Let me tell you about one of my best friends.
About two years ago, I was in a really dark place. All I could do to mark the passage of time was to see the shadows cast by the sun as it moved overhead, This friend let me call her and cry even when I couldn't explain what was wrong. She made me promise each night that I would text her in the morning so that she would know I was all right. She watched as I bared the worst parts of myself, and never looked away. All she did was to express her support for me, her confidence that I was a decent person, and her promise that if the world burned down, she would stand in the ashes at the end of it all and still be there for me.
In short, Indigo was the very real, very human and very necessary presence of Christ in my life when I most needed him.
Did I mention that she is gay?
She is not just slightly gay, she is completely gay. She is so gay that she leaves rainbow smudges as she walks down the street, and gets followed by a trail of unicorns even when she goes to Target.
Indigo is not gay by choice. If she were, she would have chosen to stop sometime during the week after her parents discovered that she was gay and put her through hell over it. If she were gay by choice, she would have chosen to stop some time in college when she saw how society provides all sorts of mechanisms for men and women to meet each other and date, but far fewer for gay couples to meet. If she were gay by choice, she would have chosen to be straight all the lonely years of her 20s.
Do you know what Indigo wants more than anything? She wants to be loved She wants to spend her days with someone who loves her, and come home at night to that person. She wants to chase dreams with someone who loves her, have someone there to hold her hand when it gets frightening, to snuggle with for the nice parts, and to make the big decisions for her when the time comes.
She wants the same thing you want. She wants the same thing I want.
Now, morally, according to the Nashville Statement people, what she wants is a horrible thing because Indigo is gay and cannot find that level of connection and intimacy with a man. The Nashville Statement signatories tell her that she needs to be alone, never have sex, and never have the sort of emotionally intimate life partner that they take for granted.
It's not enough for them to say she can't have the sacrament of marriage with another woman. They don't even want her to have the legal protections and benefits of a state-recognized union.
And yet the chief issue for people of faith is not morality but justice. That's the major theme of Scripture. Pursue justice above all else.
And what the signatories of the Nashville Statement are after is not a moral issue, it is a fundamental injustice. As such, it is something I cannot in good conscience as a follower of Christ accede to.
Showing posts with label homosexuality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label homosexuality. Show all posts
Sunday, September 17, 2017
Thursday, September 14, 2017
The Nashville Statement: Two points
There is nothing Christlike about the Nashville Statement. It upholds a code of morality at the cost of people. In Christ we see someone who included people at the expense of a moral code.
It's a bold claim to assert that the Nashville Statement merely repeats what the church has said for 2,000 years. Homosexuality has been a pronounced bugaboo of the Christian Right only since the late 80s and the fall of the Soviet Union.
It's a bold claim to assert that the Nashville Statement merely repeats what the church has said for 2,000 years. Homosexuality has been a pronounced bugaboo of the Christian Right only since the late 80s and the fall of the Soviet Union.
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
Closing the distance
Let it be known that I have far more in common with my gay friends than not.
Like them, I enjoy the pleasures of a good night's sleep, keeping warm during the winter, a nice meal, the presence of loved ones, and the new "Luke Cage" series on Netflix. And let's not forget that I'm also a snazzy dresser. There is much that we share in common; that's why we're friends.
One thing I do not share with them, and never will: I'm not gay. I'm not attracted to other men, and never have been. When I've fallen in love, whether in my teens or in my twenties, my overriding concern has been a fear of rejection, not a fear of discovery. I've never needed to fear for my safety if strangers see me with my partner. No one has ever told me that I'm going to hell for wanting to be with the one I love.
And while adolescence was rough, people generally assumed that I was straight and eventually would find a nice girlfriend, and I did. I never experienced the disorientation that comes from realizing that such fundamental expectations are all wrong. I'm not gay, so all those things are outside my experience.
Thank God for literature. It has the power to close the distance.
A bad book can treat me to an adventure in feudal Japan where all the people talk, behave and interact like 21st-century Americans, right down to their moral sensibilities. An adequate book will at least try to explain feudal Japan and its customs, while a good book will present me with fully realized characters and a setting so that I gain a better understanding of life in feudal Japan.
A truly amazing book is one that not only will help me to understand feudal Japan and the people who lived there, it will give me a personal connection to the era. By the time I'm done reading, I'll have a hunger to know more, and I'll know whether I would be a samurai, a peasant, a ronin or a monk burning incense to the Buddha. Literature can make all these things real and accessible to me.
I can't overstate how important this is. If a book, a movie, a musical, a poem or a song deepens your appreciation of the humanity you share with someone else and it fires a new connection where none had existed, then the creator of that work has accomplished the work of God.
That was my experience with “Fun Home,” a coming-of-age autobiography by artist Alison Bechdel. Originally written in 2006, “Fun Home” depicts Bechdel's childhood growing up in the living quarters of a funeral home, her teen years, and her early adulthood at college and afterward. The book is an odyssey of discovery. Through her experiences, Bechdel comes to understand not only own identity but also that of her father, a distant and inscrutable figure throughout her childhood.
A little over a year-and-a-half ago, my daughter left a copy of “Fun Home” on the kitchen table. It's like she was trying to tell me something. Dad, look! A comic book without a single costumed hero or ridiculous supervillain in sight. You should check this out.
Not only did it avoid superheroes and their melodrama, "Fun Home" was a comic book with a complex plot and complicated characters. In only nine pages, I fell in love with the writing and kept reading until I had finished. As I recall, I didn't leave the bathroom for about two hours.
Not surprisingly, “Fun Home” was adapted for the stage. The show, which won both Tony and Obie awards, opened off-Broadway in 2013 with a script that weaves its way back and forth among the different periods of Bechdel's life, with a few surprises along the way.
Toward the end of the play, when Adult Alison is starting to truly understand her late father, she hears him ask her younger self to join him on a car ride and spend some time together. And then to her wonder, she realizes that Small Alison is no longer on stage; her late father is talking to her. I'm told that the ensuing song, “Telephone Wire,” is considered one of the most moving of the show.
That may be. I haven't listened to the entire cast album, and so I don't know the music particularly well. Still, the one song I do know well is one that affects me powerfully. It's “Ring of Keys.”
In this song the Bechdel character, Small Alison, is in a cafeteria with her father when she sees a masculine-looking woman enter. This stranger is wearing jeans and lace-up boots, instead of properly feminine clothes; and moves with confidence. Small Alison is enraptured with what she sees, and wonders why no one else in the cafeteria responds as she does to this unconventional woman.
“Ring of Keys” isn't a love song. It's a song of recognition. In seeing her, Small Alison for the first time sees something in herself that she had never been able to notice before, because it never occurred to her that it could be there. For the first time in her life, it hits her that she is not the prototypical girl of tea parties and fancy dresses. She's different. She's like this woman.
For all that I have in common with my gay friends, associates and colleagues, I'm not gay. A physical or romantic attraction to another man is something I've never known, which means that there are sizeable pieces of the gay experience that I'll never share.
I make what bridges I can. At times I've had a front-row seat to the misery they've endured when they've come out of the closet and been rejected, and I've invited them to come to my home and join my family. I've witnessed their hurt when lawmakers and Christians have proclaimed a moral right and obligation to deny them a place at the marriage table, and I've screamed like hell to fight for them.
But I've never understood how liberating it must be to have that moment of self-discovery when they discover the missing piece and unlock the secret of how they are different. That essential piece of the gay experience in America has always been foreign to me. It never even occurred to me.
“Ring of Keys” changes that. The song helps me to get it. I listen, and I'm able to perceive and to understand that aha! moment, and through that discovery, I enjoy our common humanity anew, through an experience I can't relate to. It's a wonderfully moving and deeply humbling encounter.
Just think how much of our conflict and division we could resolve, if only we made the effort to listen to one another, especially when we can't relate.
Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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Like them, I enjoy the pleasures of a good night's sleep, keeping warm during the winter, a nice meal, the presence of loved ones, and the new "Luke Cage" series on Netflix. And let's not forget that I'm also a snazzy dresser. There is much that we share in common; that's why we're friends.
One thing I do not share with them, and never will: I'm not gay. I'm not attracted to other men, and never have been. When I've fallen in love, whether in my teens or in my twenties, my overriding concern has been a fear of rejection, not a fear of discovery. I've never needed to fear for my safety if strangers see me with my partner. No one has ever told me that I'm going to hell for wanting to be with the one I love.
And while adolescence was rough, people generally assumed that I was straight and eventually would find a nice girlfriend, and I did. I never experienced the disorientation that comes from realizing that such fundamental expectations are all wrong. I'm not gay, so all those things are outside my experience.
Thank God for literature. It has the power to close the distance.
A bad book can treat me to an adventure in feudal Japan where all the people talk, behave and interact like 21st-century Americans, right down to their moral sensibilities. An adequate book will at least try to explain feudal Japan and its customs, while a good book will present me with fully realized characters and a setting so that I gain a better understanding of life in feudal Japan.
A truly amazing book is one that not only will help me to understand feudal Japan and the people who lived there, it will give me a personal connection to the era. By the time I'm done reading, I'll have a hunger to know more, and I'll know whether I would be a samurai, a peasant, a ronin or a monk burning incense to the Buddha. Literature can make all these things real and accessible to me.
