The Divorce of Marriage

Marriage (or, rather, the definition of marriage) has been a hot topic these days, which is somewhat amazing.  The institution of marriage is our oldest one as human beings on planet Earth, and, until very recently, it was one of our best understood ones.

Marriage has its origins in the story of Adam and Eve, and was easy to define when there is only one man and one woman around. Moses takes the opportunity on Genesis 2:24 to state: “Therefore, a man shall leave father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh”, in the middle of the Adam and Eve story. Men have wives (sometimes more than one) in the Biblical account from this point forward, and the men are always men, and the wives are always women.  This continued on, until the present day, when something seemed to change.

Looking at marriage from a more modern sense, there were two components of marriage that we strived to keep together: the “before God” (given to us by God, translated to the “church wedding”), and the “legal” (to define rights, such as support, children, property, many stemming from divorce). We knew that marriage was one institution, so we accommodated the “God” aspects and the “state” aspects under one general term and one process, administered in two ways: by mayors, justices of the peace, ship’s captains, etc… (legal), and by religious celebrants (both before God and legal).

In the current climate, on the legal side, many governments are redefining marriage to be between two human beings, gender not defined.  This has caused the harmony between “legal” and “before God” marriage to be discordant. God hasn’t changed His mind about marriage, but man has. You cannot use the same term to mean two fundamentally different types of union.  There are, and have been, many legal remedies that accommodate unions between two people that are outside the traditional, common, unified definition of marriage, but these don’t seem to suffice these days.

So, this a legal attempt to redefine a term, more than anything else. By comparison, the term “gay” had a very different meaning not 100 years ago, but through the way the term was used in culture, it became re-defined.  Marriage has a long, well defined and universally recognized meaning that stems from the origin of man, and that meaning defined marriage as between a man and a woman.  What was done culturally, over a period of time with the term gay, is now being attempted with the force of law, over a much shorter period of time, with the term marriage. The former coupling of the legal and the before God that was termed marriage is being uncoupled.

This is the divorce of marriage. But, divorce is the opposite of marriage. So, what does that leave us with?  A term, “marriage” that is really devoid of meaning, since it means two very different things depending on the context.  But, terms don’t work that way, no one uses the term gay to mean happy anymore. But, with marriage, neither meaning is going away any time soon, because same sex people will marry legally, but only one man and one woman will continue to marry before God.  And the relationship itself will be fundamentally different, most obviously, in the fact that one type of marriage can bring forth children without any outside intervention, and one cannot.

When marriage is divorced, it’s not marriage anymore.  It’s nothing.