Marriage is, and always was, a political act

Marriage, of the official and blessed kind, always was political. For defenders of the restricted man-woman definition of marriage to accuse of political manipulation those who defend a wider definition that includes same-sex marriages is tantamount to conceding complete ignorance of the history and origins of the sacrament they feel so strongly about

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

The Christian institution of marriage, in its 450-year run, has finally come full circle. It was at the 28 th session of the Council of Trent when, on November 11 that year, lawmakers in that long-lasting totalitarian dictatorship known as the Holy Roman Empire released their legally-binding decisions about what marriage will be and who will have the right to it.

Today, lawmakers (in the Canadian part of what remains of the Holy Roman Empire anyway) are reopening the issues of what marriage is and who can have the right to it, having been prompted to do so by judges who found laws banning marriage of same-sex couples unconstitutional. Opponents of same-sex marriage say it spells the end of the institution itself.

The Council of Trent report is a stark reminder of the deep and unwavering interest the state has always taken in the personal cohabitating lives of its citizens. Anyone who says the government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation is unaware of the long history of government having almost no other business besides that which was going on in the bedrooms.

It's important to remember that until the mid-19 th Century, and even continuing up to today in some places in limited fashion, the church and the state were one and the same entity. If there is any distinction to see between church and state up until recent times, it would only be to recognize the subordinate, handmaid position the state occupied relative to the real power vested in the church.

The English reversed the roles in the 17 th Century, so that the church became subordinate to the real power of the state, but did not untie the intimate knots between the two entities. Up until the late middle 20 th Century in places like Quebec and First Nations territories in Canada, and also in Anglican England, church and state were opposite sides of the same coin.

The special religiously-blessed marriage, as opposed to the ordinary common-law marriage, was invented by the church during proceedings of the Council of Trent in order to arm the church/state entity with the power to grab control of the comings and goings of its citizens and to equip the entity with a good tool for social control generally: the Council of Trent virtually outlawed, for the first time, sex outside marriage.

As all states and the institutions that serve them know, demographics are king. How many people are being born, when they are being born and where, and to whom they are being born and by whom raised and trained, are questions that go to the heart of what determines the relative power of a state, the wealth of its controlling elite, and where its greater or lesser future lies. Dictating who can have sex and when and with whom allows one to take firm control over demographics.

All states everywhere exact as much control and direction over their citizens' reproduction as they can because it is only in that demographic control that a state can ever hope to increase its power relative to other states or to non-state institutions. One could persuasively argue that the Christian Church was the demographic-controlling device invented by the Roman Empire to oversee the state's efforts to control and direct its citizens' reproduction. One could also persuasively argue that the state itself is the overall social controlling device invented by the elite to oversee their control over all of its citizens' activities.

The overall social-controlling apparatus of the state and the demographic-controlling apparatus of the church had evolved and grown over centuries to the point where the bureaucracy necessary to work the wide range of levers throughout the whole machine came to comprise a third of the entire economy of Western states by the mid 20 th Century. That is, about a third of the citizens came to be employed in the work of exacting social control over the other two thirds, and themselves, in the 1,500 years since the elites had their state co-opt the church into serving their social control agenda.

And then a funny thing happened. The citizens began to fight for, and win, degrees of self-government, exercised through the mechanisms of democracy: they rounded up select members of the elite and chopped their heads off. Those who lived acquiesced. Though one can argue whether citizens today enjoy a great measure of self-government, particularly over matters to do with social control, there is no disputing we have more self-government than anyone ever did before.

But one thing citizens nowhere did, after winning the power of the state from the clutches of the elite, was reduce the power of the state or withdraw the reach of its levers of social control. Nor did the citizens, in excising the church from the clutches of the state, reduce the state's demographic control. Instead, the new rulers—the people—simply took those powers that had been delegated to the church and handed them directly into the jaws of the state.

Now, with the dawn of democracy, it became the state that directly exercised undiminished social and demographic control over the citizenry. In place of religiously-blessed marriages came state marriage licenses.

The size of the state grew as a result of this consolidation and expansion of power: by the late 20 th Century, the expanding bureaucracy of the state necessary to run all these metamorphosizing social and demographic control programs, now including mandatory schooling, hospitals, insurance schemes, armies, police, and so on, came to comprise fully half of the national economies. It now takes one person for every citizen, plus themselves, to operate the vast machinations of state social control of the citizenry.

It was awesome power that the elites had created in their manufactured state and church, and they didn't hesitate to use it to generate social controls that served their purposes. The church invented the idea of religiously-blessed marriages in order to control when, where, and how often the citizens of the state would reproduce, and those citizens had been unwittingly directed to that task according to the elites' rising and falling needs for markets, for trained workers, and for soldiers willing to die to protect the elite's property.

But now, to a limited degree, it is no longer the elites' interests alone that dictate to what purposes the awesome powers of the state, now bulked up with what used to be the powers of the church, would be deployed to serve. There is some level of democracy now, and the citizens themselves have interests that they now expect to be served by the deployment of those same state powers.

It is highly ironic then for those in the ranks of the elite, those still in command of depleted churches, and those raised on the other, non-pointy side of state power, to complain that the people are improperly using the powers of the state to direct state and church institutions to serve their own interests, as they do when they insist the state and the churches must abide by same-sex marriages. It is ironic because the church and the state themselves were only invented by elites for the sake of catering to their own narrow self-serving interests.

It is the founding principle of democracy, not that state power should subside, but that state power should be seized by the people and redeployed to serve their interests, instead of the interests of that narrow band of elites who heretofore had selfishly served themselves, often to grotesque extent. There is therefore no moral foundation for any political position opposing the enactment of full rights to marriage in church and state for same sex couples. If the majority favour it, so be it.

****