Gay Marriage

In every person's life and in the development of society certain issues signal initiations to a new and mature stage. But initiation, though a positive movement forward, is difficult and painful. You wonder if you will ever get through it, and you may not recognize it as an initiation. And, just as in tribal societies initiation involves images of sexuality and death, so in modern life an initiation may take the form of a sexual issue or some form of dying, and it will likely include both.

In other words, those sexual challenges that we usually think of as problems to solve are passages to a new level of maturity. To really solve them, we have to change and grow up. They dissolve when we develop a higher level of understanding and character. Society has made some progress, for example, with the rights and value of women and femininity, but it is still struggling with homosexuality.

The matter of same-gender sexuality in general is a challenge for many people, but gay marriage is the focus today. Imagining same-sex partners as participating in marriage makes many people feel that something absolutely basic, a symbol of all traditional values, is up for reconsideration. And so there is a strong backlash, a resistance to change.

Sexuality and the Life Principle

Since sex is not just a specific portion of life but a symbol of life's vitality, worry about gay marriage is, at root, anxiety about the tendency of life to keep coming at us with new challenges. The alternative is to live by the death principle‹nothing new, the reign of the status quo‹and this death-inspired existence is comfortable. It has its rewards. What it doesn't offer is vitality, the sense of being alive.

Like any private person, society lives the tension of life and death, vitality and peace, new challenges and familiar ways. You don't have to be soul-dead to resist change; it is part of life. But today society is confused about sexuality. The rhythm of tradition and new challenges is falling apart. All the sex we see on the Internet, in movies, and in magazines is not a sign of a highly sexualized culture, but an indication of how we have failed to deal with sex. The sexuality we see is large symptomatic, overdone, and soulless. It demonstrates that we have not embraced our sexuality. We are defending ourselves against it, and that defensiveness appears in the split in values we see everywhere: a combination of moralism and sexual excess.

Here we have a second reason why gay marriage is such a problem for many people today: They are confused about sex, and the issue of gay marriage just makes them more confused. People comfortable with their sexuality don't see a problem in gays wanting to sanctify their relationships. But people who are anxious about their own sexual experiences and arrangements and feel they have to repress their desires in order to be virtuous and moral will find the very idea of gay marriage a personal challenge.

In my own practice of therapy and in the letters I receive in response to advice columns that I write, ³cheating² in relationships and the desire for a broader sexual arena are the main issues presented. This focus on the sexual frontier shows how concerned people are in the confrontation of their moral values with their undeniable passions. Gay marriage represents a significant leak in the repressive boundary within which people can feel secure.

You see the emotional problem in resistance to gay marriage in the faulty logic in arguments against it. People simply assert that marriage is the union of a man and a woman. They look for corroboration for their assertion in the Bible, where, of course, you can always find words in support of your positions. But a simple assertion is not a thought, certainly not a rich and reliable idea. We need good ideas around this issue rather than opinions rooted in anxiety.

Many people don't understand how a union of same-sex people can be a real marriage. Perhaps they see male and female as obvious differences‹marriage means a union of differences‹and fail to appreciate that a human marriage, not just a biological one, is the union of different persons. Marriage is not about bodies uniting but about complex personalities coming together and sharing a life. Once this difference becomes clear, gay marriage makes complete sense.

In other words, there is a link between resistance to gay marriage and the mechanistic, reductionistic, and materialistic philosophy that dominates today. A materialistic view of marriage recognizes body differences as a basis for marriage; a more soulful and spiritual view of the person understands difference to be a matter of personality and identity. It goes without saying‹gay people are as different individually as straight people are.

In a key essay devoted to marriage, C. G. Jung observed that people getting married are often looking for a copy of themselves. They don't really understand that marriage entails difference where it counts‹two different individuals pursuing individual lives together. They are disappointed when they discover that their partner is different, mysterious, and unfathomable. Yet this clash of differences allows for a deep development of personality in each partner‹the very purpose or telos of marriage, understood psychologically.

The Very Meaning of Gender

There is also confusion about gender. Another result of the materialistic philosophy in place today, people think of gender in purely physical terms‹man and a woman have different physical ³equipment² and are therefore candidates for marriage. But we are human beings and shouldn't be reduced to our physical dimension. Gender has to do with a person's psychological and spiritual make-up as well.

You don't have to look too closely to see that, as we usually understand the words, some women have more femininity in them than others, and the same holds for men and masculinity. You may see the feminine gender lived out more fully in some men than in women. One gender may be pronounced in a person, but in general gender is a more subtle thing. Most of us a mixture of two genders, and that makes life interesting. It makes us suitably and interestingly complex.

Part of the battle around gay marriage, therefore, stems from a reduction of the human being to a merely physical entity. People overlook at the beautiful complexity of temperament, style, personality, and emotion. They think of the sex act in biological terms rather than sexuality as a central aspect of personality and relationship. Resistance to gay marriage reflects a narrow view of gender and a purely biological view of marriage.

