“Every February, across the country, candy, flowers, and gifts are exchanged between loved ones, all in the name of St. Valentine. But who is this mysterious saint and why do we celebrate this holiday?”
Today, the Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred. One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men — his crop of potential soldiers. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine’s actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.
If St. Valentine’s heroism lay in standing against unreasonable state interference in marriage, gay couples may be in particular need of his succor today, as the ignorant backlash — state-sponsored terrorism — against non-heterosexual marriages proceeds. I know I have been celebrating the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision saying nothing short of extending the right to marry to gay couples will be consistent with equal rights under the current constitution. My elation was, of course, premature. If you are not following the news from my state, our (Mormon) governor Mitt Romney and other social reactionaries have just convened a constitutional convention (actually, it had been planned for months before the Supreme Court decision, but the issue moved to the top of the agenda) to try to amend the constitution to take the legs out from under gay marriage. Successive versions of the proposed amendment have been shot down and the convention adjourned without success. But the battle is not over yet, they will reconvene in March, two months before the scheduled May implementation of extending marriage licenses to gay couples.
Some of the maneuvering around this issue seems as illegal as it is outrageous to me. For example, the favored version of the amendment would retroactively make gay marriages (since the earliest the amendment could be adopted, if successful, would not be until mid-2006) revert to civil unions. Now, I’m no legal scholar, but isn’t this tantamount to making something retroactively illegal? And isn’t the principle that ex post facto laws are unacceptable one of the cornerstones of our legal system? Also, Romney is contemplating issuing an executive order forbidding state officials to grant marriage licenses to gay couples no matter that they are entitled to them. My guess is that he hopes that the litigation to force him to reverse this blatantly defiant and illegal order would take long enough that he could prevent all the marriages that would otherwise ensue until the longed-for amendment. What, is he bucking for a cabinet appointment in the second Bush administration or something? And isn’t the idea of the constitution, state or federal, ‘defining marriage’ an obscene perversion of its scope and purpose?
Listening to all the public debate on this issue, the argument that strikes me as the most sensible says that, instead of extending the right of marriage to gays, we should take it away from heterosexuals as well. The State should be in the business of extending certain rights and duties to spousal unions, so it should regulate civil unions for everyone, and forget about marriages. It has no place in the business of regulating what is essentially a religious sacrament, which homophobic couples should be welcome to seek in their homophobic churches if the idea of a loving union between same-sex partners somehow threatens the security of their marital vows. I cannot speak for gay couples but it strikes me that, instead of seeking to be able to proudly state they are ‘married’, they ought to join us heterosexual couples who are becoming ashamed to say we are ‘married’, ashamed at what a vehicle for bigotry and irrationality ‘marriage’ has become.
