I went to a wedding about a month ago, of two old friends from my college days. It wasn’t a traditional liturgy by any stretch of the imagination; rather, the spirit of Vatican II was readily apparent in everything from the guitar music to the glass chalice to the extraordinary ministers to the audience-participatory blessing. (Also an oddity I had never seen before, wherein the groom appeared to be escorted in by a cadre of altar girls.) It takes a pretty powerful reason to get me to a Mass like that. But strangely, as occasionally happens to me in liturgies of this kind, the contrast between the trappings and the Sacrament itself powerfully intensified the poignancy of the real event in my mind. I found myself praying with a sort of furious urgency, for the couple, for the marriage, for the forging of a family bound together by peace and grace and truth. I asked all my favorite saints to pray for them, and begged the Blessed Mother and St. Joseph to stand as models to them. So great was the intensity of this effort that even the schmaltzy guitar music (which rarely fails to break my concentration) passed over me unheeded.

In part, the rush of emotion no doubt related to the very real affection that I feel towards the bridal couple and some of the gathered guests — affection that nonetheless has a sad side, recognizing the painfully few points of contact that I have with these old friends. Even in college we never agreed on much, but with my conversion the gap widened considerably more. Caring about a person, and desiring their good, but realizing that you can play no active or influential role in bringing it about, inspires particular feelings of forlornness or helplessness. For me, those tend to overflow into prayers.

A lesser contributing factor, I expect, was the fact that the couple themselves looked the part so perfectly. Though of course you never say so, it’s rare that a couple actually matches the picture-perfect bridal couple look; perhaps the groom is too baby-faced, or the bride too tall or fat, or perhaps they’ve simply chosen clothes that are in no way flattering to them (which seems to happen surprisingly often. I suppose, in the excitement of anticipating the magical day, people forget that their least flattering physical characteristics will still be there.) It isn’t that such things are really of great importance, but still one cannot but appreciate the elegance of the occasional couple that simply looks wonderful together. It brings flooding to mind all the things symbolized in the union of man and woman — on a pagan level, the joining of Mother Earth and Father Sky, and then for the Christians, of Christ and His bride. I longed to pluck the pair of them out of that amorphous 1970’s-style church and set them down in a Gothic cathedral with a towering high altar behind, the perfect setting for such an attractive pair. Obviously this was a somewhat patronizing wish, it being something the couple themselves presumably did not want. Couldn’t stop me from wanting it for them.

Perhaps the one detail that I really liked in the wedding itself was the Old Testament reading, which was taken from the Book of Tobit, in the famous passage in which Tobit and his new bride, having only just been wed, use their first moments alone together to kneel in prayer. I wondered how many of those present knew the context — that Sarah’s first seven husbands had been killed on the wedding night by Ashmodai, the demon of lust, before the marriages had been consummated. We can be sure, then, that this particular prayer was not just a mumbled formality. They knew that both their marriage and their lives hung in the balance in that moment; one can safely assume that the prayer was heartfelt. I remember the first time I read the story, some years ago when marriage was still a pretty a distant possibility for me personally. It was not long after the divorce of a friend’s parents, and I reflected then how good it would be if spouses were always so aware when their marriage hangs in the balance. Much loneliness and pain might be averted, surely, if we could all strive to protect our marriages through fervent prayer. (I then resolved that on my wedding night, should there be one, my husband and I would begin our married life just as Sarah and Tobit did… a resolution that the Doctor and I kept, though probably not with quite the same fervor as those two!)

On hearing the passage again, that old reflection came back to me, but this time with a further thought; not only marriages, individually, but marriage as a whole stands at a perilous point in our time. Indeed, this story really ought to get more attention than it does these days, particularly because Ashmodai was associated, not only with lust in general, but in particular with homoerotic desire. (The Biblical text does not discuss this, but perhaps it is not coincidental that it was always the groom who was taken by the demon.) This is a connection that I’m quite certain the bridal couple did not intend, and perhaps nobody but me made it, but there is something disturbingly current in that image — a newly wed couple kneeling together, praying that their union should be delivered from the ravages of homosexual lust.