I can't overstate how important this is. If a book, a movie, a musical, a poem or a song deepens your appreciation of the humanity you share with someone else and it fires a new connection where none had existed, then the creator of that work has accomplished the work of God.
A little over a year-and-a-half ago, my daughter left a copy of “Fun Home” on the kitchen table. It's like she was trying to tell me something. Dad, look! A comic book without a single costumed hero or ridiculous supervillain in sight. You should check this out.
Not only did it avoid superheroes and their melodrama, "Fun Home" was a comic book with a complex plot and complicated characters. In only nine pages, I fell in love with the writing and kept reading until I had finished. As I recall, I didn't leave the bathroom for about two hours.
Not surprisingly, “Fun Home” was adapted for the stage. The show, which won both Tony and Obie awards, opened off-Broadway in 2013 with a script that weaves its way back and forth among the different periods of Bechdel's life, with a few surprises along the way.
Toward the end of the play, when Adult Alison is starting to truly understand her late father, she hears him ask her younger self to join him on a car ride and spend some time together. And then to her wonder, she realizes that Small Alison is no longer on stage; her late father is talking to her. I'm told that the ensuing song, “Telephone Wire,” is considered one of the most moving of the show.
That may be. I haven't listened to the entire cast album, and so I don't know the music particularly well. Still, the one song I do know well is one that affects me powerfully. It's “Ring of Keys.”
In this song the Bechdel character, Small Alison, is in a cafeteria with her father when she sees a masculine-looking woman enter. This stranger is wearing jeans and lace-up boots, instead of properly feminine clothes; and moves with confidence. Small Alison is enraptured with what she sees, and wonders why no one else in the cafeteria responds as she does to this unconventional woman.
“Ring of Keys” isn't a love song. It's a song of recognition. In seeing her, Small Alison for the first time sees something in herself that she had never been able to notice before, because it never occurred to her that it could be there. For the first time in her life, it hits her that she is not the prototypical girl of tea parties and fancy dresses. She's different. She's like this woman.
For all that I have in common with my gay friends, associates and colleagues, I'm not gay. A physical or romantic attraction to another man is something I've never known, which means that there are sizeable pieces of the gay experience that I'll never share.
I make what bridges I can. At times I've had a front-row seat to the misery they've endured when they've come out of the closet and been rejected, and I've invited them to come to my home and join my family. I've witnessed their hurt when lawmakers and Christians have proclaimed a moral right and obligation to deny them a place at the marriage table, and I've screamed like hell to fight for them.
But I've never understood how liberating it must be to have that moment of self-discovery when they discover the missing piece and unlock the secret of how they are different. That essential piece of the gay experience in America has always been foreign to me. It never even occurred to me.
“Ring of Keys” changes that. The song helps me to get it. I listen, and I'm able to perceive and to understand that aha! moment, and through that discovery, I enjoy our common humanity anew, through an experience I can't relate to. It's a wonderfully moving and deeply humbling encounter.
Just think how much of our conflict and division we could resolve, if only we made the effort to listen to one another, especially when we can't relate.
Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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Saturday, April 27, 2013
Stand with the Outcast
It is a horrible thing to demean someone because you don't like her religious beliefs. It is a horrible thing to demean someone because you don't like what you assume her religious beliefs to be. Religion is one of those things that define us as individuals and as communities. Belittle a person's faith, and you are not only belittling and demeaning them, you are belittling something that defines them, inspires them, and connects them not only to the Transcendent but to the teeming masses of humanity.
Mocking that, belittling that, or discriminating against a person because of their religious beliefs is wrong, wrong, wrong. I wish everyone could see that.
Which is what makes what is happening in Washington state right now so aggravating.
Washington state Sen. Sharnon Brown (R-Kennewick) is sponsoring a bill that would grant an exemption to the state's anti-discrimination laws, so that business owners could refuse to serve customers if doing so would violate their religious principles. As reported by Rachel La Corte of the Associated Press, the bill has its genesis in a lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union has filed against florist Barronelle Stutzman.
Stutzman, you may recall, made national news on March 1 when she refused to provide flowers for a same-sex wedding, because she believes homosexuality to be sinful, and gay marriage immoral. (Stutzman has told TV station KEPR that she is a Christian. I regret that this disclosure does not surprise me.)
Of the law that Stutzman ran afoul of, and that Brown is trying to amend, Joseph Backholm, executive director of the Family Policy Institute of Washington state put it like this: "The government is now saying if you have a conviction about an issue that we happen to disagree with, then you as a business owner are going to be fined or shut down because of that. People should and do have the right to their own convictions."
Well, yes; people do have a right to their convictions. There is nothing in the law that says that people can't have their convictions. Our Constitution guarantees all of us the right to our convictions, and even our right to express those convictions. That's a cornerstone of our free society, and it's been put to the test repeatedly; only last year, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of Westboro Baptist Church to proclaim its virulent hatred of gays even at funerals.
It's really hard not to appreciate the irony here, that Brown essentially is arguing that Stutzman has a right to discriminate against gays and lesbians, and that denying her this right is discriminatory. But let's be clear about this: No one's convictions give them the right to decide who they'll do business with. If Stutzman and her attorney want to argue that she has that right, then they're on shaky ground. Deep-South segregationists also wanted to decide whom they would and wouldn't do business with, and they also claimed that their convictions were based in Scripture.
I'm also really curious to know what Bible Stutzman and her supporters are reading from that give divine sanction to take this stand. It's safe to say that Jesus encourages his followers to stand by their convictions, but it's also plain to see that the most basic conviction Jesus wants us to have is one of compassion.
See a man who's blind, heal him. Bump into a woman who has been bleeding for years, then you not only heal her, but you also stop and pay a little attention to her. Hug a leper, commend the faith of a heretic, eat and drink with gluttons and drunkards, love the hookers, and welcome the outcasts. Whatever Jesus' view on the righteousness of any given behavior, the gospels make one thing clear time and time again: Jesus valued people more than he was bothered by their sin.
It's worth noting that there was one group in the gospels that was really offended by the sins the people committed, and they were shocked that Jesus allowed sinners to come near him. They would go to great lengths to make sure that people knew what God thought of their sin, so that they could repent and be forgiven. I suspect they would approve of Stutzman's decision not to serve a gay couple.
This group was called the Pharisees, and Jesus had some harsh words for them. Their words were even harsher; and, in the end, they had him killed.
Perhaps no one gets to the heart of the issue like Victoria Childress. Back in 2011, Childress, who runs a bakery from her Iowa home, refused to sell a wedding cake to a lesbian couple. As she explained to KCCI-TV, "It is my right, and it's not to discriminate against them. It's not so much to do with them, it's to do with me and my walk with God and what I will answer [to] him for."
Exactly. Christians believe that we ultimately will stand before God and have to answer for the choices we made, including the choice to devalue the worth of another human being because we don't approve of their lifestyle, exactly the choice that Jesus rejected, and exactly the choice he castigated the Pharisees for making.
Discrimination is wrong. Cloaking it in the mantle of religion and claiming divine sanction for it is even worse. We need to stop justifying morally reprehensible behavior, and we need to hold accountable those who want it to be legal.
Copyright © 2013 by David Learn. Used with permission. All rights reserved.
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Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Open Letter to Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council
I was always under the impressions that the bullies were the ones who excluded other people. As my parents taught me when I was younger, those who stand up for the rights of those being excluded are the ones we should respect.
If the Boy Scouts want to continue a national policy of excluding gays from membership and leadership positions, by all means, let them do so. It tarnishes their reputation, it cheapens their claims to be a place for boys to grow into mature role models, and it puts them on the same side of history as men like George Wallace and Laurie Pritchett, men who also argued that discrimination was morally superior to inclusion and upholding human worth. It's not a choice I would make, but it's their choice.
I'm encouraged that the Boy Scouts are reconsidering their national ban on gay members and might be willing to leave it to individual troops to decide to permit openly gay men to serve in Scouts, based on the views of their sponsoring organizations.
The Scouts can and do accomplish a lot of good things for the children and teens who belong to their troops, but it's despite that ban, not because of it. It's time to do right on this issue as well.
David Learn
Copyright © 2013 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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Wednesday, February 15, 2012
open letter to n.j. gov. chris christie
Dear Gov. Christie:
The New Jersey Assembly today is expected to pass legislation that would legalize same-sex marriage in New Jersey. As a person of faith, I am writing to urge you to sign this bill into law once it reaches your desk. Please do not veto it.
I've enjoyed the emotional intimacy and support of my wife for the past 13 years, through good times and bad, and I see no reason that my gay neighbors, relatives and friends should not receive these same benefits under New Jersey law -- including the benefit of calling one another "husband" and "wife," and not just merely "domestic partner."
I realize that you believe this is something that should be put to the general public in a referendum. With all due respect, though, Mr. Christie, this is wrong. Civil rights are neither granted nor denied according to mass consent. They are, as our nation's founders wrote, "endowed by our Creator" and they are inalienable.
Thomas Jefferson even listed among our most basic rights the pursuit of happiness, which for our gay neighbors, friends and relatives is obstructed by our state's refusal to recognize the dignity and value of their relationships with the designation of marriage. The duty of your office is to lead the way in seeing that these rights are upheld, not to defer those rights to the vox populi.
