Despite protests and public outcry, South Africa’s Parliament has voted overwhelmingly to allow gay marriage, making it the first nation to do so on the African continent.
As you may recall, SA’s High Court ordered Parliament to amend the constitution, insisting that the world’s most progressive political government must specifically allow gay marriage. After months of writing and rewriting the document, 230 politicians voted to include the document in the constitution, while a paltry 41 opposed and three abstained. Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula declared:
When we attained our democracy, we sought to distinguish ourselves from an unjust painful past, by declaring that never again shall it be that any South African will be discriminated against on the basis of color, creed culture and sex.
Despite the new bill, which allows the “voluntary union of two persons, which is solemnized and registered by either a marriage or civil union”, religious leaders are under no obligation to wed people of the same-sex. The Washington Post reports:
[The bill] also says marriage officers need not perform a ceremony between same-sex couples if doing so would conflict with his or her “conscience, religion and belief.”
That actually seems pretty reasonable. Sure, it opens the door for some discrimination, but wouldn’t one rather have a supportive person bless their union, rather than someone who’s suppressing their actual opinion.
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
We can’t help but wonder, however, what Jacob Zuma thinks about all this…Not that it really matters at this point.
Christine Muller
How refreshing to see a nation take the steps necessary to ensure equal rights for all. It is especially encouraging given South Africa’s chequered past. I can only hope that the rest of the “modernized” countries will follow suit.
Our nation should be humbled by the fact that we are so far behind a country that (openly) practiced apartheid a mere 16 years ago.
Straight Man with a brain
I hope they Queer each other to death! Worthless human rejects.
William S. Wilson
Marriage: marriage as a sacrament becomes visible as a ritual within a religious practice. A sacrament participates in a transcendental continuum which is infinite and eternal. Thus most religious marriages participate in mythic powers which are not answerable to science, to humanistic reason, to civil law, or even to mundane experience. As Marianne Moore has written:
I’m sure of this:
Nothing mundane is divine;
Nothing divine is mundane.
A bride and groom negate some mundane parts of themselves in order to channel God’s love. Within a secular state, a ritualistic religious wedding, under the care of God, can overlap and supplement a civil wedding, but it is not identical to it. Such a civil wedding does not participate in an infinite and eternal transcendental continuum. A religious marriage is answerable to an infinite and eternal God, while the secular marriage is answerable to civil law, which itself is finite and temporal. A secular state need not enforce the laws revealed from the transcendental God; but a religious marriage is answerable to a civil marriage, although polygamy obeys a transcendental revelation which is taken as religious law, rather than civil law. Meanwhile, federal constitutional grounds for the unlawfulness of polygamy are not obvious, and local civil laws are allowed to go unenforced. Religious and civil marriages do overlap, but in only one direction, for while the religious acknowledges the civil, the civil need not include or even acknowledge the religious. In the United States, a religious marriage must render unto Caesar (the historic Julius Caesar was legendary as every woman’s husband and every man’s wife, but not under either divine or mundane law). In religious logic, the religious concepts easily transcend technical logic because its ideas and images overlap each other: God is Love, God is Light, God is Truth, Beauty and Goodness. A wedding and marriage are meanings, with the meaning of a religious wedding quite different from the meaning of a civil wedding. A civil marriage, which has little metaphorical use or value, is less a mystical union than a contract (different relations between marriage and contract appear in Islam, where marriage is contractual). Civil law, in contrast with religious law, is not free to overlap concepts: a civic good may be in conflict with a civic beauty, and civil justice, unlike divine justice, may hold no hope of absolute justice. Civil law must think technically, differentiating concepts, rather than overlapping or merging them, and must both describe and prescribe minute distinctions (religious marriage occurs under universal laws, while civil marriage can differ from state to state). In the United States, under the Constitution as it was first constructed, and now as it survives continuous reconstructions, the Constitution does not protect religious marriage; and is forbidden to do so under the separation of a secular government from religious values, powers and rituals. Legal marriage is left to the states, which govern only secular civil actions. Thus a religious marriage has no necessary implications for civil marriage, and civil marriage is not answerable to religious marriage. Under the Constitution of the United States, which doesn’t mention marriage, no part of the government can require a ritual religious marriage which participates in religious values, functions, structures and meanings. Nor can the state forbid a marriage because a religion forbids a marriage like that between a godparent and a godchild. Mundane civil marriage, with laws which are themselves always on retrial for their constitutionality, is not mysterious, and is beyond the reach of transcendental religions. In an analogy, note that a civil adoption does not entail a baptism or a christening, it is a matter of civil law. Civil government has no grounds to admit impediments to the marriage of true minds, as long as a few conditions of age and of health are met. Yet some marriages may not need to submit to either state or church, as with the marriage between Quequeeg and Ishmael in Moby Dick: “He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married.” Fortunately such a spirited marriage does not need the blessing of a state or the protection of a church, although both the civil state and religions should encourage enduring emotional and sexual relations among its citizens. Now, in 2006, religions have relativized marriage, so that a couple can be married in two religions, with two or more different modes of thought about marriage, clearly differing from the methods of thought in a secular wedding. Religion uses methods of thinking that construct sacred and mysterious objects like the white radiance of a religious marriage, while civil law constructs sharp-focus legal objects like contracts. Because “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” under the separation of religion from secular law, governments in the United States are forbidden to make laws respecting an establishment of religious marriage.
Jean Meiring
Just for the record, it was SA’s Constitutional Court that last December gave Parliament a year to rectify the common law. There is still the (theoretical) chance that it might strike the law down as being unconstitutional – by creating a separate regime for gays. However, today’s Act has been called an interim measure.
At the very least, it’s a huge relief that the Christian right doesn’t hold sway in SA as it does in the US. I grew up in apartheid SA and it’s good to be part – albeit from a distance – of a nation that for all its faults is trying to effect social justice for all.
Let’s hope Jacob Zuma catches the general drift …