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March was a roller coaster for proud partisans of heterosexual marriage. Voters in California fought an uphill battle but handily passed Proposition 22, defining marriage as between a man and a woman (CT, April 3, p. 15). They thus protected themselves from having to recognize pseudomarriages which other states (such as Vermont) might create between same-sex couples.

In a breathtaking plunge a few days later, Vermont's House of Representatives passed a bill creating the legal framework for "civil unions" between same- sex couples.

The Vermont lawmakers and the California voters were trying to escape the same threat: judicial activism and gay-rights activists working together to empty marriage of its traditional meaning. Indeed, the Vermont lawmakers created their "civil unions" because that state's Supreme Court had given them little choice: either swing wide the door of matrimony for homosexual couples or manufacture a parallel institution to give them the economic and social benefits enjoyed by married heterosexual couples.

Unfortunately, the meaning of marriage has already changed fundamentally in our own era, leaving us with an institution that resembles a caffeine-free diet cola: all synthetic substitutions and no substance. The proposed abandonment of heterosexuality as a key ingredient of marriage is only the latest "improvement" on Marriage Classic.

At its best, the church has understood marriage as a divine gift for the blessing of believers and unbelievers alike in the context of a well-ordered society. Such was not always the case: the church's definition has shifted, sometimes radically, over the centuries. (John Witte's 1997 book, From Sacrament to Contract, is an excellent survey of those changes.)

At times the church treated marriage as second-rate, keeping the married from sexual sin, but not contributing positively to their virtue. It considered celibate contemplation as the higher estate. And for centuries, the church countenanced private—even secret-- marriage contracts.

But as the Protestant Reformers moved marriage out of the sacred sphere and into the divinely ordained civil sphere, they began to unpack marriage in its fullness: a divine gift for mutual support and fulfillment of the couple, a holy protection of the individual from sexual sin, a microcosm of society in which the future members of society were nurtured and formed. Viewed thus, marriage served the good of society, of church, of family, of the couple, and of the individual. Each party had a stake in the institution. No longer was marriage essentially a private affair. Both marriages and divorces now had to be public events, with the couple, the magistrate, the minister, and God each playing a part in forming this covenant relationship.

With the Enlightenment, all of this began to change. This reason-minded model reduced a social institution to a narrowed focus: two individuals and their mutual contract to enter an intimate relationship. Over the last three decades, the increasing privatization of marriage has become almost absolute: neither the community nor the paterfamilias (does such exist anymore?) has any say in the formation or dissolution of a marriage. What was a community affair for over 400 years has devolved into just one more exercise of personal choice—the essence of both the modern worldview and market economics.

In an amusing but sad essay in The New York Times Magazine, Jack Hitt proclaims he is not afraid of gay folks so much as he fears Adam Smith. Says Hitt: "What is happening to marriage is the culmination of the market's radical reshaping of the culture at large." Just as the invisible hand has transformed our once altruistic hospitals into profit-driven healthcare delivery systems, marriage is now shaped by market forces. Once-rare prenuptial agreements are now routine. Conservatives fight to abolish the marriage-penalty tax.

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April 24 2000, Vol. 44, No. 5