While our religious communities should be free to define and recognize marriage according to the context of their respective religious frameworks, one of the great strengths of our society is that it is nonsectarian, and is not governed by any ideology save a pluralist celebration of our differences. In that vein, and as a person of deep faith myself, I call upon you to sign the bill when it comes to your desk, and not to veto it.
David Learn
The New Jersey Assembly today is expected to pass legislation that would legalize same-sex marriage in New Jersey. As a person of faith, I am writing to urge you to sign this bill into law once it reaches your desk. Please do not veto it.
I've enjoyed the emotional intimacy and support of my wife for the past 13 years, through good times and bad, and I see no reason that my gay neighbors, relatives and friends should not receive these same benefits under New Jersey law -- including the benefit of calling one another "husband" and "wife," and not just merely "domestic partner."
I realize that you believe this is something that should be put to the general public in a referendum. With all due respect, though, Mr. Christie, this is wrong. Civil rights are neither granted nor denied according to mass consent. They are, as our nation's founders wrote, "endowed by our Creator" and they are inalienable.
Thomas Jefferson even listed among our most basic rights the pursuit of happiness, which for our gay neighbors, friends and relatives is obstructed by our state's refusal to recognize the dignity and value of their relationships with the designation of marriage. The duty of your office is to lead the way in seeing that these rights are upheld, not to defer those rights to the vox populi.
While our religious communities should be free to define and recognize marriage according to the context of their respective religious frameworks, one of the great strengths of our society is that it is nonsectarian, and is not governed by any ideology save a pluralist celebration of our differences. In that vein, and as a person of deep faith myself, I call upon you to sign the bill when it comes to your desk, and not to veto it.
David Learn
Monday, September 01, 2008
On the Metropolitan Community Church and being different
For those who have never heard of it, the MCC is a Protestant denomination that identifies itself with the gay, lesbian and transgendered Christian community. It's a place for people who are outcast because of their sexuality or gender identity can find shelter from the storm and be welcome.
My friend Shelly, who is transgendered, visited one on Sunday morning that is local to her. I've never been to one, but I like what she has to say:
I also remember when younger all the hostility aimed at Metropolitan Community Church and the "gay Christians" who obviously were so deluded, as they were described in my evangelical circles. When I was there, all I heard was people who put God first and considered themselves humbly and really sought to be Christlike and accepting of wherever God put them. It didn't sound any different in terms of "kingdom living" than the conservatives who had good hearts, despite any theological differences.
I think the MCC church, however, understands suffering and sacrifice in ways that I never quite felt like the middle-class white evangelicals do. When you're found yourself rejected and abused and put down because of who you are and feel you can't change, when you feel constantly excluded because of what you've determined after years is your identity, you either become insanely bitter or you learn how to minister to the broken-hearted and hurting without judgment. These people were not bitter; they really found joy in knowing God.
This is a church that does sound like it has something real to offer even us straight folks -- if we're willing to listen.
Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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Monday, April 28, 2008
clobber passage
There's a place or two in the New Testament where the Apostle Paul takes it upon himself to compile a list of human behaviors in an attempt to show that no one reasonably can expect to get into heaven by virtue of good behavior.
These passages, particularly in Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6, are known in the gay community as "clobber passages." It's not hard to understand why. If you've been around evangelicals enough, you've probably seen them wielded more than once like a club in the hands of a caveman.
It's something about the human condition; we like to believe that we're more moral than another group, whether it's gays, Republicans, evangelicals, or Muslims. So we find a passage of Scripture, pop culture, or philosophy, and we lift it up in the air and bellow, and we start swinging it.
The bellow is what gets everyone's attention. It's a bestial sort of sound, coming from the throat of someone who's not quite evolved enough to handle human speech.
It's a cry of loathing, meant to alert everyone that a monster has entered our midst and needs to be put down immediately. Before long, that club comes crashing down on the skull of its victim not once, not twice, but as many times as it takes to bring the brute down.
It's a hideous thing to see, and no matter what group you belong to, you've seen the horror visited upon your own group. The loss is that Christians recognize when pop culture is clobbering them, but not when they themselves are clobbering someone else; and vice versa. I've seen a number of people slam Christians down with rather crude and unwarranted caricatures. Lost in this quest for monsters to destroy is the irony that the monster lies in all of us and how we treat those who differ from us.
Today I had the ironic task of reading one of these clobber passages in church.
Apparently people in church like it when I read Scripture. I do try to avoid the dry matter-of-fact readings we usually hear, where the reader could be reading "War and Peace" by candlelight or zipping through the shopping list at the Kroger's.
I read passages with intonation, add gestures when appropriate, and even change my voice to reflect a change in speakers. Maybe I make God's words sound more plausible than usual, I don't know, but last week I was asked if I would mind doing this on a regular basis.
Today, when I was asked to read the famous clobber passage from 1 Corinthians 6:9-20, I choked. A good friend of mine is a lesbian, and I know how badly people have beaten her with this passage from a misguided sense of what love is. Former co-workers of mine who were gay kept their distance from me for the longest time because they knew that I was a Christian, and they'd long had their fill of Christians who "hated the sin but loved the sinner."
How can you read something like this in church without feeling like you're contributing to the pain your gay brothers and sisters suffer every time the subject comes up of how their chosen lifestyle is in direct rebellion against God?
I read it, and then stewed in my seat for the first half of the sermon as the preacher answered this week's "Tough Question" about the reaction Christians should have to homosexuality and homosexuals.
No, Sodom was not destroyed because there was gay sex going on. Ezekiel 16 is pretty clear that cruelty and inhospitality were the main offenses. Certainly raping visitors to the city isn't exactly the most welcoming act the city aldermen could have come up with -- but it has as much in common with homosexuality as men in prison raping newcomers to humiliate and degrade them. It's about power and dominance, not about the sex.
A lot of my attention at this point was consumed with thoughts of how I would explain my decision not to leave the church if I ever ran for president, but there was a ray of light. The preacher challenged everyone present: "No one in the gay community has any doubt what Christians think about homosexuality. What we're missing is showing them God's love."
He even got specific that he wasn't talking about a general sort of "Gosh, we love you" sentiment, but actual tangible actions: attending a Gay Pride parade, for example, to give cold water to people. Or being friends with people and not letting it affect you one way or the other what their sexual orientation is.
Damn straight. Jesus -- and I know this will come as a shock to some -- Jesus wasn't a moralist. He wasn't about telling people how to behave, and he didn't give us a list of rules to follow if we wanted to please God. What he said was pretty simple: "I'm the Lord. Follow me."
Wish I'd hear more of that and less of people being clobbered.
Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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These passages, particularly in Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6, are known in the gay community as "clobber passages." It's not hard to understand why. If you've been around evangelicals enough, you've probably seen them wielded more than once like a club in the hands of a caveman.
It's something about the human condition; we like to believe that we're more moral than another group, whether it's gays, Republicans, evangelicals, or Muslims. So we find a passage of Scripture, pop culture, or philosophy, and we lift it up in the air and bellow, and we start swinging it.
The bellow is what gets everyone's attention. It's a bestial sort of sound, coming from the throat of someone who's not quite evolved enough to handle human speech.
It's a cry of loathing, meant to alert everyone that a monster has entered our midst and needs to be put down immediately. Before long, that club comes crashing down on the skull of its victim not once, not twice, but as many times as it takes to bring the brute down.
It's a hideous thing to see, and no matter what group you belong to, you've seen the horror visited upon your own group. The loss is that Christians recognize when pop culture is clobbering them, but not when they themselves are clobbering someone else; and vice versa. I've seen a number of people slam Christians down with rather crude and unwarranted caricatures. Lost in this quest for monsters to destroy is the irony that the monster lies in all of us and how we treat those who differ from us.
Today I had the ironic task of reading one of these clobber passages in church.
Apparently people in church like it when I read Scripture. I do try to avoid the dry matter-of-fact readings we usually hear, where the reader could be reading "War and Peace" by candlelight or zipping through the shopping list at the Kroger's.
I read passages with intonation, add gestures when appropriate, and even change my voice to reflect a change in speakers. Maybe I make God's words sound more plausible than usual, I don't know, but last week I was asked if I would mind doing this on a regular basis.
Today, when I was asked to read the famous clobber passage from 1 Corinthians 6:9-20, I choked. A good friend of mine is a lesbian, and I know how badly people have beaten her with this passage from a misguided sense of what love is. Former co-workers of mine who were gay kept their distance from me for the longest time because they knew that I was a Christian, and they'd long had their fill of Christians who "hated the sin but loved the sinner."
How can you read something like this in church without feeling like you're contributing to the pain your gay brothers and sisters suffer every time the subject comes up of how their chosen lifestyle is in direct rebellion against God?
I read it, and then stewed in my seat for the first half of the sermon as the preacher answered this week's "Tough Question" about the reaction Christians should have to homosexuality and homosexuals.
No, Sodom was not destroyed because there was gay sex going on. Ezekiel 16 is pretty clear that cruelty and inhospitality were the main offenses. Certainly raping visitors to the city isn't exactly the most welcoming act the city aldermen could have come up with -- but it has as much in common with homosexuality as men in prison raping newcomers to humiliate and degrade them. It's about power and dominance, not about the sex.