Religion, Spirituality, and Gay Marriage

Why is it that the strongest objections to gay marriage come from overt religious people and groups? You would think that religious people would be against materialism and would therefore have a more spiritual and soulful view of the human person and human relationships.

There are two kinds of religion in practice today: one emphasizes the development of a spiritual vision and sensibility. It may be found in churches or outside churches, in communities or in a person's individual spirituality. This kind of religion is open to life and there not terribly defensive about sexuality.

The other kind tends toward fundamentalism, following church rules and teachings to the letter and limiting oneself to literal interpretation of sacred texts. This kind finds comfort in restricting the intellectual life, the moral life, and spiritual practice as a defense against the unpredictable vitality found in saying yes to life's invitations. This kind of religion promotes moralism, in contrast to morality, and is generally fearful and limiting in relation to sexuality. Naturally, this kind of religion finds gay marriage completely objectionable.

Many people practice a spirituality that lies between these two poles. They may go to church and believe what they have been taught all their lives about religion, and yet they are moderately open to new ideas about tolerance and openness. These people would benefit from good, solid ideas about gender, sexuality, and marriage, and, through some intelligent conversation, might come to accept gay marriage.

The Spirituality, Magic, and Profundity of Marriage

There is often the question with regard to straight or gay marriage if it isn't sufficient to have a contractual partnership under one of various names, instead of a marriage. The history of marriage around the world suggests that people have always known that marriage is not just a rational choice to live together. It is a mysterious bond that affects families and society as much as the people wanting to share a life. It is performed with ritual, symbol, and special music, dress, and celebration. The symbolic flourishes surrounding marriage reveal its religious and spiritual nature. It goes deeper than anything the people involved intend or understand. Marriage is a sacred mystery and quite properly involves symbols that we don't fully understand. Finding a partner, agreeing to a shared life, and living together are mysteries. We don't know fully what we're doing when we are in the midst of this process. A wedding is the deep celebration of these mysteries and perhaps makes a bond that is deeper than the one created by an agreement or contract.

Marriage is the fulfillment of the self, because the self can only be fulfilled in relation to another and in community. It makes no sense to deny our children, friends, brothers, and sisters this essential process, especially on account of a neurotic fear of life that presents as homophobia.

Marriage weds us to the past, the family, our culture, our loved one, and even to nature. The impulse to celebrate a wedding on a mountain or at the sea comes from the intuition that the whole of life requires deep reconciliation and union. We need to know and feel that we are bonded to nature and to the world community. Marriage is the ground of that greater union. Every person, regardless of faith, race, or gender orientation needs marriage, or some significant substitute in the single life, to be complete in this way. Jungian psychology holds that a marriage between two people is also a deep archetypal union of all opposites. The vast inner worlds of each person encounter each other and find yet another movement toward reconciliation. Behind each human marriage the opposites at work throughout life link, creating a more cohesive world. You can detect this archetypal dimension in much of the language and in the symbols associated with marriage.

The ring, for instance, a central image in Western weddings, represents eternity, which means not only long and enduring but outside of time altogether, mythic. The big party associated with weddings around the world is also a way to step outside of time. You wouldn't make so much of a party simply to acknowledge two people setting up a life together. More is at stake, and people appropriately go into an altered state with dancing and drinking to honor the depths of the marriage. Costume is also usually a sign that what is taking place has relevance in a mythic world related to but different from ordinary life. The wedding dress and the formal attire help break the boundaries of the normal.

Clearly, all of this profound symbolic action is as relevant to a gay couple as to a straight one. Marriage is not the same as a rational agreement to share a life, and there is no conceivable reason why gays should be excluded from it, if they want it.

The Complexity of Marriage

Sometimes people joke that gay people should feel lucky that they don't have access to marriage, since half of all marriages end in divorce and the other half bring nothing but emotional suffering. But we have to understand that marriage is a deep experience of the psyche, not to be sentimentalized as a state of bliss. It is full of ordeals because it is an invitation to a more mature, more engaged entry into life. It is easy and difficult, light and dark, full of successes and failures. But that is life, and marriage is an intensification of life.

Because marriage touches such deep places in the soul, it can help the union of two people hold and endure. But its main purpose is not to act as emotional glue but rather as means of deepening the shared life. Marriage is a spiritual phenomenon and therefore is always mysterious and always beyond understanding and control. It demands a spiritual outlook and therefore contributes powerfully to the spiritual dimension of a shared life.

If a gay couple are going to get married, they would be well advised not to cheat the experience by turning it into a rational agreement to live together. Instead, they might accent symbol, ritual, and myth, drawing for inspiration on various ancient practices, to invoke the mysteries that are the very heart of marriage. And they might sustain their marriage by cultivating spiritual practices throughout their life together. Marriage is a union of souls in which body and spirit are brought together visibly in a life of trial and joy.



©2008 Thomas Moore