BRIEF PRESENTED TO

THE STANDING COMMITTEE ON

JUSTICE AND HUMAN RIGHTS

ON

MARRIAGE AND RECOGNITION OF SAME-SEX UNIONS

THE BENEFIT OF HETEROSEXUAL MARRIAGE

Presenter:

Rev. Ted Newell

Pastor, Jemseg Baptist Church
(Convention of Atlantic Baptist Churches)
Member, Christian Legal Fellowship

April 8, 2003
 Rev. Ted Newell Submission for April 8, 2003

THE BENEFIT OF HETEROSEXUAL MARRIAGE

Executive Summary

Legally adding same-sex ‘marriage’ to existing heterosexual marriage will

undermine heterosexual marriage by furthering the idea that marriage is an
individual commitment only and is “voluntaristic.” Supplementing heterosexual
marriage with same-sex marriage has potential to alter heterosexual people’s
sense of identity and will weaken rather than expand the marriage form. Extra
strength would be added to forces already dissolving heterosexual marriages.
Public policy seeks the flourishing of groups and organizations within society, not
only that of individuals. Public policy can and should draw a clear definition
around long-beneficial heterosexual marriage. The case is made without
prejudice to the many possible forms of human shared commitment.

Introduction

We at the Jemseg Baptist Church appreciate the willingness of the Standing

Committee on Justice and Human Rights to travel beyond Ottawa. In traveling
you are hearing from a wider cross-section than national bodies. You have heard
from the deeply committed ten percent on either side of the marriage issue;
surely now you are hearing from a portion of the eighty percent who may be in
the middle. Thank you for coming to New Brunswick and thank you for including
witnesses like me in your process.

I am ordained as a pastor by the Convention of Atlantic Baptist Churches. I

presently serve the Jemseg Baptist Church in a Loyalist farming area on the Saint
John River at Grand Lake. The area is reached on the TransCanada Highway
about 40 minutes west of Sussex. The church is the only one in the immediate
area and has been active for 178 years. Also I am an associate member of the
Christian Legal Fellowship. I hold a Master’s degree and am a candidate for the
doctor of education degree at Columbia University, New York City. My wife

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 Rev. Ted Newell Submission for April 8, 2003

Wanda and I have been married for 8 years, and we have children, a girl and two
boys, ages 7, 5 and 2.

We of the Jemseg church believe that the exploration of possible recognitions for
same-sex unions is an issue for all Canadians and an especially significant issue
for Canadian families.

We endorse the submissions to the Standing Committee made by the Evangelical

Fellowship of Canada and the Convention of Atlantic Baptist Churches. I do not
read myself as contradicting these agencies; I hope rather to add specific
observations.

Marriage, a Covenant and Calling

Why should the Standing Committee hear from a pastor? Well, for a start, I
marry couples. Couples come to us for a ceremony. Marriage is partly an
expression of the Christian heritage. The Book of Common Prayer (we use parts
of its ceremony sometimes) said “marriage is an honourable estate...signifying
unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church.” The phrase
comes from the New Testament, in Ephesians, chapter 5. The sacrificial care of
husband for wife and their loving service to each other is intended to be like the
loving provision of Christ for his people. Christ’s sacrifice for moral guilt is the
foundation of the life that believers share: “Christ with us.” God pictures ultimate
reality in Ephesians, we believe. Marriage traces the way sacrificial love works.
Marriage gives a hint of God’s nature. God imaged his own self-giving character
when he created marriage. God says by revelation in Malachi chapter 2, “I hate
divorce.” Marriage is a covenant relationship, like the unbreakable relationship
of God and his people. God modeled the coming together of like and unlike. To
us, the union of two persons into one flesh must be for publicly covenanted
relationships only. Adultery and fornication -- any sexual expression outside of
wedlock -- are prohibited of course in the sacredness of the bond.