A lot of my attention at this point was consumed with thoughts of how I would explain my decision not to leave the church if I ever ran for president, but there was a ray of light. The preacher challenged everyone present: "No one in the gay community has any doubt what Christians think about homosexuality. What we're missing is showing them God's love."
He even got specific that he wasn't talking about a general sort of "Gosh, we love you" sentiment, but actual tangible actions: attending a Gay Pride parade, for example, to give cold water to people. Or being friends with people and not letting it affect you one way or the other what their sexual orientation is.
Damn straight. Jesus -- and I know this will come as a shock to some -- Jesus wasn't a moralist. He wasn't about telling people how to behave, and he didn't give us a list of rules to follow if we wanted to please God. What he said was pretty simple: "I'm the Lord. Follow me."
Wish I'd hear more of that and less of people being clobbered.
Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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Monday, July 09, 2007
ups unfair to same-sex couples
When New Jersey recognized same-sex civil unions, the language of the law specified that couples in a civil union had all the same rights and privileges of married couples. All that was different is the term. Pretty clear, right?
Not to UPS. The delivery service has decided that it is not going to extend health benefits to couples in civil unions, because the law doesn't require it. Any such policy, it argues, would require concessions at the collective bargaining table.
So let's get this straight: The law doesn't apply if we don't want it to, and even if the law didn't say point-blank what it says in black and white, we still can use the letter of the law to disregard its spirit, and save money by not doing the right thing.
I'm done with UPS until they set things right.
Not to UPS. The delivery service has decided that it is not going to extend health benefits to couples in civil unions, because the law doesn't require it. Any such policy, it argues, would require concessions at the collective bargaining table.
So let's get this straight: The law doesn't apply if we don't want it to, and even if the law didn't say point-blank what it says in black and white, we still can use the letter of the law to disregard its spirit, and save money by not doing the right thing.
I'm done with UPS until they set things right.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
What little girls are made of: sugar and soy, unlike boys
I've heard a lot of weird things claims about what "makes" people gay.
The list has included a lack of sports, certain TV shows and movies, distant fathers, distant mothers, overly close fathers, overly close mothers, sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, no discipline, sexual curiosity and experimentation, overly strict religious upbringing, overly lax religious upbringing, genetics, environment, the erosion of traditional gender roles, exposure to Broadway music, participation in ballet, being a sensitive artistic sort, leg hair, and lack of friendships growing up.
Never have I heard someone pin it on diet. Until now.
Apparently, America's growing desire for health food is turning us into a soy bean Sodom. So says Jim Rutza at World Net Daily.
Soy beans. You just can't make this stuff up.
The list has included a lack of sports, certain TV shows and movies, distant fathers, distant mothers, overly close fathers, overly close mothers, sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, no discipline, sexual curiosity and experimentation, overly strict religious upbringing, overly lax religious upbringing, genetics, environment, the erosion of traditional gender roles, exposure to Broadway music, participation in ballet, being a sensitive artistic sort, leg hair, and lack of friendships growing up.
Never have I heard someone pin it on diet. Until now.
Apparently, America's growing desire for health food is turning us into a soy bean Sodom. So says Jim Rutza at World Net Daily.
Soy beans. You just can't make this stuff up.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Doing the math and getting the social nature of relationships
Picture the beginning where boy meets girl. We'll call this Point A. A little over the X-axis and a little farther up on the Y-axis is when they fall in love. We'll call this Point B. A little more to the right, a little farther up, they get serious and become a couple.
Once you calculate the slope, you can find other points on the line: the first time they kiss, when they meet one another's parents, when they marry and so on. It's so simple and so straightforward, it's a linear progression,
It was like that for me and my wife. We met Homecoming weekend at my alma mater in fall 1994, a little more than two years after I had graduated. Point A.
We bumped into each other a few more times over the course of the school year, mostly because I lived in the city where the college was located, and the following June our relationship had its proper beginning as a romantic one. Point B. Three years later we married, and now here we are.
Of course it's not that simple. I never realized just what into forming that linear progression until a friend of mine spelled it out recently, My friend Liadan is gay, and only recently found a romantic partner. Here are her observations:
Before all this happened, I had no idea that relationships between two people would involve so much strategy and networking on the part of so many other people. It struck me during all this how... social dating is. It's not just about the two people involved; all these social connections are intertwined based on who knows who and what their relation to each other is. It's hard for me to conceptualize, being someone who builds friendships one by one, but there it is in all its six-degrees-of-separation glory: society.
In this sense, gay marriage bans can be constructed as an attempt to exclude gay people and their relationships from the community, partly to delegitimize them, since relationships outside the general social network and the auspices of legal obligation can be seen as less "real", and partly to make it harder for them to exist at all-- I wouldn't have known Iris even existed were it not for the people I knew that did know her, and it wouldn't have gotten to even this tentative stage were it not for the encouragement and social support of my friends. (I was frequently threatened with bodily harm for being
waffly on sending the invitations.)
I didn't meet the woman who would be my wife until I was 24. During the long years before then, people reassured me I just hadn't met the right woman yet, and obviously that's true. I just never considered the social network that was required for meeting her.
Let's break this down. I didn't just happen to be at my alma mater that Homecoming weekend. I was there specifically because of social connections I had made in college that I was planning to draw on that evening. I was visiting a chapter meeting of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students because of a social network I had built in college. When none of the people I knew arrived, I stuck around because of a tenuous relationship I'd established with one student who was there.
Secondly, I continued to return to campus that academic year because of the ties I had there as an alumnus and as a former member of a social organization on campus. In fact it was because of Kirby House that I returned to campus as often as I did, and continued to come into contact with Natasha, who was friends with two of the new Kirbs I had met independently and hit it off with.
The third point of contact was an explicitly social event, organized by an acquaintance of mine who invited me. Her roommate was friends with Natasha, and invited her. And lastly of course a friend of mine pushed me to take the risk and ask her on a date.
It was this vast web of social contacts that made our relationship possible, a web where heterosexual relationships are accepted as the norm. We didn't just meet and become attached. We had a social network facilitating the relatonship at every step of the way, deliberately or not, and providing us with repeated opportunities to interact and then to pursue a romantic relationship with one another.
And realizing all the advantages that even I had at my disposal for finding a romantic life partner, I suddenly have a sense of what the absence of such a network would mean to a gay person like Liadan.
Liadan has a network of friends, but in networks where being gay is considered abnormal, immoral or weird, finding someone to be with can be a problem. People who assume that you're straight won't make a point of introducing you to their single gay friend whom they also assume is straight.
Thanks to hurtful stereotypes of gays, in fact, they might not introduce you to anyone, if they do find out that you're gay. They may even stop seeing you and either cut you out of their circle of friends, or encourage others to cut you out as well. The effect is to leave the gay person isolated and removed from the social networks that people rely on for regular day-to-day living and company.
The odds of finding a partner were in my favor just by the numbers. It's socially expected to be straight and it's also more common. Only about 6 percent of the population is gay, which means that of 100 hundred people I might have in my extended network, about 47 of them are going to be heterosexual women. In a population that same size, Liadan might have found three gay women, including the possibility that some or all of them remain in the closet.
That crowd will shrink a bit once we eliminate women who already are in relationships, but it still easily may end in the teens or twenties. Pairing off with one of them doesn't end the social network. If anything, it brings it together as two formerly separate groups grow increasingly intertwined as they interact with the new couple.
Liadan's potential matches easily could drop from three to zero. If she connects with someone and word gets out that they're a couple, their social network could grow closer. In more conservative areas, the trend is for it to get smaller as people cut off contact with them.
Now there are social networks and structures intended specifically for gays to meet one another and to socialize, but they exist as a subculture that the larger society often considers deviant and unhealthy. Until the 1970s they were illegal, and even now they may still be targeted for other social ills like drug use, depending on the biases of the police and the community.
The single gay or lesbian can look for a partner at gay bars, gay clubs or other establishments aimed at the LGBTQ community, but there are risks even without raids. If a single gay person is still in the closet, she can run afoul of her community's censure and disapproval once she is seen at a gay-friendly establishment. She could lose family, friends, social outlets like church and even her job, since many states offer no protection against wrongful termination for gay workers.
There's also an increased risk of abuse or being played. When I called Natasha and even when I first met her, there were other people around who knew her and who would watch out for her interests. Until she felt comfortable with me, there were a dozen people or more whom she could call and check with to see if I was safe or had a bad reputation. A person entering a gay bar, or visiting a club often is going to lack those resources.
In other words, not only do our social norms make it harder for gays and lesbians to find partners, we push them to find alternatives that aren't as safe, and then punish them heavily if they find a way to balance the scales. By getting together with someone they love, they risk losing social standing, good-paying jobs and the relationships they've had their whole lives with church, with family and with friends.
And the message from the churches that push this sort of ostracism is "We're doing it because we love you."
I don't know how we live with ourselves.
Copyright © 2006 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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Thursday, October 05, 2006
The shamelessness of Mark Foley
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm outraged that Mark Foley is trying to play the gay card right now.
After all, didn't he resign under a cloud of scandal for sending inappropriate e-mail to congressional pages? What's the message he's trying to send here, "Don't blame me for chasing underage males; I couldn't help it, I'm gay"? If he had sent explicit messages to female pages, would he have asked his attorney to announce that he's heterosexual? Good grief.
