrying who want to do so in a way that would contribute to the stability of society. Stanford Professor of family law Michael Wald contends that the proposed ballot amendment could cause emotional and financial harm to an estimated 100,000 children who are being raised by same-sex couples in California.
If asked to say, without reflecting on it, what makes a human different from an animal, most people will answer: reason, the ability to think rationally. That is the Western cultural tradition, rooting back in the philosophy of Aristotle in the 3rd century before Christ.
In Christian theology the doctrine of the image of God in humans defines what makes a human being truly, fully human. Roman Catholics follow their great Medieval Theologian, Thomas Aquinas, who, following Aristotle, said that the image of God in humans is rationality. Aquinas and his followers also shared the Aristotelian assumption that women are less rational than men. Unfortunately, Protestant theologians followed that same lead into the 1940s. When this theory is applied to the family it becomes clear that man's virtue is to rule and woman's virtue is to obey.
In the twentieth century, Swiss theologian Karl Barth shifted the emphasis of the image of God from rationality to the relationship between male and female. Barth, and those following him, make an argument from the created order. Barth said: "Man is directed to woman and woman to man ... this mutual orientation constitutes the being of each." From this assertion conservative Protestants draw the conclusion that monogamous, male-female marriage is the exemplification of the image of God in humanity. For this Barthian view of the image of God, now embraced by conservatives, true humanness is known only in the male/female relationship.
Whenever we have located the image of God in some human capacity we have been wrong, and had to repent. When we defined white skin as constituting full humanness and defined black people as only three-fifths human we were wrong. When we defined humanness as rationality and claimed that women lacked that capacity, we were wrong.
Biblically, Jesus Christ is the image of God (Col.1:15; II Cor. 4:4). Our unmarried savior, Jesus Christ, was a fully human person. Jesus Christ was like us in all things, save one -- he was without sin. Jesus Christ is the image of God because he alone perfectly reflected, or imaged, God in his unbroken obedience to God. Jesus continually and perfectly imaged, or reflected God in his person, whereas we do so only sporadically and partially.
The Gospel, the Good News, is that all people can have a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. To be in the image of God is to reflect Christ's presence in our lives by living in faithfulness to God. Thus, the image of God, what makes us truly human, is not a capacity only embodied in some classes of people but denied to others. To be truly human, to be fully in God's image, is possible for all, black and white, male and female, gay and straight.
Some will try to carry the argument further, by arguing that homosexuality is a chosen and sinful condition that precludes faithfulness to God. It has recently become popular to argue that if homosexuals just loved Jesus enough they could become heterosexual. In the summer of 1998, 15 conservative political organizations calling themselves a National Pro-Family Forum began a $500,000 "Truth in Love" advertising campaign dedicated to promoting the notion that homosexuals can change to become heterosexuals. The ads featured Reggie White, a black pro football player, Trent Lott, the Senate majority leader, and former gay and lesbian persons who are now married.
Most people will admit that no one knows the cause of homosexuality. There may be a range of homosexual propensity from fully same-sex oriented to only slightly so. Homosexuals can certainly change their behavior. That is amply attested by the fact that so many homosexuals married and had children in their attempt to be heterosexual. There is abundant anecdotal evidence of gay and lesbian people who wanted to change and did everything possible, short of suicide, to try to conform to the social expectations of the majority society. Most could not do so. To claim that the failure of Christian homosexuals to become heterosexual is due to their failure to love and obey God is a form of bearing false witness against our neighbor.
The author of Proposition 22 is William "Pete" Knight, a California state senator (R -- Palmdale). David Knight is his son. David is a graduate of the Air Force Academy and flew fighter planes in the Gulf War. His father made many speeches expressing his pride and love for his patriotic son. David is now a cabinetmaker who lives a quiet life.
Three years ago David told his father that he was gay and had a life partner named Joe. At that moment his relationship with his father ended. They have never discussed David's homosexuality or that fact that Senator Knight's gay brother died of AIDS three years ago. David commented for the press:
"My father seems to want things to remain as he has always known things to be -- without change. He can't seem to understand that we as a society are growing and allowing more people the opportunity to share in the ultimate dream of happiness. We are expressing our own family values based on the same basic principles that he so fervently protects.