Is Fr. Martin being disingenuous about Pete Buttigieg’s “marriage”?

am afraid the answer to the ques­tion is yes, but first let me fill in the back­ground. What hap­pened is that Trans­porta­tion sec­re­tary Pete Buttigieg was on Fox News with Brett Baier and, dur­ing a con­ver­sa­tion about trav­el expens­es for busi­ness, not­ed that he had often brought his “hus­band” (Chas­ten Glez­man) with him. That prompt­ed Bill Dono­hue to post an entire arti­cle at the Catholic League, deny­ing that Buttigieg has a hus­band. Dono­hue admits that Buttigieg and Glez­man are “legal­ly mar­ried,” but goes on to con­struct an entire­ly ortho­dox nat­ur­al law argu­ment against the pos­si­bil­i­ty that any two men (or two women) could be mar­ried before God.

And it is an argu­ment, I must add, that has sup­port in the pope’s apos­tolic exhor­ta­tion Amor­is Laeti­tia. The pope address­es the prop­er under­stand­ing of mar­riage in § 52 & 251. (I’ve quot­ed these pas­sages many times before at To Give a Defense.)

[O]nly the exclu­sive and indis­sol­u­ble union between a man and a woman has a ple­nary role to play in soci­ety as a sta­ble com­mit­ment that bears fruit in new life. We need to acknowl­edge the great vari­ety of fam­i­ly sit­u­a­tions that can offer a cer­tain sta­bil­i­ty, but de fac­to or same-sex unions, for exam­ple, may not sim­ply be equat­ed with mar­riage [52]

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In dis­cussing the dig­ni­ty and mis­sion of the fam­i­ly, the Syn­od Fathers observed that, “as for pro­pos­als to place unions between homo­sex­u­al per­sons on the same lev­el as mar­riage, there are absolute­ly no grounds for con­sid­er­ing homo­sex­u­al unions to be in any way sim­i­lar or even remote­ly anal­o­gous to God’s plan for mar­riage and fam­i­ly” [251].

But then what hap­pened, four days after Dono­hue’s arti­cle was pub­lished on Jan­u­ary 17, is that Fr. James Mar­tin tweet­ed the sin­gle sen­tence “Pete Buttigieg is mar­ried.”

That’s that! Case closed, ipse dix­it, Mar­t­i­nus locu­ta est. No nuance, no qual­i­fi­ca­tion of it to legal mar­riage (as opposed to sacra­men­tal mar­riage), noth­ing.

And even if Fr. Mar­tin had made such a qual­i­fi­ca­tion, Dono­hue already admit­ted that Buttigieg is “legal­ly mar­ried.” Fr. Mar­t­in’s objec­tion would make no sense. Since the whole point of Dono­hue’s arti­cle was to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between mar­riage in pos­i­tive law and mar­riage in nat­ur­al law, Mar­tin has no basis to object unless he thinks Buttigieg is mar­ried in both sens­es.

Indeed, what Mar­tin cor­rects is Dono­hue’s state­ment that Buttigieg is “legal­ly mar­ried.” Mar­tin sim­ply says, “mar­ried,” tak­ing any and all qual­i­fi­ca­tions away.

But then what hap­pened is that, yes­ter­day, Fr. Mar­tin dis­cov­ered that his tweet had got­ten more than usu­al atten­tion, and he was sur­prised. (Some of Mar­t­in’s polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive crit­ics think he’s only feign­ing sur­prise, but I don’t have rea­son to doubt him. A scan of his tweets shows me that he usu­al­ly gets about 50–100 replies per tweet. His tweet about Buttigieg received over 2,000.) Mar­tin tried to clar­i­fy:

Sur­prised this got so much atten­tion. Like it or not, Pete Buttigieg is legal­ly mar­ried. You may dis­agree with same-sex mar­riage (or not). But @SecretaryPete is mar­ried in the eyes of the state, and his church, as much as any­one else is. To claim oth­er­wise is to ignore real­i­ty.

But again, the arti­cle Mar­tin is respond­ing to already acknowl­edged that Buttigieg is “legal­ly mar­ried.” And although Dono­hue did not bring it up, I doubt he’d dis­pute Buttigieg is also mar­ried “in the eyes of his church.” (Buttigieg is Epis­co­palian.) As near as I can tell, Dono­hue does­n’t “claim oth­er­wise.” So why does Fr. Mar­tin both­er? In his first tweet, Mar­tin removes Dono­hue’s dis­tinc­tion about Buttigieg being “legal­ly” mar­ried; in his sec­ond, he tries to add it back and claim that’s what he meant all the time.

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This whole episode is a per­fect illus­tra­tion of why many peo­ple say that Fr. Mar­tin is disin­gen­u­ous on top­ics like this. He can’t say (not cred­i­bly): Well, you know, of course I accept the Church’s teach­ing about sacra­men­tal mar­riage being only between a man and a woman. But Buttigieg is mar­ried legal­ly and in the view of his church. That’s all I meant. He can’t say that because that’s what Dono­hue already said. Why object?

Fr. Mar­tin is too good a com­mu­ni­ca­tor not to know what he’s doing: He’s attempt­ing to legit­i­mate a union that, in Catholic teach­ing (and Mar­tin is a Catholic priest) is not legit­i­mate. Insist­ing upon dis­tinc­tions that no one is dis­put­ing is just play­ing games. It’s an attempt to have your heresy and eat it too.

I get that Fr. Mar­tin wants LGBT per­sons to be treat­ed with dig­ni­ty equal to that of every­one else. That’s a good and holy thing. But he is also a Catholic priest, and as a Catholic priest, he is oblig­at­ed to defend the Church’s teach­ing. That’s larg­er than just say­ing, from time to time, “Well, of course I sup­port all of it.” He does­n’t have to become a pro­fes­sion­al apol­o­gist, but he does have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to the truth that Christ pro­claimed. And one of those truths is the def­i­n­i­tion of mar­riage: “In the begin­ning he made them male and female” (Matt. 19:4).

Fr. Mar­tin also has the respon­si­bil­i­ty to defend the teach­ing of the Holy Father on this point.

Defense of the dig­ni­ty of LGBT per­sons and defense of the truth are not in con­flict. It is not as though their dig­ni­ty requires Fr. Mar­tin, or myself, or any­one, to tread with light step over what the Church says about mar­riage. Our cul­ture now treats same-sex unions as though they are equal to mar­riage right­ly defined. That makes Church teach­ing more nec­es­sary to defend, not less. You dis­pute the wrong the world defends, you defend the right the world dis­putes. That’s all Dono­hue was doing.