The issue isn't that he's gay. The issue is that he allegedly was sending explicit e-mail to male pages. That's it. Trying to give this the "I'm a victim, feel sorry for me" spin is shameful, and it should be offensive to every other gay man and woman in this country, since he's essentially saying that being gay made him sexually predatory.
It seems in some ways like Foley's trying to follow the lead of former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevy, who managed to turn his resignation two years ago into "I had to resign because I'm gay" rather than "I had to resign because I used my position as New Jersey governor to grant my lover a Cabinet-level position he wasn't qualified for."
I know from the misery that some of my friends have gone through that being closeted is hell, and that being open about a gay sexual orientation often isn't much better, and I'm sure that having to live in the closet -- particularly for a public figure -- is unimaginably worse. But let's not use sexual orientation as an excuse for criminal behavior. That's just an insult.
Copyright © 2006 by David Learn. Used with permission.
(Whaddya know: The Palm Beach Post agrees with me.)
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Friday, September 30, 2005
what the --?
Ontario Christian Schools in California reportedly has expelled a student because her parents are gay.
Not all that surprisingly, the school has a FAQ posted about the situation where they expelled her. Having read their FAQ, I suppose I can understand where they're coming from -- they say it's because they're partners with the family in educating the child, and a same-sex couple is contrary to what they want from their partner, morally and spiritually speakings -- but I have to say I disagree with the decision. Not just because it appears as though they're treating homosexuality as a worse sin than others, but because I feel they're missing something essential in the character of Christ. He was someone who welcomed sinners freely to his company, and I can't see any evidence in the gospels that he insisted they start cleaning up their act either before they came to him, or afterward. People did that on their own.
Ontario Christian School has chosen to set a purity bar for people to be members of their school community, and they've defined it in such a way that they're saying the parents are members of the community as much as the child, and therefore the decision is made to remove them from the community. Although I'm sure this is a legally defensible position, I don't think it's particularly Christlike, especially since the punishment is being meted out on the student. They can regret that the parents' behavior forced the school into this action, but unless that regret finds outward expression in action, I don't think it counts as more than a semantics exercise, similar to the president's "I take full responsibility."
A private school is free to set criteria for admission, of course; usually these are academic in nature, although I'm aware that some Christian schools use a faith-based screen in order to minimize secular or un-Christian influences. That, I suppose, depends on the guiding philosophy of the individual school, which may or may not be hideously flawed.
Not all that surprisingly, the school has a FAQ posted about the situation where they expelled her. Having read their FAQ, I suppose I can understand where they're coming from -- they say it's because they're partners with the family in educating the child, and a same-sex couple is contrary to what they want from their partner, morally and spiritually speakings -- but I have to say I disagree with the decision. Not just because it appears as though they're treating homosexuality as a worse sin than others, but because I feel they're missing something essential in the character of Christ. He was someone who welcomed sinners freely to his company, and I can't see any evidence in the gospels that he insisted they start cleaning up their act either before they came to him, or afterward. People did that on their own.
Ontario Christian School has chosen to set a purity bar for people to be members of their school community, and they've defined it in such a way that they're saying the parents are members of the community as much as the child, and therefore the decision is made to remove them from the community. Although I'm sure this is a legally defensible position, I don't think it's particularly Christlike, especially since the punishment is being meted out on the student. They can regret that the parents' behavior forced the school into this action, but unless that regret finds outward expression in action, I don't think it counts as more than a semantics exercise, similar to the president's "I take full responsibility."
A private school is free to set criteria for admission, of course; usually these are academic in nature, although I'm aware that some Christian schools use a faith-based screen in order to minimize secular or un-Christian influences. That, I suppose, depends on the guiding philosophy of the individual school, which may or may not be hideously flawed.
But basing a student's enrollment on the PARENTS' morality seems wrongheaded to me. Expelling a student already admitted because of something that hasn't changed is just plain wrong.
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
Sodom and Gomorrah, and gay marriage
Sodom and Gomorrah weren't destroyed because there were homosexuals there. They weren't destroyed even because all but five of the men who lived there were gay. (As a point of order, I feel I must point out that we don't know how many men and women who lived there were gay. The Bible doesn't address it.)
Here's what God provides as the reason for Sodom's destruction, as recorded in Ezekiel 16:48-50.
Even looking at the Genesis account of Sodom's sin in the case of the angels who visited Lot, you can see this. Yes, the Sodomites tell Lot to bring the men out so that they can lie with them, but that's not just gay sex -- that's gay rape, a wholly different matter from consensual sex, and certainly in line with a charge of cruelty to foreigners and strangers.
There's a Talmudic tradition that explains neatly what a sodomite is. The man who says "What's mine is yours, and what's yours is yours" is a saint. The man who says "What's mine is yours and what's yours is mine" is a simpleton. And the man who says "What's mine is mine and what's yours is yours" is a sodomite.
If we're concerned about God judging America, perhaps we need to be less concerned with how non-Christians behave in their bedrooms, and start thinking more about how our own behavior within the Church squares up against God's standards and the call Christ puts on those who presume to call themselves his followers. The harshest words in Scripture aren't for the unbelievers or those outside the Kingdom of God. It's for those of us who identify ourselves by his name and claim to be part of the kingdom.
Here's what God provides as the reason for Sodom's destruction, as recorded in Ezekiel 16:48-50.
48As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, your sister Sodom and her daughters never did what you and your daughters have done.If homosexuality is the "detestable" practice in question, I think it's worth noting that it's the last of several reasons given for God's judgment, after sins like arrogance, gluttony, apathy and indifference to the plight of the poor. In fact, pride is mentioned twice -- cf. the "haughty" charge -- suggesting that was the main offense.
49"'Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.
50"They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen."
Even looking at the Genesis account of Sodom's sin in the case of the angels who visited Lot, you can see this. Yes, the Sodomites tell Lot to bring the men out so that they can lie with them, but that's not just gay sex -- that's gay rape, a wholly different matter from consensual sex, and certainly in line with a charge of cruelty to foreigners and strangers.
There's a Talmudic tradition that explains neatly what a sodomite is. The man who says "What's mine is yours, and what's yours is yours" is a saint. The man who says "What's mine is yours and what's yours is mine" is a simpleton. And the man who says "What's mine is mine and what's yours is yours" is a sodomite.
If we're concerned about God judging America, perhaps we need to be less concerned with how non-Christians behave in their bedrooms, and start thinking more about how our own behavior within the Church squares up against God's standards and the call Christ puts on those who presume to call themselves his followers. The harshest words in Scripture aren't for the unbelievers or those outside the Kingdom of God. It's for those of us who identify ourselves by his name and claim to be part of the kingdom.
Thursday, August 12, 2004
so long, mcgreevey
Big news in New Jersey: The governor has admitted to being gay, and has resigned from office.
My feeling is that the entire story hasn't broken yet. All McGreevey essentially said at his news conference today was "I'm gay, I committed adultery with another man, and now I'm resigning as governor." That doesn't flow. He never once during his speech provided a meaningful explanation for his decision to leave office.
The man he committed adultery with is Golan Cipel, an Israeli citizen whom McGreevey tapped for a high-paying state post on the anti-terrorism commission. (I believe it's a cabinet post.) That was a mini scandal in itself, in that Cipel was a complete outsider. The first anyone in Jersey had heard of him was when the governor brought him here after a visit to Israel two years ago. And of course, the federal government wouldn't work with Cipel because he wasn't a U.S. citizen and therefore lacked security clearance.
Cipel reportedly is filing a sexual harassment lawsuit against McGreevey in state Superior Court in Mercer County, and I've heard that he allegedly was trying to extort money from McGreevey. I've no idea what that's about, though; this obviously is a big news story, and newsrooms everywhere in New Jersey have been going crazy as people try to sift the truth from the rumor and innuendo.
So McGreevey avoided the scandal of being outed by outing himself, but to be honest, I don't think that many New Jerseyans really care if he's gay or not. If he lived in the South, being gay cost him the respect he would need to work with state legislators and probably the trust of the public as well, but that just isn't an issue in New Jersey. It doesn't affect his ability to govern the state.
During his resignation speech this afternoon, McGreevey said something about exposing the governor's office and the state to some sort of risk through his affair. I'm not sure what he meant by that; doubtless the major news agencies like the Associated Press, the Star Ledger, Bergen Record et al are going to be revealing more details about the relationship, particularly once Cipel does file the lawsuit and all the prurient details are out on the table.
Politically this probably is a windfall for the Democratic Party. McGreevey has taken one battering after another almost since the beginning of his governorship, and he was seen as unlikely to win re-election next year. Now with his resignation, Senate President Rich Codey will become acting governor and presumably would have the incumbent's advantage during the 2005 gubernatorial election. If there are problems owing to McGreevey's budget failures and other expenses, all he has to say is, "It's Jim's fault. I've only been here a year." Or the party could simply make him a sacrificial lamb, and let him retire from politics with a hefty pension, and run U.S. Senator Jon Corzine for the governor's seat. Corzine probably would win, given his general popularity in the state as a man who ran for Senate on his own nickel instead of using taxpayer money.
