Is there an analogy between divorce-and-remarriage and same-sex marriage?
from Psephizo:
Ann Onymous writes: The journey to remarriage following a divorce is necessarily a painful one. Although it is now something of a trope (with increasing divorce rates and newspapers reporting on more and more celebrities and politicians who are on their third or fourth marriage) that marriage is beginning to be seen as something temporary, something small, something to be discarded, nevertheless it has not been my experience when meeting prospective marriage couples in my vicarage study to note any such nonchalance. Neither have I seen it, or felt it, in encounters with Christians who experience the trauma of divorce. Having lived through such a time myself, I know well the depths of pain and feeling which come from the reality of the marriage bond when it is broken.
I can appreciate how this pain, and the associated joy which comes for those who move past it into healing and fulfilment, can be seen to be analogous to other forms of grief and contentment that accompany other forms of relational distress such as unrequited love, the death of a spouse—or as is commonly articulated, same sex marriage.
Only today I saw an article in a leading newspaper exploring the issues of justice in the willingness of the Church of England to remarry divorcees, but not to offer same sex marriage. I can see how the two issues might feel closely related. Both once illegal, both once a source of shame; both condemned by the church, both now almost universally accepted in the UK.
But the issue is not whether or not the desires and longings experienced in these two experiences may evoke similar emotions, or follow similar trajectories in the popular imagination. The question is whether they are in fact analogous theologically and biblically, and my contention is that they are not. This is to say, that one may accept the remarriage of divorcees without accepting same sex marriage. Now, it might be that a Christian decides to accept neither, and there are huge numbers of Christians around the world who faithfully accept neither, but whether we accept or reject the remarriage of divorcees we do so on different grounds to our rejection of Same Sex Marriage.
There are four particular ways in which we see that the remarriage of divorcees and same sex marriage are not analogous.
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