The recent Charleston church slayings underscored symbols’ power to carry and alter civic discourse, if not shift our communal sense of self. The Supreme Court’s confirmation that the Constitution protects same-sex couples’ right to marry underscores civic symbols’ efficacy. This dynamic bears reflection in ongoing national dialogue about both of these topics, and others.
Evidence seemingly confirms that Dylann Roof appropriated the Confederacy’s “stars and bars” to communicate hateful violence. Together with survivors of Rev. Clementa Pinckney and his eight fellow victims, the Emanuel A.M.E. congregation responded with equally powerful symbolism. They disclaimed vitriol, much less violence. Perhaps for that very reason, prominent leaders joined ordinary citizens in calling for the flag’s removal from South Carolina’s statehouse grounds. Now the symbol is being withdrawn by national retailers, and is at the heart of ongoing national conversation about race and racism.
How the historical fact of the killings prompted such a decisive move now reminds us that symbols obviously speak, but also change how we think, perceive, and act. Social media suggests that the Confederate battle flag operated quite ignominiously in Dylann Roof’s consciousness. But the result of that outcome, tragic as it is, may be a shift for the good in how we talk about race relations and accompanying cultural markers. Religion obviously also explores and employs symbolic power, in its own specific ways. Perhaps the Charleston killings’ religious backdrop partially explains the conversation around symbols that followed.
Symbolism and religion also figure in conversation about the Supreme Court’s ruling that our Constitution requires that same-sex couples who wish to commit to one another in marriage be permitted to do so in the same way that opposite-sex couples have been so permitted. Colleagues and I filed an amicus brief in the proceedings on behalf of religious denominations and clergy supporting civil marriage equality, arguing that such a right is consistent with fundamental principles of both equal protection and religious freedom. Our lead signatory, Rev. Gay Clark Jennings, authored a thoughtful open letter to the Court soon after oral argument, explaining how she and others in the Episcopal Church came not simply to tolerate same-sex unions, but to value how they symbolize, and thus realize, core theological values. Not coincidentally, such a function is at the heart of what certain traditions define as a sacrament.
Friday’s Supreme Court decision confirms that because religious liberty and separation of church and state are integral to our constitutional framework, ministers remain free to decide to whom they will accord religious marriage rites. Accordingly, religious solemnization of a same-sex union, where a tradition permits it, will carry corresponding civil recognition of the union. That is how state laws generally have operated for religious solemnization of opposite-sex unions, which itself reveals religion’s unique role in American civil society.
What additional symbolic meaning, as a civic matter, might a national right for same-sex couples to marry entail? At oral argument, Justice Kennedy asked how we should understand a claim to a constitutional right to same-sex marriage given millennia of cross-cultural practice limiting civil marriage to opposite-sex couples. Friday’s decision, which he authored, suggested an answer: The case was not about “a right to same-sex marriage,” but about the right to marry. Countless same-sex couples feel drawn to exercise that right in part because of its social significance. What that ultimately may mean, we as a nation are just beginning to see.
But that is why such a right is so important. Advocates for same-sex marriage tethered their arguments to a variety of points at the heart of symbols’ power in our national consciousness, but also in the nuts and bolts of social policy. Marriage confers dignity. And that matters when consenting adults proclaim that they want their union to be not just about themselves, but about their role in the community. Marriage confers rights. And that matters when parties to an intimate union require guarantees that they can make medical decisions for one another, more easily buy or dispose of property, and do any of the other countless things that marriage facilitates. Marriage also imposes obligations that follow from rights. And that matters – as certain of the plaintiffs in the cases before the Court made clear – when the well-being of children is at stake. (April DeBoer and Jane Rowse sought marriage rights principally to ensure they can co-adopt the special needs children whom they’re raising.)
Marriage as a symbol matters because it evokes ideas – like dignity, rights, obligations – and carries the power to change how the parties to a marriage think, perceive, and act not just in their intimate lives, but in the public sphere. Denying that symbolic power denies a reality about real peoples’ lives, and that has implications in civil society. We recently have seen – in a tragic way – how denying the symbolic power of a flag allowed us to be surprised by that symbol’s power to spur violence that the better angels of our national communion keep hoping we are moving beyond. Post-Charleston, conversation about a symbol, and re-appropriation of that conversation, is birthing something new. Post-Obergefell, the symbolic power of same-sex couples’ devotion to one another, where they desire it be recognized as pouring forth into formal commitment within civil society, may further reveal what love and commitment can generate – even, if not especially, when it looks different from what we’ve been used to
