Defining Marriage Miscellanea

Expired Content: I may no longer hold the views espoused in this post. As a matter of integrity this link remains alive, but time has passed and my thoughts on this subject may have developed significantly.

Peter Ould takes a look at the liturgy used at the recent marriage of lesbian priests in Masachusetts and concludes:

In some senses there is nothing remarkable about this liturgy and that is what makes it so significant. To all intents and purposes it is a normal marriage service with adaptions for the presence of same-sex spouses. The area where significant theological innovation has occured is the re-interpretation of Ephesians 5 and the removal of references to divine intent for procreation. Putting these aside, it is very clear that TEC has now completed the circle it began to draw over the past decade or so – a Diocesan bishop has, in the diocesan cathedral, conducted a same-sex marriage that is a similar to the 1979 prayer book as to not matter except in the finer detail of the theology.

He also asks some ecclesio-political questions about this.

In considering the broader question:

Matthew Franck asks “What’s wrong with a prominent professor’s incestuous relationship with his daughter?” given the rhetoric used to promote the homosexual redefinition of marriage.    This is a similar argument to the question asked by Bishop John Harrower last November – “Why not a threesome?”   Josh Skeat references Bp. John’s post in his ongoing thread.

Stuart Schneiderman talks about the inherence of a “specific sexual act” and the “possibility of procreation” in the definition of marriage.  I’m not sure if this line of argument is that helpful as it reduces the innate value of post-menopausal marriage, or marriage in which there is known infertility.  The inherent balance of unity and diversity, similarity and distinctiveness, incorporated physically/biologically, is the better position to argue from and for.

image_pdfimage_print

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Defining Marriage Miscellanea by Will Briggs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.