Vermont Legalizes Pretend Marriage

The Vermont legislature has overridden a veto by their governor, thereby legalizing pretend marriage for couples of indeterminate gender. The difficult thing is that the legislature, in their zeal, are forcing all the residents of that state to pretend along with them. It will be illegal, I suppose, for a Vermonter to say out loud that these "marriages" are false, or to refuse in any way to treat them as if they were real.

Again, Chesterton was prescient on the point;

"Two different standards will appear in ordinary morality, and even in ordinary society. Instead of the old social distinction between those who are married and those who are unmarried, there will be a distinction between those who are married and those who are really married."

I don't doubt that Christians and others who refuse to join these poor souls in their delusion will start to see jail time, eventually.

And speaking of marriage...

Newt Gingrich swam the Tiber recently, and became a Catholic.

I like Newt, and respect him. He is one of those (seemingly few) people on the national stage who can give a reasoned defense of what he believes. If he were on the way out to grab the morning paper and got collared by a reporter, he could stand there in his robe and slippers and give a pretty accurate account of the historical and philosophical underpinnings of the founding of the United States and of the Constitution, and could go on to argue against abortion and euthanasia based on first principles and natural law. I don't think Sarah Palin could pull that off.

I would, therefore, like to welcome him more enthusiastically, but the fact that he is on his third marriage does give me pause. Not that I know anything of his personal history. It is not my job to say whether his current marriage is valid or not, I only know that this is the kind of thing that makes non-Catholics think of annullment as mere "Catholic Divorce", and that leads them to believe that, though the Church claims to stand for moral absolutes, all you have to do is wait a certain period of time, jump through some hoops and pay some fees and you can have a tribunal declare all your former marriages invalid. Even a number of Catholics are calling for some kind of intervention from the Vatican, hoping they will bring some pressure to bear on lax tribunals in Western countries.

It just that (*sigh*)... what are the odds that a man's third marriage turns out to be "the valid one"?

It might be argued that a youngster doesn't understand what married life is really going to be like, and therefore doesn't really understand all the implications of the vows he is making. But, if that is the case, who could ever make a valid marriage vow? No one ever knows what their marriage life is going to be like in five years... does that invalidate their vow? The whole point of the vow is to commit to difficulties you can't foresee and don't understand. Anyone of normal intelligence knows when they marry that they are promising to stick with their mate no matter what, through good and bad times, until death. If such a vow can't be truly made with some substantial degree of ignorant and even naive optimism, it can't be made at all.

I certainly didn't understand, at the age of twenty-one, what my marriage would look like five or ten or twenty years down the road. It may be that some say the words of the vow with really no concept at all of what they mean, but the words of the vow are few, which means that they are powerful. I don't see how it could easily be claimed that great numbers of people simply miss their meaning altogether.

It might be, I suppose, that huge numbers of people have no concept of what a vow really is, and how important it is. It may be that the word "vow" has no meaning in modern life. Everything is a "contract", now, and that kind of thing is for the lawyers to work out. Nobody can be held to anything - especially something hard - just because they promised they would do it, once. That kind of fastidiousness about "honoring your word" is for suckers.

Please understand, I don't particularly want to throw stones at Newt Gingrich or his marriage history, of which I am wholly ignorant. But generally, people can be scandalized by this kind of thing. It scandalizes, perhaps especially, those outside the Church... like Rod Dreher and Christopher Buckley.

Comments

[Del]

Vermont and Iowa. I'm crushed. These are places where normal people live.

It is hard, being Catholic and watching our nation's morality die.
It is hard, being Chestertonian and watching our nation's common sense die.

I suppose we can hope that someday Catholic missionaries will enter America, and be surprised to find a remnant of faithful Christians.

Concerning Newt... well, "Praise the Lord!" and "Welcome Home!"

Newt's marriage #2 was annulled easily; she had been married to another prior to Newt.

Given the world's frivolous attitude toward marriage and divorce, it will be rare for any convert to enter the Church with a clean history of marital bonds.

[Foxfier]

Maybe if you consider the damage done to marriage in the light of the damage done to the knowledge of the biological species of an unborn child?

I've had several folks-- intelligent ones-- insist that unborn children aren't biologically human. They just... blank on it.

[J.R. Stoodley]

"These are places where normal people live."

I have to disagree when it comes to Vermont, by my experience. Folk are queer up there, in the hobbitish sense of the word I mean, ha ha.

This is why New York needs to live up to its title of Empire State and reclaim that rebel territory. I've been advocating this for years. Now I'm justified: the Green Mountain renegades have proven themselves incapable of responsible self-governance.

Just kidding, obviously. Actually I'm quite afraid New York will be among the next states to fall. Honestly, I'm a little surprised we've held out this long.

[Sleeping Beastly]

I think you're absolutely correct that people tend not to think of vows as meaning anything much anymore. If promises can't be enforced, then they aren't terribly relevant to a lot of modern-day Americans. It's a self-perpetuating problem, too. Kids see the way adults marry, divorce, remarry, philander, abandon spouses, cohabitate, and blend families... Is it any wonder that so many of us grew up thinking that all domestic situations are fluid?

It comes of thinking of people as interchangeable pieces. People trade in their friends and associates when it's convenient, so why not spouses too? When the primary good is the gratification of one's desires, what is there to be gained by accepting artificial limits like vows and promises?