Gay Marriage

After a prolonged and sometimes fraught debate in the Senate, gay marriage is now all but legal in Argentina. Besides the arguments that this is a step forward for Argentina, now one of ten countries that has legalized same-sex marriage, and the only country in Latin America to have done so, the political power plays that have brought this about are also interesting, as pointed out today by The Economist.

On the one hand, CFK still has to prove that her party has power in an increasingly anti-K environment, and picking the controversial but well-supported same-sex marriage bill was a no-brainer: after the first marriages were approved by judges last year, this was always going to snowball into something bigger.

However, what I find more interesting is what this whole discussion says about the role of the Catholic Church in contemporary Argentine society; it really is in a bit of a muddle at the moment. An eroding institution at best, constantly beset by the charges that afflict Catholicism around the world, the Church is often forced to take unpopular and eventually damaging positions due to its very nature. The march of parents and their children to Congress on Tuesday, organized by the Church to demonstrate the integral family unit, came hot on the heels of violent proclamations of “the devil’s work” in Sunday masses. It also severely disrupted traffic, to the point where my taxi driver at the time dismissed them all as anti-human lunatics who should “burn in hell”.

So the Church picked the side it had to pick, and lost. Just. The vote was close, the arguments were tense; the result is undeniable. The fact is, the Church must have known it was always on to a loser, if not now then later, as it has always known ever since the debates about civil marriages, divorce, etc. A colleague today told me that he had read an article comparing the Church’s arguments against civil marriage, divorce and even female suffrage to the arguments employed recently against same-sex marriage, and said that, word-for-word, they were almost identical. Thus the Church, in what remains an officially and openly Catholic country, must face each fresh advance of progress with the same, weary acceptance of inevitability. The Church does not modernize. The Church does not debate. Therefore, the Church will always lose, bit by bit, until it is no more.