Our Stories

Better to Marry?

by Dr. Mary E. Hunt

Del Martin, 82, and Phyllis Lyon, 79, married in San Francisco's City Hall on February 12, 2004. They became the first same-sex couple in the United States to have their marriage recognized legally by a government agency. They may also be the first to be divorced if the courageous decision by Mayor Gavin Newsom to grant marriage licenses to two partners of any gender constellation, rather than to a man and a woman, is overturned by the courts. After their fifty-one years of love and pioneering work together to make the world safe for lesbian/gay people, it is hard to imagine why anyone would deprive these good women of their desire to legalize their commitment. Ambivalent as I am on the whole question of marriage, I delight in the fact that they were first.

The San Francisco mayor's strategy of putting a human face on a social issue worked. In this case, it was two beautiful older women. Feminist filmmaker Joan E. Biren (JEB) made a marvelous documentary of their lives, "No Secret Anymore: The Times of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon." It premiered on the eve of their golden anniversary a short year ago when no one was talking about same-sex marriage as a done deal. Now it is, for better or for worse, even if couples will be divorced preemptively by the State of California.

Massachusetts seems headed in the same direction on even stronger legal footing. That state's high court made clear that "civil unions" are not "civil marriages" and that separate has never been equal in this country. Despite the risk of living up to its liberal reputation at time when one of its senators is a presidential contender, there is no putting the toothpaste back in the tube in Massachusetts. Some of the keenest legal minds in the nation are at work there on what promises to be another significant challenge to the hetero-only marriage laws.

It is hard to imagine, given all of the progress on same-sex issues, what life was like for Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon and their friends fifty years ago. I bow before their sheer courage to claim their love and their sanity at the same time. They insisted that they were entitled to full citizenship then as now, regardless of what people thought of their intimate lives. They wrote books (Lesbian/Woman, 1972), started organizations (Daughters of Bilitis, D.O.B., the first national lesbian organization), and worked on feminist issues such as violence against women.

Del and Phyllis were a family before anyone imagined what is now quite commonplace even if still debated. I am sure that many of the lesbian/gay couples who are rushing to wed have never heard of them. Such is the fate of pioneers. However, they certainly give marriage a better name than Britney Spears and her erstwhile husband did when they married for a day in Las Vegas.

President Bush's support of a constitutional amendment to codify discrimination against same-sex couples shows just how political the whole issue has become. Chances of such an amendment passing in the near future are slim. The fact that people would consider such a serious move attests to a fact that opponents are out of arguments.

Nonetheless, I think there are serious questions to ask about marriage that have been obscured in the scramble for civil rights for lesbian and gay people. These hard questions will surely be passed over as same-sex marriage heats into an important presidential election issue. However, it is important to think carefully even when the reflexive reaction of progressive religious people is to recognize social change as it unfolds before our eyes. With same-sex marriage we celebrate a rare and perhaps fleeting victory. Nonetheless, the role of theologians, and especially of feminist theologians, is to ask critical questions so that we generate thoughtful conversation to help shape what is emerging.

My view is that marriage ought to be available to any adult who wants to marry, but that marriage is not necessarily the best way to organize a society to optimize the common good. There are legal, religious and political issues at hand. I raise them here to start that conversation.

First, the 1000+ legal entitlements that go with marriage, including such important issues as hospital visitation, access to a spouse's health care plan, and inheritance mean that married people actually enjoy social privilege that single people do not. I wonder what justification can be offered for this. Surely no one thinks marriage guarantees social stability at a time when 50% of all marriages end in divorce. Protection for children is the old saw, but now many children live in unmarried families and many married people have no children so that won't do either.

I think it is time for a wholesale rethinking of marriage for everyone—straight and lesbian/gay alike. Then we can organize ourselves so that every adult designates who can visit her/him in the hospital, everyone has health care, not simply those with partners, because everyone has a body, and everyone designates heirs to whom they pass on their earthly goods. Radical notions, pie in the sky? Perhaps, but so was same-sex marriage not very long ago and look what has happened.

