Ritual Combat

It seems absurd, at the beginning of the 21st century, to be fighting over access to a ritual.

A lot of this fuss over same-sex marriage stems from the incomplete separation of church and state, and the constant pressure of some churches to resume the control they once had over people’s lives.

At the risk of offending some of them, the fact of the matter is that the state permits religious weddings as a matter of courtesy, out of respect to people’s beliefs, but they have no legal significance.

A church (and presumably a synagogue, mosque, temple) wedding ceremony contains two events. First there is a religious rite, and then the legal one when the couple signs the register in front of witnesses.

In fact it would make no difference if those two events happened in reverse order, or even on different dates (as they do in France), because it’s the legal bit that makes them a married couple, not the preceding ritual.

Religious folks take the opposite view. For them, the couple is married at the completion of the ritual: what happens afterwards is merely the state recognising their pre-existing relationship.

Most gays and lesbians are not especially fussed about the church (synagogue / temple / mosque) ritual. It’s a ‘nice-to-have’, but that’s an argument that gay Jews must have with Jews, gay Muslims with Muslims, and gay Christians with Christians.

Meanwhile most religious folk are not especially bothered about relationship recognition, and have accepted the idea of parallel relationship registers (the marriage register is a relationship register).

So why are we fighting?

They will accept the legal stuff, but they don’t want us to have the religious ritual. We’re not especially fussed about the religious ritual.

Where this gets nasty is, they don’t want us to have a secular ritual either, which is frankly none of their business. They don’t interfere in the relationship recognition rituals of temples, mosques and synagogues, and shouldn’t interfere in the ones at registry offices either.

They say that we can’t be allowed to have a ceremony because this ‘mimics’ marriage – it offends them, because they think it parodies their sacred ritual. What this reveals – and what they carefully don’t say - is that as far as they’re concerned, all secular weddings only ‘mimic’ marriage, because only their ritual can truly recognize a relationship.

My grandmother – who never attended church except for baptisms, weddings and funerals - thought you weren’t really married unless you had a church ceremony. As far as she was concerned, people who tied the knot at a registry office were living ‘over the brush’, as she called it.

“When are you going to have a proper wedding,” she would ask the embarrassed couple?

I suspect this is still the attitude of all those who tick the ‘Christian’ box on the census form, but like my grandmother only ever enter a church or meet a priest for baptisms, weddings and funerals, and the occasional carol service. They don’t feel married without some sort of ceremony. It’s the social equivalent of comfort food.

And it is for the comfort of such folks that the ceremonial component of civil marriages was created. It has no religious significance. It’s just the state making a gesture to reassure people that this is still a real marriage, even if the bloke up front is in a suit rather than a frock.

The bible says “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”. Civil marriage belongs to Caesar. The churches should heed their own doctrine and butt out.