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 Rev. Ted Newell Submission for April 8, 2003

Bruce Cockburn sang at the breakup of his marriage in 1979 in protest and pain,

What about the bond? What about the bond?

Sealed in the loving presence of the Father.1

Marriage is a distinct calling. The biblical way of life relies on First Corinthians
chapter 7. It might be important to realize that the Jesus way of life never had
marriage as essential. By the Christian way of life I mean the tradition taken from
Jesus by his disciples; their writings are in the 27 sections of the New Testament.
Marriage the Jesus way is recognized as a crucible. This crucible is a place to
grow into a style of sacrificial life. Not everyone should marry, says the apostle
Paul. Marriage is a special calling for those males and females who are ‘gifted’ or
endowed with specific talents for it by God. Of course, many in fact are gifted in
this way. Marriage is one of God’s two forums for learning to do life and
relationships. The other style of sacrificial living is singleness. Singleness in the
biblical way has powerful and unique significance. Not all are called to marriage.
The understanding that marriage is a calling places a relationship in eternal
perspective, but at the same time makes it part of the present life and frees it
from being an end in itself.

Marriage is an expression of God’s love for the world. It is well known that God
said according to revelation, “It is not good for man to be alone.” God made
marriage for human fulfillment, even though fulfillment is ultimately available in
the person of God.

Marriage is a covenant and a calling, and so love is also more than feelings of
love. Love expresses its essential nature by a shared covenant commitment. It
will be clear to the Standing Committee that the high ideal of marriage is not
usually do-able. Only faith in God, coupled with certain understandings about
ourselves, enables a couple to live their marriage vows. In the vows, faith is
expressed in the God who is able to make the relationship work. It goes without
saying that Christians fail the ideal more often than live it. But we are people on

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 Rev. Ted Newell Submission for April 8, 2003

the way. The ideal is beautiful, so much so that we would not want to limit
marriage’s potential. To limit the ideal would be limiting both ourselves and our
God.

I need to say immediately: I am not proposing to hold all Canada’s families to a

Christian view of marriage, as if I or any group could make it happen in some
authoritarian or theocratic way. We recognize that, as the Evangelical Fellowship
of Canada said in its brief, “Marriage is one among many forms of relationships
within a pluralistic society.”2 We recognize too that communities such as the
Jewish, Sikh, and Muslim communities share the Christian high valuation of
heterosexual marriage. I ask instead that heterosexual marriage’s uniqueness be
preserved in law.

Heterosexual Marriage in Today’s Society

My proposition today is that legally including same-sex ‘marriage’ with

heterosexual marriage will undermine heterosexual marriage by furthering the
idea that marriage is an individual commitment and is “voluntaristic.”
Supplementing heterosexual marriage with same-sex marriage has potential to
alter heterosexual people’s sense of identity and will seriously weaken rather than
expand the marriage form. Extra strength will be added to forces already
dissolving heterosexual marriages.

I said above that I marry couples. More accurately, I marry some couples.
Heterosexual marriage is a form of family life under major pressure. The church
already is somewhat out of the marriage business; more than half of New
Brunswickers starts in common law relationships. Lois Mitchell says in an essay
for the Convention of Atlantic Baptist Churches that younger Canadians are
“increasingly choosing common-law relationships as their first conjugal union;
among women in their 30s, 42% are expected to choose a common-law union as
their first union and 51% to choose marriage.” Note that the trend for marriage is
sharply downward. “Just over half (53%) of women in their 20s are expected to

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 Rev. Ted Newell Submission for April 8, 2003

enter into a common-law relationship as their first union and 31% will likely
marry first.”3 This trend is as evident in Jemseg as anywhere. It is more striking
in Jemseg, though, because of long traditions in our area. Most of the area young
people are living together without the benefit of marriage. The prevalence of
common law liaisons is a huge change for an area where the church long led
public opinion.

On the street, people say -- even to a pastor -- that common law relationships are
evidence of a love that will not submit to mere formality. “What would a piece of
paper do for our relationship?” Males especially imply that a piece of paper does
not make their commitment any more real or valid. The validity of a relationship
rests with themselves, within the two persons.

The fact of widespread common law unions would not help an evangelical make a
case for Canada-wide action -- except that heterosexual marriage is of undeniable
benefit to the state. The main reason is that it is so good for children. Family is
the basic formative process of society. Family life encourages self-giving
sacrificial behaviors oriented to the future. The Standing Committee has heard
significantly positive statistics.

Heterosexual marriage in our area is in big trouble. Having married some, I hear
that other couples have split up. In our area, three homes split open in January
and February 2003, and at least three more are on shaky ground. A couple in our
congregation counts off more than 20 homes broken apart in the last three years.
This, in an area of only 480 private households, fewer than 330 of which are
occupied by people under 55.4 Pastors are possibly the closest supporters to
families. We see marriage breakup at first-hand, not just in statistics. I talk to the
young people affected by family breakup. In our Sunday school Grade Ones class
we have only one child out of eight who has not experienced breakup. What is
happening in Jemseg could be typical of small New Brunswick communities. The
wave of family dislocation is happening with no less force in a small-c
conservative part of Canada.
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 Rev. Ted Newell Submission for April 8, 2003

Of course many factors are at work to separate people. Changes in persons’

understanding of themselves over the past four or five decades must be an
influence. One young couple were married after a three year dating and
preparation time. One year afterward, the husband walked out on his new bride
saying that he did not expect that marriage was like “this” and he desired
personal space. This tale is utterly unremarkable because it is so common.
Anyone hearing it could add their own story. The point is that hidden, tacit
factors contributing to the understanding of the self have been altered, so that
marriage is often not what it used to be.

Do legal factors contribute to family instability? Is there a public policy

imperative to help stabilize families? Public policy can encourage beneficial
marriages. Clearly, fewer obstacles to divorce allows couples to avoid working
out relationship problems; they may seize the option and cut the knot. Effects of
legal changes begin to show in a decade, but possibly not fully until the next
generation; again, the Standing Committee heard effects on marriage after
common law couples were recognized in law. Further modifications will have
further effects. Public policy can encourage people to keep on processing life
together.

Those coming as witnesses and those hearing them are likely to have been
beneficiaries of a stable home. By being where we are, we more or less give
witness to a stable background. Divorce is hard on kids. Kurt Cobain, lead singer
of the rock band Nirvana, was “a very happy child who used to run round the
streets banging a toy drum and singing Hey Jude at full volume.” When he was
eight years old his parents separated. His mother said: “It just completely
destroyed his life.” Cobain became depressed.5 William Burroughs, the writer,
said on meeting him, “There's something wrong with that boy...He frowns for no
good reason.”6 The trauma is there, in Nirvana’s music and lyrics. Cobain ended
his own life, aged 28.

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 Rev. Ted Newell Submission for April 8, 2003

Heterosexual Marriage is Unique

Heterosexual marriage is more than a kind of caring, committed relationship. We

grant that committed relationships do look alike on the surface. But it would be
careless to say “live and let live.” Heterosexual marriage is different. Adding
same sex marriage to heterosexual marriage will alter heterosexual marriage.
“There's nothing in this court decision, nothing in this bill, nothing in the
committed relationships of two people that presents a threat to my marriage." So
said Vermont state Senator James Leddy in 2000. True?

Robert George, philosopher and law expert at Princeton University, argues that
heterosexual marriage deserves its separate title. Male and female genital
bonding forms a unit together, one that has been uniquely able to produce human
life. Even couples who know themselves to be sterile and who engage in the
sexual bond know themselves to be forming or renewing a unique one-flesh bond
across genders.

The female and male organs separately cannot make a single unit; only together
do they become one complete unit. Accordingly, heterosexual marriages are
predicated on successful conjugal relations. Failure to consummate a marriage
has been adequate grounds in law for termination.

I still remember that moment of clarity when first I learned that the male organ
fits into the female organ. Possibly many remember their own moment of
discovery. I’d known the surface facts about female anatomy for some time but
until the secret was whispered, I’d never realized the significance of male and
female. That discovery was amazing and wonderful, a moment when mysteries
came together. It was preposterous; it was funny. “Who planned this?,” I asked
myself, in the spirit of a boy who puts together model kits.

The experience of heterosexual marriage is an intrinsic good, argues George, not

merely an instrumental good.7 Sex is often taken to be a instrumental good, for

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 Rev. Ted Newell Submission for April 8, 2003

pleasure or self-fulfillment. But the marriage act is an intrinsic good and is good
whether or not anything “comes of it.” The two distinct kinds of human being,
male and female, have come away from themselves and have become a new single
unit. To speak plainly, other body parts may be used in sex but these have never
been taken in law as sufficient to the marriage act. Not only Christians have seen
this but all religious and cultural traditions down to today have seen it, as was
argued elsewhere.8 For Christians, as for Jews, Sikhs, and Muslims, God
included in human beings a built-in incompleteness that is satisfied by the one-
flesh union of man and woman.

Whether this complementarian viewpoint continues be recognized by everyone in

Canadian society is not exactly the issue. Significant dissent exists. The dissent is
making itself recognized in our legal system, and politics. The issue for
Parliament is whether the long-established view of marriage can continue to be a
livable option for millions of Canadians and their children. In the Canadian
context Robert George’s argument shows only -- but significantly -- that
heterosexuality is unique. Millions of Canadian couples understand the unique
bond by intuition. It is part of the courage needed to press on as married, and to
grow a family.

Adding Categories will Redefine

Sexual rights activists are well able to make a case for same-sex marriage because
the understanding of marriage in Canada has become excessively self-oriented.
For example, one group writes,

In the last two hundred years, as democratic revolutions have extended

our notion of equal rights, and as feminist movements have fought to win
equality for women, marriage has been redefined again. Today, with birth
rates low and many heterosexual couples choosing not to have children,
marriage as an institution represents a committed union between two
people, traditionally a man and a women.9

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 Rev. Ted Newell Submission for April 8, 2003

The understanding that marriage is a committed union between two people is

true enough as far as it goes -- only it does not go far enough. Heterosexual
marriage, to many, is a personal commitment but far more. I showed its depth in
arguments above from scripture, tradition, and a natural law theorist. Marriage
is not just personal and voluntaristic; it is more than a commitment. It is a
covenant expressed in flesh. Only a more-than-personal commitment is able to
keep marriage across genders alive through its tough seasons.

Adding a new category to marriage will not expand marriage or make it somehow
more generous. It will not only add new potentialities. Adding a category to
heterosexual marriage will fundamentally change marriage as it has been for
centuries, if not millennia.10 Probably gender and gay theorists understand the
potential most clearly. Daniel Cere of McGill University quotes gay and lesbian
theorist Ladell McWhorter. McWhorter said that if gay people are

allowed to participate as gay people in the communities and institutions

they [heterosexuals] claim as theirs, our presence will change those
institutions and practices enough to undermine their preferred version of
heterosexuality and, in turn, they themselves will not be the same. They
[heterosexuals] are right, for example, that if same-sex couples get legally
married, the institution of marriage will change, and since marriage is one
of the institutions that supports heterosexuality and heterosexual
identities, heterosexuality and heterosexuals will change as well.11

Not all gay theorists wish marriage. The gay community, like all communities, is
not a solid block. Varying angles of approach come to bear. Paula Ettelbrick,
policy director for the U.S. National Center for Lesbian Rights, is for same-sex
marriage, but with caveats:

Being queer is more than setting up house, sleeping with a person of the
same gender, and seeking state approval for doing so.... Being queer means
pushing the parameters of sex, sexuality, and family, and in the process,
transforming the very fabric of society...As a lesbian, I am fundamentally
different from non-lesbian women...In arguing for the right to legal
marriage, lesbians and gay men would be forced to claim that we are just
like heterosexual couples, have the same goals and purposes, and vow to
structure our lives similarly...We must keep our eyes on the goals of
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 Rev. Ted Newell Submission for April 8, 2003

providing true alternatives to marriage and of radically reordering society's

view of reality.12

Activists’ and academics’ statements have to be taken with a grain of salt, of

course, on whatever side they appear. Besides, these are Americans speaking.
Yet the president of Toronto’s HOPE (Homosexuals Opposed to Pride
Extremism) can be quoted as saying,

"Sure, we all have baby envy, and lots of us would like to raise kids...But
we can’t have everything we want in life, and it’s selfish and rude to
redefine society’s traditions and conventions simply for our self-
indulgence.13

Adding same-sex marriage as a possibility to traditional heterosexual marriage

will change or weaken heterosexual male and female identity. Those identities
are essential to heterosexual marriage. With identities changed, the internal
commitment necessary to heterosexual marriage itself cannot but be further
weakened.

Encouraging Community with Diversity

It may be helpful to say that the Canadian evangelical church is not attempting to
establish or retain any hegemony in society. Any notion of dominance was
dispelled some time ago. I believe that the genuine church of Christ can flourish
in many settings. On the other side, some evangelical traditions do have a strain
of withdrawal, even separatism, and our focus on the individual is sometimes
linked to pietism. Sometimes evangelicals withdraw from public participation.
Christians are, though, part of the body politic, voters, and therefore we have a
stake in public debate. Our voices will be reasonable for some here and I come
with confidence that, God willing, no coercion necessary, you will hear me out. I
have no intention of joining with “religious-right” styled public participation.

Public-spiritedness is an aspect of Christian living. Christians were drawn to

share in the work of maintaining the Roman state before and especially after the

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 Rev. Ted Newell Submission for April 8, 2003

conversion of the emperor Constantine in 312 AD,14 and Christian participation

has continued over time. Talking about marriage as covenant and as the
foundation of community underlines the dynamic, workable teaching of Jesus
Christ about the process of living together.

Public policy needs to encourage community. The virtue of heterosexual

marriage is that it virtually creates community around it in the form of children.
The presence of children generates wider efforts to share in the task of raising
them. It is no accident that seven of ten children in Canada are presently living in
homes where heterosexual marriage is the foundation.

Heterosexual marriage brings community out of diversity. Opposite genders are

drawn together in a significant and ongoing personal stretching exercise. As the
Evangelical Fellowship observes, maintaining the distinctiveness of heterosexual
marriage is to maintain diversity. Not all have to be married like heterosexuals;
not all have the biology for the heterosexual marriage act. The distinctiveness of
heterosexual marriage should be maintained. Equality should not force
sameness.

Parliament’s Ability to Make Policy

Public policy can encourage a diverse community only if distinctions are

maintained. I quoted the Evangelical Fellowship’s brief above, saying that
marriage is one among many forms of relationships within a pluralistic society.
Their statement continues, “The definition of marriage distinguishes it from other
forms of relationships. Definitions make distinctions -- this is what definitions
do.”15

James Skillen of the Center for Public Justice observes that definitions are the
foundation of public policy. The state has a responsibility not only to individuals
and their maximum freedom. The individualizing stance is libertarian. The state
must also recognize, though, that agencies or organizations depend on it for

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 Rev. Ted Newell Submission for April 8, 2003

health also. These groups include “families and churches, profit-making and
non-profit organizations, schools, hospitals, and labor organizations.”16
Therefore talk about rights for individuals must be balanced against the needs of
all agencies of society. The family is not least of these agencies.

