A
religiously pluralistic society
needs to separate church and state
"The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had it right: 'Marriage is a vital social institution.' Government should not define marriage in religious terms. In a religiously pluralistic society, we need to separate church and state. Numerous thoughtful citizens, many of them religious, no longer accept the religiously based rejection of same-sex relationships. There are mainstream religious groups that perform same-sex marriages or same-sex commitment ceremonies. Beyond that, many religious people believe that civil marriage should be open to same-sex couples, even though they do not want to grant religious recognition to such relationships.
"Religious communities and the state have transformed the definition of marriage through history. We no longer allow one man to have more than one wife, as the Bible did. We no longer allow men to have sex with a slave-woman, as Abraham did with Hagar. Our law is no longer based on the biblical teaching of wifely subordination, although many religious communities still teach wives to obey their husbands.
"The Christian value of condemning same-sex love is not a tradition of which Christians can be proud, which many Christians now recognize. In the 19th century, the churches were split over whether or not to allow slavery, as the Bible indeed does. Virtually all pro-slavery advocates appealed to the Bible in support of slavery. Today the crisis is over to whether to accept civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people. Many thoughtful citizens now recognize that it is not a good idea to base our legal institutions on ancient tribal and slave-holding values."
Bernadette Brooten
February 25, 2004