Some of my progressive clergy colleagues recently have made a bold declaration. They've announced that until same-sex marriage is legalized, they won't perform marriage ceremonies for anybody - straight or gay. I greatly admire them for taking such a stand - it's a strong statement with personal consequences for them. Many pastors depend on weddings as an important source of income. These pastors are putting their money where their hearts are, for the cause of marriage equality.
I respect their stand but won't be joining them in their pledge. My heart is in the same place as theirs, but I believe I'm called to push for the cause by other means.
A few days ago, I did a pastoral counseling session with a woman whose husband announced a few months ago that he was leaving her. Now that they are fairly deep into the process of divorce, he has begun emailing her, asking for reconciliation. She feels guilty for not responding, but she knows he no longer lives in her heart. Traditional religious beliefs had a big role in locking her into an unhappy marriage, and now those same beliefs tug at her to let her husband move back in with her again. But when I asked her about her feelings toward him, she made it clear that the inner connection between them was broken. The marriage had been over for a long time - long before they filled out the divorce paperwork. She once thought marriage was fundamentally an official status bound by government and church laws. Now she sees that marriage is a spiritual state between two people. When marriage ends, the spiritual facts have changed whether or not the dissolution papers have been filed with the court.
Likewise, in my long experience of performing wedding ceremonies, I have seen firsthand that marriage transcends the legal status associated with it. When marriage begins, it's a spiritual fact that can't be denied even if the law doesn't yet recognize it. I have performed marriage ceremonies for people who for various practical reasons didn't sign wedding licenses. I have performed marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples years before the law (temporarily) recognized such unions. Those gay couples were as married as any straight couples whose services I have performed. To deny that they are married strikes me as absurd; I don't understand how anyone who really knows these people could question it.
The last same-sex wedding I performed was for a lesbian couple who got legally married during the window of time when that was possible in California. I knew that the majority of the people who attended that beautiful event - a rather traditional-looking ceremony - had never been to a same-sex wedding before. I would wager that dozens of people were converted that afternoon, turned in favor of legal recognition of same-sex marriages. For these converts, going to a lesbian wedding has become a "new normal" thing to do.
The more of these ceremonies we clergy people conduct, with our without the blessing of the law, the more unremarkable such weddings and relationships become for the wider public, and the more converts we make to our cause. Just as interracial and inter-ethnic couples are now commonplace, and miscegenation laws are now seen as bizarre footnotes of history, the day won't be long in coming when most people will look at same-sex marriage as perfectly normal.
I believe that the biggest objection to same-sex marriage is religious in nature. People who oppose legalization very often do so on the grounds that it is against the will of God and the divine word of the scriptures. Religion is most of the problem, so religion has to be at least part of the solution. If churches and temples encourage people who are spiritually married to celebrate these facts of the soul in wedding ceremonies, without distinction regarding their legal status, this makes a very powerful statement to the wider public. Such ceremonies visibly demonstrate that there is something of the divine in the bonds of committed, spiritually-centered couples, whether gay or straight.
So I will keep on doing weddings for heterosexual and same-sex couples alike. And I plan to emphasize more than ever in my wedding addresses that marriage is a spiritual reality, quite apart from whether or not society has evolved to the point of legally supporting it.
I suppose that this question is a lot like the choices that civil rights activists had to make in the '60's. Should they get on the bus and refuse to sit in the back, no matter what the law says, or should they boycott the buses completely and walk instead? Both were honorable, and in their own ways effective, means of action against the injustice. I'm going to stay on the marriage bus and do my part to assure that same-sex couples are up front, for all the world to see.
