(De)Imbricating state law and catholic heritage: contesting same-sex marriage in Argentina

GUADALUPE ALLIONE; JUAN MARCO VAGGIONE

Religion and Nonreligion in Same-Sex Marriage Debates

De Gruyter

Año: 2026; p. 59 - 83

The main purpose of this chapter is to analyze the parliamentary debate during which same-sex marriage was legalized in Argentina to understand it as a new and more radical phase of an older controversy: how the state should regulate sexuality, kinship, and reproduction. This debate opens to a critique of the prevailing religious influences and, as such, it is an important analytical and normative moment about what religion is and is not. Particularly, the chapter considers how the debate strains the frontiers between morality and immorality by disputing the clear lines that separate what is natural and what is historical in marriage as a legal institution.We are interested in delving into the ways religion, nature, and history are produced as imaginaries during the parliamentary debate. Firstly, we ask how the legislators evaluate the impact of religious beliefs during the debate. One characteristic of the debate is that political parties made the decision to allow legislators to vote according to their “conscience”; this created the space to debate the role of religious beliefs as part of lawmaking processes. In this sense, freedom of conscience became a possibility, a shortcut, to include different positions about the place that religious beliefs have and/or should have during legal debates.Secondly, we examine the way that legislators produce narratives on “nature” to justify their own positions on the proposed bill, introduced in 2010 at the National Parliament, to allow same-sex couples to marry. The debate over same-sex marriage is also a debate on the role of nature and reproduction when regulating sexuality. Previously, homosexuality had been defined and regulated as being outside of nature, as the anti-natural, due to the nonreproductive character of the sexual act. Finally, we consider how deputies and senators bring history and temporality to the legal debate to support their position. The recognition of rights for same-sex couples also implied debating the transhistorical character of the sexual order putting the invariability of morality into question.