How to Resolve The Same-Sex Marriage Issue

I’d like to share what may be a novel perspective on the same-sex marriage issue, which is presently under heated debate at all levels of government, as well as at the office water cooler and cocktail parties.  Being such a charged topic, I can’t help but worry that my ideas may not be well-received by all readers, but if you think about them in the right context, I believe that they present a more fair solution than any other I’ve heard to date.

Incidentally, let me just state here at the outset that when I use the terms “priest” or “Church” in this article, it is for convenience and readability only.  I intend them as non-denominational terms; it would simply be cumbersome to have to continue to refer to the concepts they represent as “priest, rabbi, imam, shaman, or other holy man or woman” and “church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or other house of worship,” respectively.

Anyway, to begin, we’ll need to review some historical context.  If we look back 500 years or so, monarchs didn’t preside over weddings – priests did.  Priests even presided over monarchs’ weddings.  Such was the Church’s power over marriage that in the 1500s, when King Henry VIII couldn’t get the Church to permit him a divorce, rather than decree himself divorced, he formed a new Church, “The Church of England,” to do it for him.

In my mention of the story of Henry VIII, I left out one important detail: Henry appointed himself the leader of his new Church, thereby fusing the powers of Church and State under a single common steward.  I don’t know if this was the first incident of such a fusing, but it’s certainly one of the early and notable ones.  After this fusing, it didn’t take long before his government began persecuting religious dissenters.  In the 1600s, seeking religious freedom, 20,000 Puritans fled to the New World, followed by flights of Quakers, Baptists, and Protestants.  These early settlers and their reasons for coming here are an important and telling part of American history.

As Britain’s and the colonies’ positions became more and more diametrically opposed, eventually a revolution was sparked, forming what we now call the United States.  In its formation, the US’ founding fathers codified some of the issues at which they had been at odds with Britain.  They created a Constitution that enumerates and upholds the population’s inalienable rights.  They then wrote amendments to that constitution, the first ten of which are known as “The Bill of Rights,” which specifically discuss freedom of religion as one of those inalienable rights; they separated Church and State.