Plenty of people in politics and the media here in New Jersey knew, suspected or had heard that McGreevey is gay, long before his revelation. I wasn't surprised or shocked at all when he said it. My reaction about five minutes into his speech was, "For crying out, just come out and say it."
I don't think the average New Jerseyan cares that the governor is gay, whether they voted for him or not. Probably most don't even care that he had an affair, homosexual or not.
The fact that he appointed Cipel to the homeland security post as an apparent form of cronyism IS problematic to me, and I think to others as well. But that also happened about two years ago.
I'm waiting to find out exactly what led to the resignation.
My feeling is that the entire story hasn't broken yet. All McGreevey essentially said at his news conference today was "I'm gay, I committed adultery with another man, and now I'm resigning as governor." That doesn't flow. He never once during his speech provided a meaningful explanation for his decision to leave office.
The man he committed adultery with is Golan Cipel, an Israeli citizen whom McGreevey tapped for a high-paying state post on the anti-terrorism commission. (I believe it's a cabinet post.) That was a mini scandal in itself, in that Cipel was a complete outsider. The first anyone in Jersey had heard of him was when the governor brought him here after a visit to Israel two years ago. And of course, the federal government wouldn't work with Cipel because he wasn't a U.S. citizen and therefore lacked security clearance.
Cipel reportedly is filing a sexual harassment lawsuit against McGreevey in state Superior Court in Mercer County, and I've heard that he allegedly was trying to extort money from McGreevey. I've no idea what that's about, though; this obviously is a big news story, and newsrooms everywhere in New Jersey have been going crazy as people try to sift the truth from the rumor and innuendo.
So McGreevey avoided the scandal of being outed by outing himself, but to be honest, I don't think that many New Jerseyans really care if he's gay or not. If he lived in the South, being gay cost him the respect he would need to work with state legislators and probably the trust of the public as well, but that just isn't an issue in New Jersey. It doesn't affect his ability to govern the state.
During his resignation speech this afternoon, McGreevey said something about exposing the governor's office and the state to some sort of risk through his affair. I'm not sure what he meant by that; doubtless the major news agencies like the Associated Press, the Star Ledger, Bergen Record et al are going to be revealing more details about the relationship, particularly once Cipel does file the lawsuit and all the prurient details are out on the table.
Politically this probably is a windfall for the Democratic Party. McGreevey has taken one battering after another almost since the beginning of his governorship, and he was seen as unlikely to win re-election next year. Now with his resignation, Senate President Rich Codey will become acting governor and presumably would have the incumbent's advantage during the 2005 gubernatorial election. If there are problems owing to McGreevey's budget failures and other expenses, all he has to say is, "It's Jim's fault. I've only been here a year." Or the party could simply make him a sacrificial lamb, and let him retire from politics with a hefty pension, and run U.S. Senator Jon Corzine for the governor's seat. Corzine probably would win, given his general popularity in the state as a man who ran for Senate on his own nickel instead of using taxpayer money.
Plenty of people in politics and the media here in New Jersey knew, suspected or had heard that McGreevey is gay, long before his revelation. I wasn't surprised or shocked at all when he said it. My reaction about five minutes into his speech was, "For crying out, just come out and say it."
I don't think the average New Jerseyan cares that the governor is gay, whether they voted for him or not. Probably most don't even care that he had an affair, homosexual or not.
The fact that he appointed Cipel to the homeland security post as an apparent form of cronyism IS problematic to me, and I think to others as well. But that also happened about two years ago.
I'm waiting to find out exactly what led to the resignation.
Tuesday, July 06, 2004
not really your problem
A friend of mine writes:
The sanctity of your marriage, of mine, and so on, is not diminished at all by the existence of a civil union between two gays, even if that civil union is called a marriage and entitles its members to the same rights and privileges as a heterosexual couple as far as taxes, insurance, pool memberships and whatever else goes. Extending those privileges to gays and homosexuals in no way prevents you from filing as a married couple, from enjoying the benefits Sarah gets at her job, adopting another child, or from making important life-and-death decisions in the event of the other's incapacitation. With your marriage left intact, how is it your problem?
The church is not required to perform same-sex marriages because of the First Amendment guarantee of free exercise of religion. Although some groups likely will scream "homophobia" when a church refuses to perform a gay wedding, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of James Dale v. Boy Scouts of America that government does not have the right to dictate inclusionary practices to a nonprofit organization -- and the BSA is not a religious group. With your church still able to view homosexual behavior according to the dictates of orthodoxy, how is it your problem?
Doubtless there will be gay marriages in some neighborhoods that didn't have them before. A couple with a piece of paper indicating that their union is sanctioned by the state (and maybe a church) is little different from a couple without such a marker. With the only outward difference between before and after being a piece of paper and official sanction, how is it your problem?
I'm not a student of history, but as I understand, marriage has become much more formalized in the last few hundred years, with couples going to church to be married in a lavish ceremony. It used to be that the service was a small civil thing, and that couples would go to the church to celebrate Mass together. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that's the direction we're headed now as a society -- civil unions for everyone, with the church blessing those it approves of and not recognizing those it disapproves of.
On a side note -- and this really isn't related directly to the topic at hand -- the Scriptures don't say much about what's involved in making a couple married. Paul pretty much states that when a man and a woman have sex, they're joined together in the eyes of God, which is why the Lord gives us the option of one partner or none. (Note: Insert standard digression here, about polygynous relationships in the Tanakh and whether they even were expressly forbidden in the New Testament.)
If that's the case, then wouldn't my friend Josh and his girlfriend Hagar be married in the biblical sense, since they are living together, with all that entails? If I understand the word in the classic sense, "fornication" isn't sex between two unmarried people as much as it is casual sex. (The word comes from the Latin "fornix," which is a brothel.)
Using that kind of reasoning, I should point out that as the number of pastors and other clergymen in New York has increased over the last few hundred years, the city has seen a growth in murder, drunkenness, extortion, prostitution and corruption.
There are a great many many more social dynamics at work in the Netherlands than just civil unions for homosexuals. I would think the legalized prostitution and generally casual attitudes toward sex in general would do more to erode the concept of family, and probably drove the civil unions for gays as well.
We're probably going to keep going around the mullberry bush on this one as well. If one of our goals as Christians is to preserve the traditional family, we would do better to focus our attention on the root causes of what has caused family to unravel and start finding new ways to bind the strands together so it will hold in the times ahead.
The problem is that we keep viewing this as a political or civil rights issue. It's not. It's a spiritual one. Those driving the call for gay marriages have some legitimate grievances in there, and those who oppose them also have some legitimate objections. Deal with it in the political arena, and we're going to continue to divide ourselves against one another and further inflame heated passions.
Our goal should not be to get people to behave in a certain way, but to get them to the point that they put their faith in Christ, whatever their situation, whatever their sin, whatever their involvement. Lead them to Christ, and then let him begin the process of changing their hearts, which in turn will lead them to change their behavior. Transformation begins on the inside and works its way inexorably outward.
Since, as you acknowledge, the carnal nature is at enmity with the nature of God, trying to get sinful man to follow God's ways is much like trying to teach a pig to sing. You won't have any success, and you'll irritate the pig. And even if you do somehow teach the pig to sing, you haven't really changed its fate. It'll still get chopped up and turned into breakfast for one person or another. Don't focus on changing society's behavior, because you're not accomplishing anything except driving most people away from the gospel for the wrong reasons -- they see Christians as a bunch of controlling moralists -- and possibly making a few people more secure in their own righteousness so they have a comfortable, well padded trip to hell.
Look at it this way. In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul writes to the Corinthian church that he has heard of a form of sexual immorality among the church that is unheard of even among their pagan neighbors. A fellow was having sex with his father's wife, and instead of being ashamed of it, was actually bragging about it.
Paul was outraged, much as I expect you would be too, and told the church to throw the guy the heck out and not have anything to do with him until he had repented. Paul's got all sorts of harsh words for this guy -- but he concludes by saying an odd thing: "What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? Expel the wicked man from among you." In other words, "If this were someone outside the church, I'd say it's none of our business. But he claims to be a Christian, so I'm telling you right now to have nothing to do with him until he's repented."
What business is it of ours if people outside the church want to have same-sex marriages? It's not our business. It has no bearing on us; it's irrelevant to what we're here for. Share the gospel, encourage one another to follow Christ, and keep yourself living righteously.
As to prayer, I see no point in praying that the Federal Marriage Amendment go through. I think the writing is on the wall already that it will fail, and even if it succeeds, what is it really going to accomplish? Will it stop same-sex relationships, or will it simply stop same-sex couples in committed relationships from being able to extend insurance benefits to their partners, from being able to make critical life-and-death decisions for one another, and so on?
If you're concerned for people in same-sex relationships -- and I believe you are -- I would suggest praying for ministries like Exodus Ministries and Genesis Counseling (or whatever their names are). Those ministries aren't for everyone, obviously, but there are people who believe they have benefited from them, and there are people who have left the gay lifestyle and adopted a heterosexual one.
And if you're concerned about the country's growing acceptance of same-sex relationships -- and I believe you are -- then start praying for our cultural leaders, the arists, philosophers and other social architects who provide moral leadership to our nation. Pray for them, and pray that they will awaken to God's call on their lives. (Those leaders, by the way, don't live within the Beltway, by and large. They're concentrated in Los Angeles and in New York.)
