"Who Says 'I Do'?"

One way or the other, weddings have kept me busy all week. The growing groundswell of support for civil marriage for same sex couples has continued to generate news. And I’ve been following it closely.

Wednesday I went to a Freedom to Marry celebration at Congregation Kol Ami, a Jewish synagogue in West Hollywood. The event brought together religious leaders and activists for a morning of worship, news, and networking. I came home uplifted by the service, updated on all the latest developments in Massachusetts and San Francisco, my pockets filled with business cards and pamphlets.

Last night I officiated at a wedding ceremony. After five years, three different cities, and two long distance commutes, a young couple celebrated their commitment to one another. Standing up before their family and friends, they exchanged traditional vows, promises that men and women have been making to each other for generations. Sometimes it’s hard to understand how this simple act, so heartfelt and hopeful, could ever be so controversial. Or why some people would be so determined to prevent others from having the right to do as this young couple did: to marry and to receive all the economic, social, and legal benefits that marriage confers.

Now that the civil marriage debate has moved into the center of the political arena, it’s time to reaffirm where we stand, as a people of faith, on this human rights issue. Unitarian Universalist support for the freedom to marry is unequivocal and longstanding. With over thirty years of advocacy for equal rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons, our faith community has embraced marriage equality too. In 1996 the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association passed a Resolution of Immediate Witness in support of the right to marry. Our larger Unitarian Universalist community is eager to keep this issue at the top of the list of social concerns needing our support. The new California Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry has chosen marriage equality as a top priority. As our Faith in Action issues election confirmed last week, the same is true for us here in Santa Monica.

We are so fortunate that our tradition of freedom and tolerance allows us to take a stand with relative ease and unanimity. Yet because we share a similar perspective on this issue, we rarely challenge ourselves to articulate just what it means and why it matters. The current public debate needs us and our voices, and it is time to speak out.

I have had to sort out my own thinking about marriage. As a minister, I focus on the spiritual dimensions of the wedding ceremony. And like other Unitarian Universalist ministers, I have been performing ceremonies for same sex couples for decades. The ceremony is an expression of love and the religious aspect of a commitment between two people.

Signing the license is almost an afterthought, paper work I am required to complete. That license, however, is how a marriage shifts from a religious rite to a civil entity. Until all people have access to that civil entity, all marriages are not equal, however much you or I may see them that way.

Domestic partnerships and civil unions are approximations of civil marriage, extended to same sex couples. But they do not provide equal rights. Only civil marriage can give two people – and their children – the full array of legal protections and benefits that marriage provides.

I may think of marriage as a religious rite of passage, but that is only one aspect of this complex and evolving social institution. In her book What is Marriage For? author E.J. Graff likens marriage to Jerusalem, “an archaeological site,” she writes, “on which the present is constantly building over the past, letting history’s many layers twist and tilt into today’s walls and floors. As with Jerusalem, many people believe theirs is the one true claim to the holy ground. But like Jerusalem, marriage has always been a battleground, owned and defined first by one group and then another. While marriage, like Jerusalem, may retain its ancient name, very little else in this city has remained the same – not its boundaries, boulevards, or daily habits – except the fact that it is inhabited by human beings. And yet marriage exists in every recorded society.”

Consider the marriage in the African folktale I told earlier. When the beautiful young woman Natiki falls in love with a young hunter, he rescues her from an abusive home and takes her far away. He provides for her and their children. She is happy. Just like Cinderella.

E.J. Graff points out that marriage as public policy has evolved as economics, the status of women, and the role of love have all evolved too. Marriage is a protean creature, merging our intimate lives with social institutions. No wonder it has become an election year controversy. How we see marriage today will change in time to come, just as it has changed in the past. The role I assume as an officiant at wedding ceremonies suggests that religion has always been part of marriage. It hasn’t been. As E.J. Graff points out, early Christians rejected marriage, taking up celibacy as a communal ideal and social rebellion. Christian celibacy also protected women from arranged marriages and sexual servitude in the Roman Empire.

In the United States, marriage has not always been a religious act either. The early settlers of New England instituted the custom of civil marriage, but did not allow the involvement of clergy in them at first. In a recent editorial in the Boston Globe, Harvard University minister Peter J. Gomes points out that not until 1692, “when Plymouth Colony was merged into that of Massachusetts Bay, were the clergy authorized by the new province to solemnize marriages.”

The idea of a traditional church wedding is actually quite recent. And yet I have had so many opportunities to appreciate how much that can mean to people. Just think of how many couples have been married in this sanctuary. With or without the trappings of a conventional wedding, sacred space is essential for some people. Two women came all the way from Germany once to be married in this Unitarian Universalist church. They believed that if they were married here – where same sex unions are considered as holy as heterosexual ones – that they would be truly married in the sight of God.

As an officiant, I have had the power to authorize marriages and also to decline to marry certain couples. I have rarely exercised the power to decline, preferring instead to decline from judgment about the viability of other peoples’ relationships. But one time when I did refuse, I was acutely aware of how my judgment was tied to everything I believe as a person of faith, not as an agent of the state.

It was only my first or second year in ministry. A couple came to see me about their wedding. There were certain things they wanted me to understand about them, they made clear at our first and only meeting. They believed they belonged to a superior race of people, chosen to survive an imminent apocalypse. It sounds funny – or even pathological, but they were dead serious. I’ve met my share of kooks in our Unitarian Universalist world, but these people scared me. After a little more exploration of their particular destiny – which, obviously, I would not be sharing with them – I told them that I would not perform their wedding. Their ideology was just too mean spirited and contrary to our Universalist faith.

I may not have wanted to marry them, but they still had a right to their civil marriage. The separation of church and state protects people from religious discrimination. Marriage today is a democratic institution. It is a right all people deserve because anyone can love another.

Whether validated by civil license or sanctified in the church, love is the “common cultural currency,” as E.J. Graff defines it, of marriage. Love is a value cherished by our society and revered by people of faith. The love any two people share binds them not only to each other but to all humanity, our yearnings and our commitments. We are not so different from one another.

In Walt Whitman’s beautiful love poem, he writes how nothing – not his “plaudits in the capitol,” nor his accomplishments, could make him happy. Only the intimate companionship of his beloved, “under the same cover in the cool night,” can do that. And though not all of us will marry, or experience love in the same way, none of us would deny Walt Whitman the love that made him happy.

The same is true for marriage. Each time we extend our understanding of human rights, we take a step forward as a democratic society. To win the freedom to marry is to grow in our humanity and to celebrate the truth that love belongs to everyone.

References used to prepare this sermon include "What is Marriage For?" by E.J. Graff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999); “For Massachusetts a Chance and a Choice,” by Peter Gomes, in the Boston Globe, February 8, 2004. For information about the Unitarian Universalist Association history of affirming equal marriage, go to http://www.uua.org. I also referred to pamphlets published by Lambda Legal and other advocacy groups.