Donald Sensing offers an interesting take on the marriage issue from his pastoral perspective.
Sensing proposes that we divide marriage, as it is currently constituted, into two components–a civil-legal and religious:
- A state-issued “Civil Interpersonal Contract,” which grants adult partners most of the legal rights currently conferred by the marriage license.
- Religion-issued “Certificates of Marriage,” which have no legal significance. Churches, synagogues, or mosques would free to unite couples as they see fit.
“Civil Interpersonal Contract” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but I agree with the general premise of this idea. We should separate the legal from the religious. As Sensing rightly points out, the prevailing political rhetoric on this issue defies reality:
People who scream about the “sanctity of marriage” – a religiously loaded term – need to explain how sanctified Americans think marriage is when there far are more than a million divorces per year, an enormous percentage of children are born out of wedlock and, as I already said, the vast majority of men and women who do marry already are living together as de facto husband and wife. The fact is that America destroyed the sanctity of marriage long before homosexuals became politically activist.
One only need look to Britney Spears’ 4 a.m. wedding to see what a good job government has done in protecting the sanctity of marriage.