You aren't going to like hearing this, but the truth is the "culture wars" are over, and the church lost sometime back in the 1960s. We failed to understand what the hippy movement was about and we were slow to provide the leadership our culture needed. We now live in a post-Christian society where our worldview no longer dominates, and where Scripture's testimony about God is no longer accepted as an authority.
The postmodern society Gen X inherited and now is beginning to lead is a society where moral absolutes don't exist, and the superiority of one religion or one set of morals isn't a given. Try to justify your disapproval of gay sex without once referring to Scripture, and you might get a sense of why this is a lost cause. Society has moved on, and trying to get it to go back is like keeping away the tide with a broom.
I haven't caught up on the news since last week, but last I heard there were 165 lawsuits pending from out-of-state same-sex couples who got married in Massachusetts, then went back home and are suing to have their marriage recognized legally.
So yes, it IS my problem.
The sanctity of your marriage, of mine, and so on, is not diminished at all by the existence of a civil union between two gays, even if that civil union is called a marriage and entitles its members to the same rights and privileges as a heterosexual couple as far as taxes, insurance, pool memberships and whatever else goes. Extending those privileges to gays and homosexuals in no way prevents you from filing as a married couple, from enjoying the benefits Sarah gets at her job, adopting another child, or from making important life-and-death decisions in the event of the other's incapacitation. With your marriage left intact, how is it your problem?
The church is not required to perform same-sex marriages because of the First Amendment guarantee of free exercise of religion. Although some groups likely will scream "homophobia" when a church refuses to perform a gay wedding, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of James Dale v. Boy Scouts of America that government does not have the right to dictate inclusionary practices to a nonprofit organization -- and the BSA is not a religious group. With your church still able to view homosexual behavior according to the dictates of orthodoxy, how is it your problem?
Doubtless there will be gay marriages in some neighborhoods that didn't have them before. A couple with a piece of paper indicating that their union is sanctioned by the state (and maybe a church) is little different from a couple without such a marker. With the only outward difference between before and after being a piece of paper and official sanction, how is it your problem?
I'm not a student of history, but as I understand, marriage has become much more formalized in the last few hundred years, with couples going to church to be married in a lavish ceremony. It used to be that the service was a small civil thing, and that couples would go to the church to celebrate Mass together. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that's the direction we're headed now as a society -- civil unions for everyone, with the church blessing those it approves of and not recognizing those it disapproves of.
On a side note -- and this really isn't related directly to the topic at hand -- the Scriptures don't say much about what's involved in making a couple married. Paul pretty much states that when a man and a woman have sex, they're joined together in the eyes of God, which is why the Lord gives us the option of one partner or none. (Note: Insert standard digression here, about polygynous relationships in the Tanakh and whether they even were expressly forbidden in the New Testament.)
If that's the case, then wouldn't my friend Josh and his girlfriend Hagar be married in the biblical sense, since they are living together, with all that entails? If I understand the word in the classic sense, "fornication" isn't sex between two unmarried people as much as it is casual sex. (The word comes from the Latin "fornix," which is a brothel.)
The Netherlands have had civil unions for gays for a while now and it has destroyed the family -- last stat I saw said 65 percent of the kids born there in the last few years were born out of wedlock. Sad.
Using that kind of reasoning, I should point out that as the number of pastors and other clergymen in New York has increased over the last few hundred years, the city has seen a growth in murder, drunkenness, extortion, prostitution and corruption.
There are a great many many more social dynamics at work in the Netherlands than just civil unions for homosexuals. I would think the legalized prostitution and generally casual attitudes toward sex in general would do more to erode the concept of family, and probably drove the civil unions for gays as well.
We're probably going to keep going around the mullberry bush on this one as well. If one of our goals as Christians is to preserve the traditional family, we would do better to focus our attention on the root causes of what has caused family to unravel and start finding new ways to bind the strands together so it will hold in the times ahead.
The problem is that we keep viewing this as a political or civil rights issue. It's not. It's a spiritual one. Those driving the call for gay marriages have some legitimate grievances in there, and those who oppose them also have some legitimate objections. Deal with it in the political arena, and we're going to continue to divide ourselves against one another and further inflame heated passions.
Our goal should not be to get people to behave in a certain way, but to get them to the point that they put their faith in Christ, whatever their situation, whatever their sin, whatever their involvement. Lead them to Christ, and then let him begin the process of changing their hearts, which in turn will lead them to change their behavior. Transformation begins on the inside and works its way inexorably outward.
Since, as you acknowledge, the carnal nature is at enmity with the nature of God, trying to get sinful man to follow God's ways is much like trying to teach a pig to sing. You won't have any success, and you'll irritate the pig. And even if you do somehow teach the pig to sing, you haven't really changed its fate. It'll still get chopped up and turned into breakfast for one person or another. Don't focus on changing society's behavior, because you're not accomplishing anything except driving most people away from the gospel for the wrong reasons -- they see Christians as a bunch of controlling moralists -- and possibly making a few people more secure in their own righteousness so they have a comfortable, well padded trip to hell.
Look at it this way. In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul writes to the Corinthian church that he has heard of a form of sexual immorality among the church that is unheard of even among their pagan neighbors. A fellow was having sex with his father's wife, and instead of being ashamed of it, was actually bragging about it.
Paul was outraged, much as I expect you would be too, and told the church to throw the guy the heck out and not have anything to do with him until he had repented. Paul's got all sorts of harsh words for this guy -- but he concludes by saying an odd thing: "What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? Expel the wicked man from among you." In other words, "If this were someone outside the church, I'd say it's none of our business. But he claims to be a Christian, so I'm telling you right now to have nothing to do with him until he's repented."
What business is it of ours if people outside the church want to have same-sex marriages? It's not our business. It has no bearing on us; it's irrelevant to what we're here for. Share the gospel, encourage one another to follow Christ, and keep yourself living righteously.
As to prayer, I see no point in praying that the Federal Marriage Amendment go through. I think the writing is on the wall already that it will fail, and even if it succeeds, what is it really going to accomplish? Will it stop same-sex relationships, or will it simply stop same-sex couples in committed relationships from being able to extend insurance benefits to their partners, from being able to make critical life-and-death decisions for one another, and so on?
If you're concerned for people in same-sex relationships -- and I believe you are -- I would suggest praying for ministries like Exodus Ministries and Genesis Counseling (or whatever their names are). Those ministries aren't for everyone, obviously, but there are people who believe they have benefited from them, and there are people who have left the gay lifestyle and adopted a heterosexual one.
And if you're concerned about the country's growing acceptance of same-sex relationships -- and I believe you are -- then start praying for our cultural leaders, the arists, philosophers and other social architects who provide moral leadership to our nation. Pray for them, and pray that they will awaken to God's call on their lives. (Those leaders, by the way, don't live within the Beltway, by and large. They're concentrated in Los Angeles and in New York.)
You aren't going to like hearing this, but the truth is the "culture wars" are over, and the church lost sometime back in the 1960s. We failed to understand what the hippy movement was about and we were slow to provide the leadership our culture needed. We now live in a post-Christian society where our worldview no longer dominates, and where Scripture's testimony about God is no longer accepted as an authority.
The postmodern society Gen X inherited and now is beginning to lead is a society where moral absolutes don't exist, and the superiority of one religion or one set of morals isn't a given. Try to justify your disapproval of gay sex without once referring to Scripture, and you might get a sense of why this is a lost cause. Society has moved on, and trying to get it to go back is like keeping away the tide with a broom.
Friday, October 24, 2003
spirituality and public morality
"America is not a Christian nation -- but I would argue that it's our job as Christians to encourage it to accept Biblical principles and values as true, because it'll be happier that way. Live closer to the way the Author prescribed, live happy; the more we diverge from that, the more miserable we're going to be."
- RBP
Isn't that missing the point of what we're called to do? We're not called to teach people the Rules for Right Living, and we're certainly not called upon to present some works-based initiative where if we behave in accordance to the designs of God, our lives will be better.
That reasoning essentially is works-driven, and it's what Paul rejects in Romans and Galatians as incapable of bringing us life. His thesis is that if any Law or prescribed behavior could bring us life and righteousness, then the Torah was the Law that could do it. But that's a false offer, because it's impossible for us to follow the Law even in part, because any violation of a part of the Law is a violation of its entirety.
Follow the Law, and encourage others to follow the Law, and you might see the results you're describing. But everyone will be further from God as a result. What God desires is that we live by the spirit, not seeking ways to experience his blessings (including a more righteous-seeming nation) but seeking new ways to experience *him.* That's done by interacting with other people and discovering God's image as it is stamped upon them, meeting their needs and loving them as Christ desires us to.
I don't see homosexuality as an issue worth even a fraction of the attention it's received from the church. Again, assuming for the sake of argument that what you say is true, consider that the places Paul condemns homosexuality in Romans and 1 Corinthians are actually rather lengthy and all-encompassing lists of human behavior, including greed, fits of rage, gossip, slander and boasting.
