Marriage: God’s Rules and Caesar’s
With the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide, I have been unearthing some of my writings on the subject over the years, many of them emphasizing a common theme: the way some religious people confuse civil and religious institutions. I’ve previously posted on this website a 2009 blog on the subject. I now add this oped, syndicated by Pacific News Service in 2004, soon after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom unilaterally ordered the city staff to issue marriage licenses without regard to gender, setting off a brief, celebratory period during which the city was issuing marriage licenses as the Supreme Court acknowledged 11 years later is constitutionally required.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan said it exactly right when he told the media that President Bush “has always strongly believed that marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman.”
Behind the exhilaration of the recent San Francisco gay marriages — or the angst, depending on your viewpoint — lie a few deceptively simple words that we have hopelessly confused. The easiest way to come to terms with the national tempest over gay marriages is to place those few words under a microscope for a moment.The operative words in the White House statement are “sacred” and “believed.” McClellan’s announcement accurately summarizes the president’s religious view that marriage between a man and a woman is a sacred institution, not a governmental one. But what Mr. Bush is proposing is the
President Bush “has always strongly believed that marriage is a sacred institution”
inclusion in the United States Constitution, the ruling document of our secular government, of his personal “beliefs” on what is “sacred.”
Mr. Bush, said to be a deeply religious man who felt a “calling from God” to run for the presidency, is welcome to his Read more »