Sending my big hearty congrats to 2009′s dethroned Miss USA Carrie Prejean, who on Friday took advantage of the privilege she has reserved for herself, the right to publicly and expensively enter that once-sacramental, still-revered institution of marriage, declaring lifelong devotion her beloved, who conveniently happens to be of the opposite, and thus apparently more suitable, sex.
Curious what Miss Prejean thinks marriage should look like, since she posed herself as a defender (in favor of the “opposite” union rather than the “same-sex,” I believe was her wording), I browsed the sneak peeks posted on the celebrity website–yes, Miss Prejean has apparently earned celebrity status with those remarks last year. Now, admittedly, I’m looking at the wedding photos, and the wedding, as we all know, is not the most reliable indicator for one’s views about marriage, long-term, from the inside. But having been through this myself recently, I feel that the wedding is indeed a reflection of what the couple thinks marriage is and should be, and so with this in mind, I scrolled through the offerings on celebrity-gossip.net.
I was not surprised to find that the former Miss Prejean’s visions for herself as a bride included a long, ruffly white dress and lots of tulle crowning her head. I was also not surprised that she put her bridesmaids in red strapless gowns and her groom in a tux. I was surprised that they got married at a resort–the chapel of which, mind you, contains pews carved for a cathedral in Italy–and not a “real” church. If Genesis 1 and 2 are indeed the basis and the rule for Miss Prejean’s views about marriage, I suppose I assumed that the full regalia of the institutionalized church wedding would be her preference. And for all I know, the Capella Church is indeed trying to look a lot more like a chapel in Italy and not, say, Nevada.
Best wishes for the happy couple as they embark on the coupled voyage of marriage. As more and more couples ask the question “what is marriage for?” (as in this recent column on Yahoo! Shine), Miss Prejean answered this question for herself, in part, by identifying the gender of the participants. The attire, locale, and everything else I gathered about her wedding from my skimming only supports my impression that her beliefs about the “traditional” wedding align exactly with what we of the last few decades have been taught to understand is traditional about weddings, as put forth beautifully in Rebecca Mead’s One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding. A fabricated tulle dream, and we get to inhabit it for that one looong, perfect day.
Just for the record, I had the reading from Genesis included in my wedding ceremony. Which was held in a church, and officiated by a pastor who went to seminary and got ordained in all the usual ways. And even as I drafted the program, I struggled with myself, and considered having my reader announce (in part for the benefit of the sex-paired couples I love who were attending, in part just for me) that I selected this reading for its suggestion that God creates partners, selects two people to be together, and then gives them the container of committed partnership to hold them together. To me, those partners don’t necessarily have to be a reproductive pair; they just need to feel they belong together– to feel certain that this person has been chosen for them, brought into their life as a gift, and it is their charge to love and care for and protect this dear companion, for as long as their shared life lasts. That’s what I feel about my spouse, and that’s what I feel is encapsulated in this part of Genesis.
Sure, the couple there is a man and a woman. My spouse and I happen to be a man and a woman. And yes, I felt guilty about marrying my spouse in a state where same-sex couples are still only allowed “civil unions,” which friends of mine have done, to my great joy. Like Miss Prejean, I found that society at large, as well as our friends and family who came to celebrate with us, looked in favor on our union. So I had the big fluffy wedding and the white dress, too, feeling the pull of that created “tradition” as well as a more medieval tendency to see weddings as a combination of religious and social event.
My arguments for granting same-sex couples the right of marriage–if right it is–are nothing new. From the practical aspect: if we allow drive-thru weddings, quickie ceremonies in Nevada chapels, dissolutions and annulments and divorce, who are we kidding? That arrangement is not at all a sacred institution, much less a sacramental rite. (No offense to Britney Spears, but one of her former marriages is often invoked by me as an example of how matrimony is not, universally, held to be holy.) If any adult over 18 can whimsically decide to marry an 18+ year-old of the opposite sex on the promptings of booze and hilarity, what, exactly, is there left to defend? Is there some conspiracy to try to make marriage seem more appealing to the heteros by keeping a doorman on it, deciding who and who does not get through the door to the VIP lounge?
There are other practical reasons for endorsing same-sex marriage, in my opinion. More love in the world is more love, period. Honoring committed relationships matters on the individual level–look at how much energy we personally invest in our lifetime in locating, attracting, and maintaining mates–and the social level. Why did the Roman emperor Augustus reward Roman males who married and produced children? Because he, like Queen Victoria hundreds of years later, knew that marriage produces strong family units, and strong family units form an incredibly powerful foundation for a cohesive, ordered, productive, and peaceful society. So why not have more marriages, especially if there’s a chance that marriage is on the decline? Given what we can all plainly see about the destructive impacts of the kinds of isolated, loneliness, emotionally-deprived lifestyles enabled by a mobile population, depersonalized cities, and communications media, why oughtn’t we encourage people to pair up and support one another?
Not to mention that recent study in Pediatrics about the well-adjustedness of lesbian-parented kids, superior in ways even to that traditional hetero pairing that Genesis is, again, held up as the model for. (Or perhaps that supposed first family isn’t the best model anyway, considering the sibling rivalry and fratricide.) So that old argument that families take a mommy and a daddy starts to look like something constructed, too, rather than being eternally, universally true.
Miss Prejean’s personal feelings aside, since of course she is entitled to them, as well as the expression of them–just as she is entitled to express herself in shoots for Playboy, erotic sex tapes, books, and talk-show appearances, which makes one wonder just why she’s adopted the Focus on the Family rhetoric while at the same time she clearly celebrates her own sexuality–I still don’t see what the “defenders of marriage” feel will be taken away from them if the “homos” get the same rights as the “heteros.” Will there be less room in marriage if more people enter it? Will there be less love to go round? I’ve been browsing around a newly-discovered resource, the Ruth Institute (which has a response to that study) and I still haven’t pinned down the precise reasons for insistence on “one man, one woman.” The Book, to me, is an excuse, not a reason. Time to do a little more research here.
And in the meantime, let’s hope that the brand-new Mr. and Mrs. Kyle Boller are enjoying their honeymoon, and if any filming is done or provocative pictures get taken, the happy pair are the ones taking them.