When Marriage Means Nothing

I do not gloat over retired Episcopalian Bishop V. Gene Robinson’s announcement, nor I hope will any of us. Having endured and witnessed my own family’s trials and sufferings amidst divorce, I recognize that it is utterly impossible, and inhuman, to rejoice whenever two people come to a parting, whether it involves the end of a marriage or otherwise. I cannot condone the relationship Bishop Robinson was in, but my heart is not made of stone, and, so, naturally, I cannot help but feel pity for the sense of loss he and his former legal partner Mark Andrew naturally feel. Yet the sad reality is that retired Bishop Robinson’s kind of thinking about what marriage is exemplifies the perfect embodiment of the desacralization of society and of the world itself within the progressive worldview. This worldview does not entail merely the creation of a hitherto unrecognized form of marriage, but the desacralization of the very concept or idea itself into something that hardly resembles a marriage.

Robinson’s own words on his recent legal divorce from his male partner (legally his husband) speak volumes. His understanding of his now former gay union is, strikingly, no more or less profound than his retroactive understanding of his earlier heterosexual one, when he was married to a woman with whom he had two children (Robinson had come out to his wife prior to their marriage, and they divorced in 1986, two years before he entered into a formal relationship with his now ex-husband). In how Robinson has referred to both his unions– one heterosexual, the other homosexual — it is clear that they were primarily contractual negotiations to him, in which he felt love and affection, but no sense of obligation to lifelong commitment or a mutual transformative growing in holiness.