Intimate Unions: Rites: Scots couple eschew state-ceremony for Humanist wedding

A new wrinkle emerged in the range of developments around intimate unions of couples in society and the state's relationship to them. The state's relationship to intimate unions has become increasingly dominant since the Enlightenment when the state was authorized by several schools of Humanism (socialism, communism, fascism, nazi-ism) to conduct a grand takeover of authority generally and also inr regard to who gets married and how. In the end, of course, the intimate union of any two persons is not a state-originated function (yes, you can argue the opposite in regard to royal marriages where the entire populaton of the king/queendoms had a stake in the whom and the howm of the topmost nuptials).

The wrinkle emerged in the news fascinatingly from Scotland, where a couple were married by one of 12 officers designated for the purpose of performing marriages with the state's legalization and recognition the non-state action. In this first and exemplary case, the recognition of the couples intimate union as a marriage was fully in accord with the tradtional legal definition of 1woman1man. Thus, it was a truly salutary development when, after 15 years of legal battle the Humanist Society of Scotland was at last "granted the right to legally conduct marriages by the country's registrar general starting June 1. Previously, wedding ceremonies had to be conducted by a religious minister or a civil registrar." Scotland had finally found its way to an authentic religious pluralism, even in the case of religion that denies being a religion because it does not believe in God the Creator (but, of course, this self-denial of Humanism as to being a religion is a Western pathology that Buddhism, being simillarly an atheism, long ago showed for what it is, a dodge. Most Buddhist denominations are atheist as to a Creator God, while some allow their adherents much play with "little gods" enshrouded in ancient folkloric supersitution.

Granting the right to celbrate rites of marriage to secularist atheist Humanists which in that act function as religions while maintaining a specious rhetoric to the contrary, is really the only thing the Scottish political entity could do. We congratulate them for acceding to the campaign of this one Humanist denomination, and we congratulate the HSS for pursuing its good fite over the 15 years required to win it in a country where you could be put death as late as the Nineteenth Century for publically stating there is no God (a horrible and intellectually indefensible thing to say, mind you, but ... death penalty for that?). Neither the state nor the religion (thru its organized denomination/s like HHS) create intimate unions; these are created by both members of any paticular pair, the couple, in their mutual development into a micro-social sphere around their growing depth of intimacy with one another.

But, just as the churches, the synagogues, and the mosques have their own denominational and religious interests for celebrating rites of recognition of intimate unions, especially marriages meeting the traditional legal definition of 1woman1man, so does the state have its own interests in delegating its authority to ministers of religion/religionlike authorities and institutions it certifies for that purpose. The juncture of the spheres is significant: the couple who constitute the intimate union, the religious institution thru a minister or celebrant, and the state thru its function of state-recognition of the co-action of the previous two but especially the first, and also the state's function of legitimation whereby it says that this couple are not only married but are married in a way we can discern and protect and reinforce and offer ajducation when its worldly affairs are become tangled beyond the ability of the pair to sort out solely among themselves, especially in cases of divorce which was not part of their original intention.

One wag told me recently that once upon a time marriage stood in its own right as a free choice of the couple who wanted to complete their pairing in a way their families would find honourable (not quite true ... but). Then marriage got absorbed into the church - true enuff. It happened for the first time known, in Spain in the 800s when the first wedding took place on the outdoor steps of a large church in town. Only later was the ceremony moved inside, and then became part of a eucharist-centered rite (the marriage rite being absorbed into a larger rite). Only as this process got rolling and the growth and development of Sacramental Theology took note of it, was marriage as an act of the laity - not so much as a freely-choosing couple, but as an economic arrangement of the two parental families which affected their clan or clans (making an inter-clan marriage more significant and potentially troublesome than an intra-clan marriage) - displaced. For a while the Church reigned supreme over marriage in the Western orbit of Christendom.

Later, the state displaced the churches in many jurisdictions. Civil marriages were introduced. But the theme of free-choice marriage persisted for many Christians and for many Humanists allike, where the depth of intmacy developed by the couple was the key normative feature altho sentimentalized by the culture of romantic love with ambiguous results. Today, however, the state's interests predominate and have given us the grey phenomenon of the "civil marriage" - surely, an oxymoron or conundrum, if there ever was one. A civil marriage implies that there is no intermediating community between the state and the couple which provides a warm and welcoming general environment for that particular intimate union, so the marriage itself has a better chance to become what it is supposed to be, so that it is not stranded amidst fee-taking document-stamping bureaucrats of the state appartus in a coupled aloneness, cut off from families and a nurturing institution like a church. But until now, couples and families that were Humanist in conviction had no where to go outside the state's Marriage Bureau to get themselves processed into legal recognition. With a Humanist Society competent to designate certain of its members as qualified celebrants for weddings, the state can arrange an agreement whereby such celebrants include the government-required documentation as a mere detail of an over-all event in which a community of faith and moral teaching (tho not acknowledging a Creator God) can bring all three of the crucial spheres into the recognition and legitmation event.

The most important thing, however, is the action of the couple: they make their promises to one another, and they do so in ways where the word goes out to the community assembled under auspices of the celebrant and his/her denomination, and thru these latter together with the documents they prepare, the word goes out as well to the state.

The only thing that bothers me about civil marriage (which will be changed into civil union only, not intimate union recognized at all in the statist term, in many jurisdictions) is this: Will the state, the church, and the couple hold one another to promises of the intention of permanence and the exclusivity of the sharing of the deepest intimacy by the two members of the union? Or, are we to see this thin strong line of doctrine of the marriage vows removed, being replaced by the Brad Pitt / Tom Cruise doctrine that you stay married as long as it suits you, then you leave to find another skirt, paying whatever fees the state determines thru the legal professions' negotiations or lawsuits, with that hassling complication of the children you leave behind, after "divorce"?

It's too bad Jennifer Anniston and Nicole Kidman can't get together with other women treated in the same way as they have been, on the basis of the same 'promiscuous-marriage' doctrine to which most Humanist strait males ascribe, it would seem. Get together for a religious class-action by women against men who publicly teach this doctrine, in the name of whatever religion or religionlike ideology they mouth. It's a cruel doctrine, and it makes fools of whatever auspices they're married under, including those under civil unions officiated by state bureaucrats.

The promises necessary are: the intention of permanence of the intimate union; the exclusivity of the partner in the sphere of marriage, or other kind of intimate union. Divorce is not the issue. But teaching the trivialization of vows of intimate union are. The planned "promiscuous-marriage," oxymoronic as it is, also trivializes the community of faith Christian / Judaic / Muslim / Humanist that performed the ceremony and gathered the assemblage of famlily and friends. A Pitt/Cruise promiscuous-marriage also trivializes the state. It also trivializes the legitmate process of the state in divorce proceddings for those couples who have tried to fulfill and believe in and have promised "the intention of permanence." The state has an interest in stable marital relationships; the community of faith (even a godless one) has an interest in stable marital relationships; any children of the couple has an interested in stable marital relationships; and an aggreived partner who was lied-to at the time of marriage, by the offending partner, has an interest in a stable marital relationship; but divorce sometimes nevertheless and tragically, may be the only solution. More than that, there should be consequences for the Brad Pitts and Tom Cruises who spread this Humanist ethos gone ugly, like a dose of STD. If they profess to be Christians, they should be excommunicated, denounced by every public communications avenue open to Christian expression, for teaching this false "promiscuous-marriage" doctrine so grievously and so publically, and the shoulod be denied Holy Communion for this major offense against us all and God's Creation-order for marriage. - Owlb

Texts of Vows