Are AFF roundtables on marriage outdated?

Monday, cigarette #3

When we marry, the choice is voluntary, but the duties are not a matter of choice. Edmund Burke

I had been planning to go to the AFF roundtable "Is Marriage Outdated?" on a swing through DC, but Mike Gravel rescheduled his YPU appearance at the last minute. Lucky for me, AFF has posted an audio recording of the whole thing.

James Poulos, riding high from the very fun phrase "this world, where you must plant your feet firmly on your own shoulders," delivers this about twenty minutes in:

Marriage is outdated if we decide that marriage is all about us... The authority of shared spousal agreement is only partial. Marriage is the willing subjection of both spouses to an authority outside them both... So, we can realize how gay marriage doesn't necessarily threaten the authority of all marriage. It only does so if gay marriage isn't sacred or isn't a union. As people like Andrew Sullivan show, a vocal number of would-be gay spouses do want unions, and many of them do think that gay unions are just as sacred as straight ones. Gay marriage is controversial because large numbers of Americans think homosexuality is not sacred, and that really is the deciding issue.

This is only true if involvement in the sacred is something we can just decide. James is right that the important and interesting thing about marriage is that it binds two people together by some kind of sacred authority, but he doesn't give a very clear picture of where this sacred authority comes from. I can't make something sacred just by saying it is — two roommates, for example, couldn't invest their living arrangement with the same kind of holiness that marriage has just by calling it a "sacred" commitment.

Maybe it's possible that, while one person doesn't have the authority to make something "sacred," a whole community acting together does, and so if your community or church decides that gay marriage is sacred then it is. As Eve pointed out in a question, though, it ain't necessarily so:

Do you all think there is a difference between a "contract with the community" and "entrance into a tradition?" Those two seem to have different resonances with me, to the point that when I hear "contract with the community" I think, "Oh God, Hillary Clinton wants to raise me like a baby," whereas when I hear "entrance into a tradition" I think, "Oh, that sounds cool and beautiful and somehow aesthetically pleasing."

If it's not what your community says but the tradition of marriage that makes it a sacred relationship, then we have considerably less freedom to decide which relationships count as marriage and which ones don't. If it turns out that the Western Canon from the Song of Songs on down talks about marriage in deeply gendered terms, then we can't crowbar gay marriage into "the sacred" and expect it to work.

Full audio here.