From the WSJ Opinion Archives
HOUSES OF WORSHIP
Yes, Minister
Alanis Morissette can officiate at a friend's wedding. So can I.
Two weeks ago, Cambridge, eager to be the first city in Massachusetts to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple, opened City Hall at midnight.
Outside, breathing the night air on Massachusetts Avenue, were thousands of revelers and well-wishers, a dozen protesters with antigay placards--and, less noticeable, a small group of ministers milling about, handing out fliers.
"Let us unite your lives!" read a salmon-colored sheet I was given. "Two North Carolina wedding ministers--highly qualified. . . . We support civil rights for all and are glad to officiate same sex ceremonies." Listed below was the phone number of the resort on Cape Cod where the ministers could be reached that week. Another flier, distributed by a Unitarian minister, offered three different prices for marriage ceremonies: for a private ceremony, a public ceremony and a public ceremony out of town.
Whatever one thinks of same-sex marriage, it is disturbing that ministers would ever advertise their willingness to marry anybody who could cough up the cash. Marriage is supposed to be a solemn commitment. Doesn't a minister have a responsibility to get to know the couple he or she is marrying, at the very least to make sure they like each other and know what they're getting into? That they don't seem abusive to one another? That they're not trying to, say, merely defeat immigration restrictions?
I have to think that ministers willing to marry gay couples on the fly probably don't do much premarital counseling with straight couples, either. Which might be one reason that heterosexual marriage is in such trouble. I have met rabbis and Catholic priests, too, who do quickie, few-questions-asked weddings. The party atmosphere around gay marriages in Massachusetts might have brought the most shameless hucksters in the ministry out into the public light, but they have been with us all along, marrying anyone who can afford their fees.
In fact, there is really no control over who can administer your vows or sign your license. It's not limited to judges, justices of the peace, trained ministers and the like. I, for example, a free-lance writer and high-school teacher, could marry you and your intended. Recently asked by a couple of friends if I would officiate at their wedding this summer, and knowing that Connecticut allows only justices of the peace and clergy to be officiants, I went online and applied to be a minister of the Universal Life Church, based in Modesto, Calif., which since 1959 has been giving free ordinations by mail (now e-mail) to anyone who applies.
Within 24 hours of filling out a form that asked only for my name and address, I received an e-mail ordaining me and charging me to uphold the church's only teaching: "Do only that which is right." I was now eligible to marry people, the e-mail said.
Because of the separation of church and state, the government will never rule on what is or isn't a proper ordination. You don't have to go to seminary, or even be literate, to be a minister and officiate at a wedding. That's part of what makes America great. But that is also why, for better or worse, many ski instructors and Outward Bound trip leaders are Universal Life Church ministers, so that they can marry people in exotic locales. The rock star Alanis Morissette became a ULC minister to marry friends. If you scan the New York Times wedding pages, the "interfaith ministers" performing marriages are usually with the ULC.
I'm thankful that the government does not regulate ministry. But ministers should still regulate themselves. The ULC basically functions as an ordination mill so that friends can ask friends to perform marriages; but that fact does not exempt me, I believe, from treating the institution of marriage as sacred.
Which is why I wanted to meet several times with the couple I will be marrying, just to talk about what marriage means. I have not been to seminary, and I can't quote much Scripture. But I knew, outside Cambridge City Hall, that something was wrong--not the gay people getting married but the ministers outside, so eager to make a buck, or to make a point, that they had forgotten entirely what God, and their churches, had charged them to do.
Mr. Oppenheimer's book about the bar and bat mitzvah in American culture will be published next year by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
