Recently in Same sex marriage blogalogue Category

In your latest entry, Tony, you choose to focus on the state's role in defining marriage as a legal institution, and point out that the legal definition of marriage has changed over time (e.g., the defeat of laws against interracial marriage), or not changed despite challenges (e.g., the defeat of polygamy). I take your point to mean that as a matter of secular law, the definition of marriage is not a fixed thing, handed down from on high.

True -- but, I think, insufficient. Except for procedural laws, all laws are made with reference to a moral ideal. Whenever our lawmakers and our courts are faced with a challenge to the definition of marriage, they have to ask themselves, "What is marriage?" Mind you, I have no serious knowledge of the jurisprudence in either the interracial marriage cases or polygamy cases, but the consistent principle in both cases is that marriage, in the eyes of the law, consists of one man and one woman.

Gay marriage fundamentally changes the institution in ways that interracial marriage did not (even the segregationists didn't claim that interracial marriages weren't marriages; they just didn't think blacks and whites should marry). Our government doesn't recognize polygamist marriages as marriages, because the assumption is that anything that is not one man + one woman is not a marriage by definition.

Gay marriage is not analogous to interracial marriage because the two unions are based on fundamentally different philosophical views of what marriage is. To clarify, gay marriage is analogous to interracial marriage if one believes that marriage itself, as a phenomenon, is nothing more than a contract between two people who love each other and wish to bind themselves together legally. But if marriage means something deeper than that -- that is, if marriage has a purpose that we can discover, but not alter -- then the two are only superficially alike.

The basic question that guides how courts and lawmakers -- and ultimately, all members of a polity -- decide on the question of gay marriage is: What is marriage for? There is no such thing as a morally neutral position for the state to take. Whether the state privileges traditional marriage, or opens itself up to radical innovations (same-sex marriage, polygamy), all depends on how the lawmaking bodies answer that question.

Put another way: Yes, you can legislate morality. We do all the etime. Again, aside from laws governing procedures, all laws are statements of moral principle. Moral neutrality when it comes to marriage law is impossible.

Here's Tony's opening message to me in this blogalogue. He's in Dallas for a few days, so we met to set the ground rules of our discussion. Actually we didn't want to set rules as much as we wanted to establish trust. We don't want this exchange of ours, between my blog and his, to be about points-scoring; it's simply a conversation between two fortysomething Christians -- I an Eastern Orthodox convert with an orthodox Roman Catholic background; Tony a Protestant pastor who is a leader in the Emergent church -- who come down on opposite sides of an issue that is dividing many churches and is perhaps the key battleground of the culture war. Below, you can see a video excerpt of today's conversation. I'll answer the substance of Tony's first post in this blogalogue below the jump -- but I'd appreciate it if you'd watch even just a bit of this video, so you can get an idea of our voices and way of speaking. You who follow this thread will be listening to two people talk, not two representatives of any "side" or church. It's important to remember that.

I also want you to know that I am going to be doubleplus vigilant to patrol for trolls in the comboxes on these threads. If all you have to say is the other side is bigoted, or a squish, or some variation on the usual yadda-yadda, take it elsewhere. Really. It's boring by this point.

Here's the video. My response to his post after the jump: