Last Rite

No, not Extreme Unction (which sounds like it should be administered by Uriah Heep), but Marriage, the last of the rites to get on the list as a sacrament or something close.

Marriage has been mainly about property. In olden times (e.g. biblical ones), marriage was a contract between two families (usually) involving the exchange of a woman (and some other property) for some property. It was a lifelong commitment because otherwise all the property had to be given back and the one family was stuck with the woman again (and at second-hand value). (This is why biblical marriage were often intrafamilial: first cousins, even half-siblings). People who didn't have property, didn't get married in any legalistic way, they just cohabited or practiced some folk ritual (jumping the broom, say).

Of course, when a couple of propertied families contracted a good marriage, they celebrated the successful conclusion of the negotiations and the signing. And, why not invoke the gods (or, eventually, God) to oversee the contract's execution (it seemed to help with that subdivision last year)? So a ritual evolved for these occasions. And this ritual came to include an expression of the clauses of the contract: life long commitment, exclusivity, sharing property, taking care of one another, etc., to the point where the ritual almost replaced the contract and the contract was not considered valid without the ritual (there are wonderful medieval debates about when the contract came into force, in case one of the participants -- bride, groom, or priest -- died before the whole thing was over). Marriage came to be -- in some people's mind, at least -- not something done by the bride and groom (or their families) but something done by God through the agency of the priest ("whom God has joined together").

The Church (or whatever) saw several advantages in this situation and so institutionalized it, first bringing the ritual into the church (first the informal parts, then the main worship space) then raising it to the status of a sacrament (the Wedding at Cana gave her a needed precedent). She also expanded its scope, so that everyone, whether propertied or not, had to be married to live together or have children (the opportunities for bastards in the strict sense were sharply limited). As noted, knowing who goes with whom is useful information to have, and the Church gave up little to get it.

For a time, then, a Church marriage was the only kind there was (officially). But, with the rise of the modern state and its interest in information about its citizens, civil marriage reemerged and became the only official standard. The church marriage became again a ritual around the signing of a contract, an occasion to proclaim and celebrate the union the contract involved and to bless that union. But much of the aura of the intervening era of sacramental marriage remained, and spread even to civil marriages without ecclesial frills.

Marriage is traditionally a man taking a woman (men were too valuable to be used as bargaining chips). What exceptions there have been we few, widely separated and very temporary, though occasionally historically important.

However, notice that sex is nowhere mentioned in the contracts. It may be assumed, or acknowledged with a Pynthonesque nudge and wink at "union," but it is not dealt with in the clauses. Thus, the contract can serve as well for for a same-sex couple as an other-sex couple, barring reference to 'bride' and 'groom', with their assumed genders, or "this man" and "this woman" with explicit reference, assuming that the couple can fulfill (or commit themselves to try to fulfill) the clauses actually there. And there is no apparent reason why a same-sex couple cannot do this.

And, since the clauses of that old private contract, now made public and civil, informed the church ritual, there is no reason why a same-sex couple cannot have their union blessed. What is blessed (proclaimed and celebrated , too) is the union, the commitment to live out those clauses. Other things that happen in the context of that union are incidental: if they break the clauses (as wife-beating and adultery surely do) then either the union is dissolved or the reconciliatory prescriptions are brought into play; if they don't (as consensual sex acts clearly don't), then these, though unblessed, do not per se affect the union or the blessing on it.