One of my facebook buddies (actually one of our Ruth Institute alumni) is going back and forth about my post on the Washington Archdiocese from a couple of days ago. I posted a reply to them, but thought regular ruth readers might be interested in this issue.
Here is the quote from my original post:
“According to the Washington Post, at the end of civil marriage ceremonies judges will say ‘I now pronounce you legally married,’ unless the marrying couple suggests something different.”
People, both on this blog, and over on the facebook page, seem to be interpreting this as an issue about religious liberty. But I’ll tell you what bothers me about this: the judge is saying “legally married,” in order to avoid saying, “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” This has been the customary formula, for civil and religious ceremonies alike. This issue has nothing fundamentally to do with the distinction between religious marriage and civil marriage.
My objection is that the state is requiring all of us to abandon all of our gendered language. No more bride and groom, no more husband and wife. Only Progenitor A and Progenitor B instead of Mother and Father. The state is taking control of the language, which is another way of taking control of our thought. I don’t like that, on principle, the principle that I get to think for myself. I don’t think that is a particularly a religious principle.
We are being steered into believing that we should think of ourselves as generic humans, rather than as men and women. Just one problem: there are no generic humans. There are only men and women, girls and boys. Male and female are two different but complementary ways of being human. Losing gender is not a small loss. I don’t think this is a distinctively religious principle, although most of the traditional religions would affirm it in some form or fashion. I think that driving the idea of sexual differentiation from our minds is dehumanizing to us all. I think it is quite impossible to accomplish this goal, without an enormous amount of state effort, and of human suffering. Our actual identity, that of a gendered being, either male or female, is compromised. Our ability to be in the world as we really are, namely as men or women, is being impaired by the state’s demand that we think of ourselves as generic humans, “spouses” not “wives” or “husbands,” “parents,” not “mothers” or “fathers.”
That is why I’m against the state take-over of the language. If only religious people can figure this out, so much the worse for the non-religious.