My parents live in California, so I hear a fair amount from them about the furor surrounding Proposition 8 (which would outlaw same-sex marriage in the state.) Though certainly they’ve always held marriage and family to be things of great importance, I’ve been a little surprised to see my parents becoming so invested in the political aspect of it (not usual for them.) My father actually helped with a campaign to encourage voting and to pass out literature supporting the proposition — my whole life I can’t recall him ever doing anything like that. My mother, in particular, argues with conviction that privileging traditional marriage is necessary for the welfare of children, and I’m certainly on board with that argument as far as it goes.

For me, though, sadness about what’s happened to marriage begins before we even get to the children. As vitally important as that aspect may be, for me it all starts here, at the altar, where vows are exchanged and hands joined, where a man gives himself wholly to a woman and a woman to a man. It begins in that mysterious moment when Earth meets Sky, when Christ meets Church, when two tiny individual lives are suddenly swept up into something infinitely larger than themselves and bound together body and soul with an unbreakable bond. Catholicism is all about coming to appreciate how this can happen (as it does not only in marriage, but in the other Sacraments, in sacramentals, in blessed objects, and so forth); staggering mystical forces and perfectly mundane earthly activities are fused together into a beautiful whole. Neither obliterates the other, and thus the sublime becomes plain and tangible while at the same time the mundane is elevated to have cosmic significance. Of course the most sublime example is in the Blessed Sacrament itself, when God is placed on our tongues in the form of bread. But marriage is also a beautiful illustration of this kind of mystery. The very ordinariness of the formal proceedings (after all, how many weddings do we attend in our lifetimes?) provides a bridge to help us grasp the importance of what has been accomplished there. Meanwhile, a stunning piece of a grand cosmic drama is presented before us in the perfectly familiar form of a man and a woman and a priest.

It isn’t just that a homosexual marriage can never be this momentous thing that I’ve tried in clumsy words to describe. If that were the only problem then, as liberals continually argue, there couldn’t be “much harm” in allowing the really determined to go through with it anyway. The Doctor and I could still have had our Tridentine Nuptial Mass even if a pair of lesbians had been staging a very different sort of event a mile away. (Even that could change if things progress to the point where the Church can be prosecuted for refusing to join homosexual couples. But let’s stay away from that slippery slope argument and suppose for now that such things will never happen.) Why does marriage have to mean to everyone what it means to me?

Perhaps the best way to begin answering that question is to ask: what else could it be? Of course certain details of the marriage ceremony and surrounding customs will change from place to place and from culture to culture. But essentially, I take marriage to be a complete act of self-giving, a fulfillment of the innate human desire to be joined to someone of a different but complimentary nature, and at the same time an earthly representation of that great mystical joining of goods that for Christians is best seen in Christ and Church. Not everyone shares this view. But if it isn’t what I say, what other options are on the table? We could describe the legal arrangement, but no sensible person thinks that marriage is created by law; presumably our legal system is tracking some other reality and giving it privileged status because it recognizes it as something to be encouraged and preserved. So, apart from the Catholic understanding (shared in some imperfect way, I think, by most other religions and historically by most other cultures), what could that thing be?

Immanuel Kant gives us an alternative definition. According to Kant, marriage is a contract between two people for the mutual use of one another’s sexual organs. A delightful suggestion, no? As hilarious as it is distasteful. For those who don’t know, Kant was not a funny man — he is not even close to joking here. And as so often happens, he proves to be the quintessential modern, because here he presents to us, in all its undisguised horribleness, modern marriage. Herculean efforts have been made to dress this monster up as something more attractive, but at the end of the day, I contend that the only intelligible alternative to the sort of view I’ve described (let’s call it the normative model) is Kant’s.

Let’s get to the most obvious objection first. Marriage (yes, even gay marriage) is going to involve a lot more than sex. Some will immediately want to say that it involves love, but let’s set that aside for the moment, not because love is unimportant to marriage (quite the contrary, it is absolutely central) but because it needs to be an endpoint rather than a beginning for a discussion. None of us understands fully what love is, and marital love is far from the easiest kind to grasp; citing love as a necessary component for a happy marriage is rather like citing wisdom as a necessary component of a great university. True, but not helpful when you’re trying to figure out the nuts and bolts.

