First published on May 4, 2004, in the Rutland Herald.
The challenge for supporters of same-sex marriage is much greater than obtaining access to civil marriage for gay Americans. Supporters must help all Americans distinguish between marriage and a marriage ceremony. And the way to do this is to ensure that the civil certification of marriage looks radically different than the ceremonial celebration of marriage.
I recall a former ministerial colleague's pithy words about the role a pastor plays in the life of a church member. The minister is there when a person is hatched, matched and dispatched. People turn to religion, he was telling me, in order to mark births, marriages and deaths. The state, as it happens, is also present at each of those moments. But what the state does is quite different from what the church does.
Consider what happens when a person is hatched. There was a time when churches provided the sole record of a child's birth. In places where those records are incomplete or lost, we are left to conjecture when people from past centuries were born. If people didn't go to church at all, their births could go unrecorded. The state took over this bookkeeping function from the church in order to keep track of people (likely for tax purposes) and has never looked back.
But the church has not ceased to celebrate births just because the state issues birth certificates. Rather, there is the infant dedication or baptism (or, in the case of Jewish male infants, the bris), where the newborn is brought into the faith community. There is no competition between church and state, because we accept the bookkeeping function of the state as independent from the ceremonial life of the faithful.
The same distinction happens when a person is dispatched. The coroner expedites the paperwork for a death certificate, and the funeral director secures a burial license. Once again, these are bookkeeping tasks that the state has assumed from the church, whose bookkeeping was spotty. But the state's role does not supersede the work of the fait+hful. There is no state requirement that a family sit shiva for the departed; death certificates do not require funeral or memorial services in order to make them valid. The faith community marks death with its own distinct set of rituals. And most of us would revolt if the state dictated what our rituals should look like.
Here is where marriage runs afoul of both church and state. In Vermont, the law requires that a marriage be solemnized in order to validate a marriage. While there is no specification of what constitutes an acceptable solemnization, the language is clear: The state requires a marriage ceremony in order for a marriage to have legal force.
There are many good reasons to have a marriage ceremony. It allows the couple to share their joy and love with us. It allows us to show our support for the couple. It even provides an opportunity, if we take our responsibility seriously, to express our concerns and tell the couple we think they're making a terrible mistake ("speak now or forever hold your peace"). It turns a marriage into a communal event.
This would all be well and good if the law held the community accountable for a marriage. But the law does not. When a marriage ends, the community usually does not gather before the magistrate (unless it's a celebrity divorce). This is because marriage gives two individuals rights and responsibilities and obligations.
This would also be well and good if the marriage ceremony had no religious connotations. But with all the talk about the sanctity of marriage and its status as a sacred institution, it is obvious that a great number of Americans fail to distinguish between the marriage ceremony and marriage.
Thus, there ought to be a sharper line between the two. If the state wishes to retain the requirement of solemnization, the state, not the church, should do the solemnizing. Couples who want to marry should be required to retain the services of a public official, who will certify the marriage. If there is concern that marriages may be contracted in haste, the state can institute a waiting period or require proof of pre-marital counseling. But the larger point is: Legally speaking, the couple should be married by the state, separate from whatever marriage ceremony the couple may also choose to have, either before or after the legal certification of marriage by public officials.
As we debate same-sex marriage in America, the issue should not be whether gay men and lesbians will redefine marriage as we know it. The issue should be whether we are willing to redefine the certification of marriage. The separation of the marriage certificate from the marriage ceremony parallels the separation of the birth certificate from infant baptism and the separation of the death certificate from the funeral service. This is the direction we should take when two individuals are matched, and the proponents of same-sex marriage need to lead the way.