Second, the common religious question of the moment is whether religious officials can be forced to perform same-sex ceremonies against the teachings of their tradition. Of course they cannot be forced, offering religious institutions one more chance to discriminate "in good faith." However, I think this is an opportune time to raise a deeper question about the arrangement that makes religious officials agents of the state. How does this square with the cherished notion of separation of church and state when the state deputizes ministers of even the most marginal credentials to act on its behalf?

I favor what many other countries do, namely have civil marriages performed by government officials and leave religious groups to handle commitments as they wish with no legal bearing whatsoever. That would level several playing fields at once. It would make the default understanding of marriage a secular one. Romance aside, in fact, it is in the secular arena that marriage matters most: taxes, property and other fiduciary responsibilities. It would acknowledge growing religious pluralism by encouraging all groups to handle commitments according to their beliefs without privileging any group.

Third, the political implications of same-sex marriage are being touted by its opponents to herald the end of civilization as we know it, and by its proponents as ushering in a new era of equality and justice. I obviously agree with the proponents, but with a big caveat. Here is the problem: if same-sex couples cannot marry, we suffer discrimination; if we can, then soon we "must," with the result being yet more relationships under state control. While some consider this a small price to pay for justice, I see it a clever ploy on the part of conservatives to win both ways. Suffer discrimination or be coopted; pick your poison. I worry about what happens to those who choose to remain single, opt for community life, or live in other forms of unmarried relationships.

I worry about women, especially women with children, whose lives become more difficult, more marginal still with all the pro-marriage rhetoric. The Bush Administration's "Healthy Marriage" Initiative is a $1.5 billion effort to encourage, even coerce people to marry, heterosexually of course, as an antidote to poverty. That crass policy takes no account of many women's risk of domestic violence when they live with male partners to please the welfare system. The Administration passes over the fact that marriage helps economically only if one partner has more money than the other does, which is not often the case for most poor women and poor men. That such thinking is rampant in the society in which marriage, hetero or homo, is lauded gives me pause.

While we pop the champagne corks and congratulate the lawyers, I hope we will also make time to think and rethink what is at stake when one form of oppression falls. Without such care, I fear another form may simply take its place.

Credit: WATERwheel Vol. 16, 3

About Mary E. Hunt

Mary E. Hunt is a Catholic lesbian feminist theologian. She earned a doctorate at the Graduate Theological Union where she wrote one of the earliest works on feminist liberation theology. She also earned masters degrees at Harvard Divinity School and the Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley where she trained for priesthood.

Dr. Hunt has written a range of works on LGBT themes, including her book, Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship (Crossroad, 1991), in which she claims that friendship and not marriage is the most adequate relational paradigm for mature adults. She is on the editorial board of the journals Theology and Sexuality, Religion and Abuse, and Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. She is a contributor to many collections on sexuality including Catholicism and Sexual Diversity edited by Patricia Beattie Jung in which she wrote "Catholic Lesbian Feminist Theology," which she hopes will be a sketch for a portrait.

Mary Hunt is the co-founder and co-director, with her longtime partner liturgist and therapist Diann Neu, of WATER, the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual in Silver Spring, Maryland. WATER is a LGBT friendly organization that offers programs, projects and publications on feminist issues in religion.

In over two decades of work in the LGBT community, Mary Hunt has served on the boards of New Ways Ministry and the Religious Consultation on Homosexuality. She is a member of CLOUT (Christian Lesbians Out) and Dignity. She was a longtime supporter of the Conference for Catholic Lesbians. She has lectured at Kirkridge Conference Center's LGBT weekends, spoken at ILGO (International Lesbian Gay Organizations) and preached and lectured in scores of other settings. She currently serves on the national board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry at the Pacific School of Religion and is a member of the advisory board of the LGBT Religious Archives Network.

Mary Hunt and Diann Neu live in Silver Spring, Maryland with their daughter Catherine Fei Min Hunt-Neu.

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