Seems I can only consider the former when the latter is at hand.
Welcome to my night: It's raining; I'm fighting off depression and my brain needs to focus on something none-too complicated. I'm thinking back on last year a bit and several things I wanted to ponder/talk about but never quite got around to.
In December my far-too-young-to-get-married nephew got married, a "necessary" wedding, I'll note with a wink and a shrug; the kind that in my parents' day would have been called a shot gun wedding. By my day such a thing was thought obsolete (at least by me and mine -- there's a diary on that topic, too), but we're in a new era of the personal politics of procreation, and an 18 year old and a 19 year old tied the knot in a small but, "family-oriented", ceremony.
Now, I hate weddings, all weddings. I'm not overly keen on marriage, but recognize that my own particular viewpoint on the institution does not define the whole. Weddings on the other hand, leave me cold and they always have. I have in my life deeply offended close friends and relatives by refusing to attend their weddings. It has taken 20 years for one of my college friends to forgive me, but my consistent position of disdain over time has helped heal that wound.
Still, I only have two nephews. So I packed up the offspring and we headed to Florida for a quick weekend trip. Did I mention that I hate weddings? Or that I also hate my ex-brother-in-law? I'm sure that I've included the fact that the groom's mother--my closest sibling in age--hates me? My nephew, though, he loves me. And he asked, specifically, that we come. And so we did, since in the end, that's the only detail that really matters.
This was only the third marriage ceremony I had attended in the last 21 years, the fourth in the last 24, if I include my own in the tally. So you can imagine, perhaps, that it does linger in my consciousness a bit, and understand, possibly, why weddings are on my mind tonight.
My last four weddings aren't the four I'm thinking of tonight however, at least not all of them. The last two are ones I'd like to consider in more depth, along with two other, very high profile ones from the past year.
One of the things that has helped to change (somewhat) my take on weddings, is the slow progression of same sex marriage rights. For the longest time just attending a wedding, forget holding one, was just a screaming pile of privilege in my mind, mostly because of the way that everyone took it all for granted. It wasn't so much that I begrudged the folks their celebration, I just wanted them all (and their guests included) to register how privileged an act it was for them. I didn't really want to be wearing that uncomfortable set of emotions to go along with all the uncomfortable clothes I'd be expected to wear.
Another is the nuance that comes with age and at least half a lifetime of following the less than typical path for things like love, marriage, partnership, procreation, child rearing, parenting, and family-building. So weddings can very easily become trite, formulaic, or even propagandistic to me, especially when put together without much reflection. Likewise, the sheer waste and excessive consumerism fueled by the wedding industries is an open invitation to critique contemporary materialism.
My nephew's wedding was a rather ugly event, politically and reflexively speaking. I'm fairly confident that I'm the only guest of the event who noticed, but there was a strong, "family friendly focus" to the festivities. The Bible passages selected by the very young minister seemed like dog whistles to me. The two children marrying, of course, didn't notice, but it did make me wonder how they came to be standing there. My response is only that of a guest who found the overreach of the pastor to be inappropriate and thus did the atmosphere become stifling. (The last funeral I attended I had a similar reaction -- minister over the bounds of what is appropriate and a bereavement ritual became more like a pep rally for Christ). It made me wish that we had better solutions to offer young people like my nephew and his new wife, better ones than just "get married and God will take care of everything".
While there, I thought back to the marriage ceremony I had last attended, when my son's two adopted dads married in the Boston Public Garden in autumn of 2009, a few short months after they were legally able to do so. They had a lesbian justice of the peace performing the ceremony and my son and theirs via legal custody acting as the best man. I was there as photographer, family member, and only girl, because somebody has to hold a bouquet when people get married. It was low key, but nonetheless profound, the final step in what was a long progression. Their relationship had developed to the point that they had taken every legal step available to them whenever the political and legal environment offered it: co-habit, co-owners of property, domestic partnership once legally recognized in DC, then finally, marriage, after it passed in MA. There was love, there was inclusion, there was thought but there was no excess.
Quite a contrast, hmm? In an oddly poignant, but somehow upside-down manner, thinking about this contrast makes me sad. The emptiness of the more conventional, religious path, the one that seemed to me to just be trying too damn hard, was something I couldn't shake from my mind. What seems too often to be missing from the discourse of the so-called moral authorities, pushing their so-called moral agendas with their so-called moral politics, is a moral position on the humanity of all this.
It also led me to ponder, with far less personal investment, the two big weddings of note from the past year: The Kardashian Production Number and Britain's April Royal Wedding. Both of these events, along with each having a store, also have something to add to the ongoing cultural conversation about the politics of marriage and families. When I look to the Kardashian page, I notice only how many pictures are individual shots of the bride. The entire event is a photo shoot, with expensive party planning and merchandising. I ask myself who is doing more to harm the institution of marriage, my son's two dads or this family of side-show barkers? More contrast. Less morality, no wedding fandom here.
The Royal Wedding, on the other hand, is a lesson I hope everyone takes in. These events, more than any other in our contemporary culture, so very clearly illustrate the real history of marriage as an institution and the politics behind it. Marriage was originally about property. Children were important, but only as to the proper dispensation of property and titles,and in particular, the crown. The church got involved in marriage in order to legitimate both the protection of property for the aristocratic classes and to legitimate a governing system that had no internally legitimate authority. This is what marriage means and has always meant: a system for making sense of how to distribute (and protect) property. Through the passage of time and the changes in history it is easy to forget this, in fact many interested parties would have us all forget it. But it is only with the rare and exalted occasions of Royal Weddings when that history, for a brief moment, can be glimpsed. Of course it is difficult between all the discussion of the dress, or the bum, but there it is, if we choose to look. In a way the Royal Wedding is the greatest ally of we who advocate for marriage equality.