State has no grounds to deny gay marriages

Some years ago I was approached by my niece to perform her wedding ceremony, a job I was happy to accept. But there was one condition of my participation. As a minister, I was thrilled to help them design a religious service around their covenant of commitment. However, I did not wish to be a functionary of the state, so I asked them to engage the appropriate governmental official to issue their marriage license.

I have stopped signing marriage licenses because I accept the constitutional separation of church and state, and if we are serious about the separation, there are no secular grounds for denying gay marriage.

Marriage benefits the state because two people are consenting to a legally binding contract that they will take responsibility with and for another. The state recognizes that because these two people are committing to each other, they are more likely to take care of each other in times of illness or financial difficulty. They are also more likely to work together on the difficult issues involved in child-rearing.

Stronger communities

This kind of bond and collaboration makes for stronger communities and decreases the burden on the state. That is why the government rewards married couples with access to more than 1,000 benefits, including tax relief and legal protections.

That so many people who oppose gay marriage say they are protecting the institution's "sanctity" exposes the solely religious underpinning of their argument. Sanctity implies holiness or sacredness, a sense of having been set apart in the eyes of God. I believe that weddings should be understood as sacred, but that's based on what happens between the couple and God and has nothing to do with the state. In my view, there was nothing sacred about Britney Spears' first 55-hour marriage even though it was as legal as one done between two people in front of God and a loving congregation. I do find sacred the decades-long commitments made by many gay and lesbian couples even without governmental recognition.

All the difference

The couples I have stood with -- gay and straight -- have all undertaken the religious covenant of marriage, it's just that some are also allowed to have their union given legal protection by the state. And that difference makes all the difference; the state is benefitting from the commitments of all these couples, but only giving recognition, rights, benefits and protections to one type.

We are supposed to be living in a country where we do not allow religious tenets to be imposed on others, and yet we are doing exactly that by denying marriage licenses to gay couples. There are tangible, painful problems that result from this denial. Using the few legal methods currently available (wills, POAs, health-care directives, etc.) does not protect gay couples from legal interference by family members who find their relationship objectionable, and often these legal actions come at times of crisis, such as the illness or death of one of the partners.

In a religiously diverse country, we rightly do not require religious tests for public office. Likewise, our government should not utilize a majority's religious test in setting public policy.

Various religious traditions already have very different ideas about how religious ceremonies are to occur, how they are designed, and who may participate. For example, a male-female couple, though allowed to be married by the state, may be rejected for marriage by a Catholic priest if they are not themselves Catholics in good standing. And that is the perfect right of the priest based on the teachings of his church, just as any religious body may make its own decisions about who may be wed, regardless of state law. Several denominations along with local congregations around the country currently allow same-sex wedding ceremonies, so the "religious" voice is not univocal.

By the way, had my niece been born in an earlier time, she could have had a religious ceremony performed only to be denied legal recognition of the relationship, not because she married someone of the same sex, but because he was of a different racial identity. Anti-miscegenation laws were often based on scripture and a misguided sense of what God regarded as "natural."

Thankfully those laws were overturned by courts, which saw through the specious arguments, in which a religious majority tried to impose its will on governmental policy.

■ The Rev. Susan Parker is an ordained Baptist minister currently serving as an associate pastor at Wake Forest Baptist Church in Winston Salem.