Skillen observes further that if individuals through action on rights are able to
redefine basic institutions such as marriage, then the state has lost its ability to
make distinctions and to make effective public policy. For example, the state
wishes to subsidize education. But is the farmer who insists that his farm is also
educating its workers not also eligible for the subsidy? “The question [for
government] is not about the distinction between...practices of marriage but
about how government should identify marriage in the first place in order to be
able to do justice to it.”17 Limits must be drawn for public policy to function. To
allow the demands of individuals to define structures is to court structural
problems. The marriage issue cannot be a matter of equality first of all; it is a
matter of the well-being of a vital contributor to Canadian society. Heterosexual
marriage must continue as a distinctive contributor to national well-being.

In my work as pastor at Jemseg it is a pleasure to be able to take part in wedding

anniversaries of the highest numbers. Forty, fifty, sixty years of marriage are well
known among us. These days in Canada, such events are rarer than they should
be. Anniversaries like these are celebrated -- family and community draw
together at the Lions Club to sing and eat and enjoy themselves. Something in
the DNA of such marriages needs to be drawn out for a new generation.

1 Bruce Cockburn, “What About the Bond,” published by High Romance Music, 1980.

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 Rev. Ted Newell Submission for April 8, 2003

2 Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, “Submission On Marriage and the Legal Recognition of Same-

Sex Unions to Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights,” Feb. 13, 2003, p. 14.

3 Lois Mitchell, “The Marriage Issue: Forging a Christian Response to the Politics of the

Redefinition of Marriage,” October 2002. Available from Convention of Atlantic Baptist

Churches.

4 United Baptist Convention, PCensus Project, from Statistics Canada 1996 Census.

5 Tony Watkins, “Divorce: Never or Clever?,” Christianity Magazine, January 2000.

6 Retrieved from the world wide web, Mar 14 2003, www.observer.co.uk.

7 An intrinsic good is one that is known by those involved but which can only be grasped by others
by inference. For instance, a son decides to go to art college. The question is, why? Well-paid
jobs for artists are scarce. But art gives the son an intrinsic satisfaction that another might only
understand by inference. It is inadequate for the father to say, when asked about the son, “He is
going to college so he can make a living.” The father is mystified, most likely. A future source of
income is an instrumental cause to go to college.

8 Robert George’s argumentation is in “Marriage and the Liberal Imagination,” Georgetown Law
Journal, 84/301 (Dec. 1995) and in his The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion and Morality in
Crisis, Isi Books, 2001. Information about marriage recognized across culture and religious
traditions is in Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, “Submission On Marriage and the Legal
Recognition of Same-Sex Unions to Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights,” Feb. 13,
2003.

9"To Have and to Hold," (Washington, D.C.: The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 1995), p.
3, cited in Anton Marco, “Same-Sex ‘Marriage’," Christian Leadership Ministries. Retrieved from
the world wide web, www.leaderu.com, Mar 5, 2003.

10 Community and cultural ideas of marriage and gender expectations have surely varied over

time. The research offered by e.g. the Metropolitan Community Church to support their radical
re-reading is contentious, however.

Ladelle McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization,
11

Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1999, p. 125, cited in Daniel Cere, “Wars of the Ring,” The
Newman Rambler, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Summer 2002): 1-8.

12Paula Ettelbrick, "Since When Is Marriage a Path to Liberation," in Lesbians, Gay Men and the
Law, William B. Rubenstein, ed. (New York: The New Press, 1993), pp. 401-405, cited in Marco,
op.cit.

John McKellar quoted by Tom Hoopes, “Can Same-Sex Marriage Be Stopped?,” Crisis
13

Magazine, July 2, 2002.

14 Robert Louis Wilken, “In Defense of Constantine,” First Things, 112 (April 2001): 36-40.

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15 Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, ibid., p. 14.

16James Skillen, Center for Public Justice, “Kuyper and Gay Rights,” unpublished article, March
2003.

17 Skillen, op.cit.

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