What is clear, though, is that virtually all modern marriages will involve lots of things apart from the sex. There will be shared meals and shared holidays, intimate conversations and memorable outings, mutual interests and mutual support given in hard times. There will be mundane things like division of chores and delightful things like laughter and sympathy and the warm feeling of being valued and accepted. There will be all the domestic details of setting up a household, picking curtains, coordinating schedules, feeding pets. Of course homosexual relationships can include all these things just like heterosexual ones, and it would be most unjust to suppose erotic pleasure is the only thing keeping such relationships going. The very fact that homosexuals clamor for marriage speaks to the wrongness of that assessment.

It is important to note, however, that none of these goods that I have named can be what makes a marriage. None of them is in any way exclusive to that sort of relationship. You can pick curtains with your college roommate. You can go to the movies with a brother or sister. Holidays and hard times are weathered together with family, and close friends can engage in intimate conversation. At the same time, the lack of any one particular thing on this list would not be enough to destroy a marriage — are couples who never go out together, or who don’t have pets or celebrate holidays, or who never go through any particularly hard times, not married? Clearly that would be ridiculous. So even though it may seem that the delightful things I have listed in the paragraph above are the “real meat” of a marriage, they are neither necessary nor sufficient (as we philosophers like to say) to make one.

What is unique to the marital relationship? Well, most obviously, sex. Indeed, if we must define marriage in terms of “things you can do with a spouse that you can’t do with anybody else,” pretty much the only things you can come up with will relate to sex in some way, whether as preparatory (e.g. kissing) or as a natural result (e.g. children). So, we have a choice. We can build up an account of the significance of sex that puts it in a much larger context, showing how sex, when properly ordered, simply does symbolize and sustain a particular, special sort of relationship that fulfills some greater intrinsic human need. Thus, the sex may be per se the only activity that sets marriage clearly apart from other human bonds, but it’s really just the most tangible part of a more complete bond that affects and orders every part of the person. To get a view like that off the ground, you’re going to have to talk about human nature and proper human ends and all those good Aristotelian ideas… which will going to move you steadily in the direction of the normative view. And those are exactly the sorts of claims that the moderns want to strip away, and that proponents of homosexual marriage (insofar as they’re aware of them) actively ridicule.

So we can take things in the other direction. Let the sex itself be the whole and complete defining feature of marriage. This leaves us with Kant: marriage is a contract between two people for the mutual use of one another’s sexual organs. If there is also sympathy and laughter and mutual respect and shared Thanksgiving turkeys, that’s great. But at its core, marriage will be a contract involving sex, no different in kind really from the deal struck between a prostitute and her patron, though of course the marriage tends to last longer. Fancy trappings aside, this is what the moderns are left with when it comes to marriage, and I have yet to find any defender of homosexual marriage who is able to wiggle out of this trap.

So the problem isn’t just that homosexual marriage can never really be marriage as I understand it, and can only be this distasteful thing that I have briefly described. Maybe the people who seek out such “marriages” are far enough off track already that giving legal sanction to their union won’t do much further damage. But even if that’s so, the harms are still very real, because far more people than actually engage in this kind of “marriage” will come to think of it as a perfectly representative example of what marriage can be. And this in turn will serve as a very real barrier to any appreciation of that deeper, more mysterious and infinitely more beautiful possibility. In short, anybody who thinks of homosexual marriage as a legitimate possibility will necessarily have a gravely deficient understanding of what marriage is. And inevitably this will take a toll on heterosexual marriage as well.

Obviously I’ve outlined this position only very briefly; one of the disadvantages of the normative view is that it requires the laying of a lot of groundwork before it becomes really clear and cohesive. Modernist interlocutors are rarely patient enough for all of that. Still, I write this post in part to suggest that it may not always be best to resort to the “good of the children” argument in defending marriage. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that argument, and insofar as it’s convincing some people, say, to vote for Proposition 8, that’s great. But at the point at which this is the pillar of the conservative defense, we’re bailing water from a sinking lifeboat. People who don’t really appreciate the positive value of marriage are not forever going to accept that legally sanctioned homosexual unions are anything very bad. Ultimately, people need to be brought to understand that heterosexual marriage doesn’t just happen to provide the best environment for raising children; it provides the best environment because it is importantly in harmony with deep truths about human nature. And because it is supported by a spiritual (and for Christians, sacramental) bond infinitely more powerful than the hunger of lust.