The relentless rage in France over marriage equality deserves a much broader conversation than just gay rights. After all, the last global crisis in Christian unity was also precipitated by a furious disagreement over marriage. There is likely much to learn from this parallel. Oddly, we rarely discuss that profound parallel. I suggest that this is because the truth of marriage equality is too unnerving to face head on.
In both cases, King Henry and Anne or Sir Elton and David, the issue, of course, has nothing to do with marriage or sexual orientation.
Henry's decision to redefine the tradition of Christian marriage in the name of love, politics and human rights must contain lessons for today.
When Henry divorced Catherine in 1533, he destabilized an ancient tradition of forging mostly unshakeable political, financial and dynastic alliances through the "divine" union of man and woman.
From that divine and supposed eternal contract between two would come one, mostly in the form of a male heir. Catholic marriage united nations and ended wars, under centralized Roman rule called divine but obviously man-made.
Of course, despite Henry's Christian marriage revolution, marriages of political and financial convenience continued, even through today as a means to unite nations, empires and bank accounts. Princes and Princesses, Queens and Kings, Rockefellers and Kennedys.
What did change, however, was the influence of organized religion. I think it would be overstating to claim that Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn gave birth to the modern secular humanist nation; perhaps it was more a symptom or manifestation of the so-called Renaissance and emergence of science over faith. But Henry's serial weddings most certainly, like nothing else, focused painful public attention on the fading power and influence of the Vatican and of organized religion overall.
So this leads me to think and suggest that as it was during the birth of the Protestant Reformation, the current marriage revolution is also a symptom and a manifestation of another intellectual, legal and cultural revolution, this time on an even greater scale. Gay marriage is part of a new enlightenment, the birth of a world in which each individual human being is empowered and honored as a whole.
Marriage equality speaks to a radical new world where laws are determined by human rights, not by autocratic institutions built on coercion, greed and superstition, a world where human rights are universal, not relative according to the beliefs of a Priest, an Imam or a megalomaniacal politician.
Those who protest comparisons between gay rights and the black civil rights movement may actually be correct. The black civil rights movement was intended to end the vestiges of a monstrous and truly evil institution; the gay rights movement and the struggle for marriage equality is something much more.
The global violence against gay men and women is easy to understand. Our freedom and equality as fully realized human beings completely invalidates the centralized authority of nations throughout the Middle East and Africa. Human love and human worth are self-evident and not subject to the delusions of a Pope, a Sheik, an Ayatollah or the ignorant and loathsome ravings of a Michele Bachmann or Pat Robertson.
Marriage equality leads the way to a radical new humanist civilization where law is defined by what is morally right, not by what is politically expedient and not by a belief system that divides humans into believers and non-believers.
Comments