On De Facto Unions And Same Sex Marriage

The fifth Westchester Scholars Forum devoted itself to the issue of de facto unions and same sex marriage. Specifically, it sought to deliberate about how best to promote the natural institution of marriage in light of contemporary culture's ever thinning understanding of it.

The Forum began by assessing the diminished understanding and practice of marriage in today's society. There was a general recognition of the grave condition into which the institution has fallen, in as much as it was generally uncontested among the Forum participants that American society has by and large lost sight of the essential nature of the institution. Specifically, there is almost no cultural memory that a marriage vow is perpetually binding upon a spouse and hence that remarriage after civil divorce is not a possibility. The dominant social outlook, even among most conservative Protestants, is that remarriage is always an option. Secondly, there has been a complete erosion in understanding that marriage is, of its very nature, intrinsically ordered toward procreation. Americans almost universally look upon children as something to be chosen after, and in addition to, marriage, as a good extrinsic to the marriage itself. They do not see begetting and raising a family as the reason why one gets married.

What all of this means is that "marriage" in America has been reduced to a non-binding contract between two selves who seek a formal, but entirely dissolvable, expression of their mutual delight in one another. The inexorable logic of this socially dominant understanding is that two people of the same gender could equally well fit this definition. The still dominant custom of thinking of marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman is a healthy albeit eroding vestige of a view of marriage that no longer characterizes American sensibilities.

This makes the question of what to do positively to promote the natural institution of marriage in contemporary culture a daunting one. The difficulty of the issue was not lost upon the participants of the Forum, who were generally not optimistic about the looming cultural and legislative battles surrounding same-sex unions. A number of avenues of reflection were traversed in the pursuit of insight into how best to renew the institution of marriage. There was, for example, a discussion about what the Catholic Church could do internally to reform and renew the preparation it offers for the sacrament of matrimony, including a possible revision of Canon Law. Following upon this, there was a lengthy and stimulating conversation about what is necessary for consenting to enter into a valid marriage. Finally, strategies were debated for diminishing the harmful impact of recent court decisions dictating the establishment of parity in civil law between heterosexual and homosexual couples who seek formal recognition of their union.