His point is that sin is universal and none of us has hope on our own merits, not that any particular group is guilty of an especially horrible sin. The language in the Torah is harsh -- toe'bah is only used to describe two sexual practices in the Torah, although the death penalty also is prescribed for adultery -- but even there, the injunctions against homosexual behavior are contained in a list of many other sins. The point, again, is that apart from Christ, none of us possesses righteousness.
Going a step further, when Paul addresses the issue of incest in the church -- a practice he calls so hideous that even unbelievers are disgusted by it -- he says, point-blank, "You know, if this were going on outside the church, I would say it's none of our business."
So if a man sleeping with his father's wife is none of our business when they're not Christians, why would we have the right to dictate the sexual morality of the world at large?
Jesus wasn't a moralist. He didn't campaign against prostitution, against homosexuality, or fornication, or other such behaviors. What he did was react with compassion to everyone. He ate with Pharisees when he was asked, and with low-lifes when they asked. He treated everyone with respect, and in the gospels at least, the sins he really went off on dealt with the legalists who made pleasing God a works-related business, religious hypocrisy, and denying justice. The lifestyle he had was one of inclusion and warm welcome to everyone who needed him.
So I agree with your statement that Christ calls us to encourage others to follow him and act as he would -- but I believe that's done by the example of selfless living, dying to ourselves daily, and an in a thoroughly personal way, not a political one.
- RBP
Isn't that missing the point of what we're called to do? We're not called to teach people the Rules for Right Living, and we're certainly not called upon to present some works-based initiative where if we behave in accordance to the designs of God, our lives will be better.
That reasoning essentially is works-driven, and it's what Paul rejects in Romans and Galatians as incapable of bringing us life. His thesis is that if any Law or prescribed behavior could bring us life and righteousness, then the Torah was the Law that could do it. But that's a false offer, because it's impossible for us to follow the Law even in part, because any violation of a part of the Law is a violation of its entirety.
Follow the Law, and encourage others to follow the Law, and you might see the results you're describing. But everyone will be further from God as a result. What God desires is that we live by the spirit, not seeking ways to experience his blessings (including a more righteous-seeming nation) but seeking new ways to experience *him.* That's done by interacting with other people and discovering God's image as it is stamped upon them, meeting their needs and loving them as Christ desires us to.
I don't see homosexuality as an issue worth even a fraction of the attention it's received from the church. Again, assuming for the sake of argument that what you say is true, consider that the places Paul condemns homosexuality in Romans and 1 Corinthians are actually rather lengthy and all-encompassing lists of human behavior, including greed, fits of rage, gossip, slander and boasting.
His point is that sin is universal and none of us has hope on our own merits, not that any particular group is guilty of an especially horrible sin. The language in the Torah is harsh -- toe'bah is only used to describe two sexual practices in the Torah, although the death penalty also is prescribed for adultery -- but even there, the injunctions against homosexual behavior are contained in a list of many other sins. The point, again, is that apart from Christ, none of us possesses righteousness.
Going a step further, when Paul addresses the issue of incest in the church -- a practice he calls so hideous that even unbelievers are disgusted by it -- he says, point-blank, "You know, if this were going on outside the church, I would say it's none of our business."
So if a man sleeping with his father's wife is none of our business when they're not Christians, why would we have the right to dictate the sexual morality of the world at large?
Jesus wasn't a moralist. He didn't campaign against prostitution, against homosexuality, or fornication, or other such behaviors. What he did was react with compassion to everyone. He ate with Pharisees when he was asked, and with low-lifes when they asked. He treated everyone with respect, and in the gospels at least, the sins he really went off on dealt with the legalists who made pleasing God a works-related business, religious hypocrisy, and denying justice. The lifestyle he had was one of inclusion and warm welcome to everyone who needed him.
So I agree with your statement that Christ calls us to encourage others to follow him and act as he would -- but I believe that's done by the example of selfless living, dying to ourselves daily, and an in a thoroughly personal way, not a political one.
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
no time for glibness
One of the observations that struck me when I read a friend's journal, as I shared with my wife today, is that Christians often make glib or overquick statements concerning homosexuality and how thoughtless we are when we do that.
My friend presented two of those on her site, the "Homosexuality is an abomination before the Lord; yea, gays and lesbians are pimples upon his face, and he shall pop them" view, and the "Well, it's a sin, but it's no worse than any other sin" attitude.
The first, while it neatly sums up the traditional view of homosexuality, fails to do anything but rudely say "I disapprove of you and what you do and so does God" while the other dismissively equates a very basic and driving part of a person's nature -- their sexuality -- with practices and behaviors that are less deeply rooted in who a person is, such as a person's inclination to fib on their taxes or a disrespect for authority. Those latter things, and other practices like them, while they may be deeply ingrained in a person and difficult at times to deal with are nowhere near as fundamental to a person's psyche as their sexuality.
In each case, the response indicates a failure to connect with another person as another person, to see their inherent worth and to love them in the true, personal sense that Christ calls us to. It made me stop and wonder how I had treated my friend, and whether I had shown her the same unconditional love Christ has, or if I had treated her as less than a person in herself, and just as a gay Christian (as though that were all she is) or if I had treated her in either manner so described, or in some other way that I haven't described yet.
And that of course inspires any number of other thoughts, including the oft-stated observation that Christianity is a very simple religion to "get" -- that accepting Christ's death on our behalf reconciles us to God -- but also one that is impossibly hard to follow in truth. This whole idea of loving other people and being part of a community is just impossible to get.
My friend presented two of those on her site, the "Homosexuality is an abomination before the Lord; yea, gays and lesbians are pimples upon his face, and he shall pop them" view, and the "Well, it's a sin, but it's no worse than any other sin" attitude.
The first, while it neatly sums up the traditional view of homosexuality, fails to do anything but rudely say "I disapprove of you and what you do and so does God" while the other dismissively equates a very basic and driving part of a person's nature -- their sexuality -- with practices and behaviors that are less deeply rooted in who a person is, such as a person's inclination to fib on their taxes or a disrespect for authority. Those latter things, and other practices like them, while they may be deeply ingrained in a person and difficult at times to deal with are nowhere near as fundamental to a person's psyche as their sexuality.
In each case, the response indicates a failure to connect with another person as another person, to see their inherent worth and to love them in the true, personal sense that Christ calls us to. It made me stop and wonder how I had treated my friend, and whether I had shown her the same unconditional love Christ has, or if I had treated her as less than a person in herself, and just as a gay Christian (as though that were all she is) or if I had treated her in either manner so described, or in some other way that I haven't described yet.
And that of course inspires any number of other thoughts, including the oft-stated observation that Christianity is a very simple religion to "get" -- that accepting Christ's death on our behalf reconciles us to God -- but also one that is impossibly hard to follow in truth. This whole idea of loving other people and being part of a community is just impossible to get.
Sunday, August 17, 2003
journey to compassion
I have a friend this week who came out of a closet she's lived in for the past few years.
Jane -- that's not her real name, which I won't use for obvious reasons -- is 18 years old. She's come to realize over the course of her high school career that she's a Little Bit Different from her friends. She's gay.
Unfortunately for Jane, her parents found out before she was ready to tell them. Her mother spent most of the next few days crying, the entire family went to see a psychiatrist, and everyone in the family forgot how to laugh. All told, it sounds like a fairly miserable experience.
I've never actually met Jane in person. I know her through an online humor forum created and maintained by a mutual friend, but when I learned what was happening, my reaction was the same as if she attended my church or lived down the street from me.
All day Monday and Tuesday, she was on my mind as I alternately prayed for her and her family, and tried to dig up resources that they could use, such as contact information for chapters of Parents and Friends of Lesbians And Gays in her area.
That's actually a fairly major departure from how I would have reacted a few years ago. Although my moral views on homosexuality have remained largely unchanged in the past 10-odd years, my attitude toward gays and lesbians themselves has undergone a steady migration from homophobia to tolerance.
Homophobia is a funny word to use. It's certainly not a term I would have used to apply to myself back in college. After all, as a devout Christian since a conversion experience when I was almost 18, I recognized a need to "hate the sin and love the sinner," a popular cliche in evangelical circles often used to provide a safe cover for not loving people regarded as sinners.
It's a common thing in evangelical circles to view homosexuality with hostility. You hear all sorts of comments about "the homosexual agenda," along with arguments that the growing acceptance of homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle will lead to the deterioration of the family as an institution and to the destruction of society as a whole.
The basis for all this invective is found in about six or seven places in the Bible, including one verse in Leviticus that actually prescribes the death penalty for gay sex, a penalty also prescribed for adultery.
Elsewhere, in the New Testament book of 1 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul mentions homosexuality in a fairly comprehensive list of human behavior that also includes sins like gluttony, rage, drunkenness, greediness, malicious speech and other offenses.
Mix these Scriptures with a pervading sense of fear that the bad guys are winning and society slowly is being subverted, and it's easy to see why many otherwise decent people latch onto the growing acceptance of the gay lifestyle as one of the root causes for all that's wrong with the world today.
I'm sorry to say that I bought into it. While I professed to care about all people, including gays and lesbians, the truth probably is that I came across as more concerned that people know how I felt about what they were doing than about how I felt about them -- which means, of course, that they really didn't mean that much to me at all, however much I protested otherwise.
Things started to change my junior year when a friend of mine lent me Tony Campolo's book "20 Hot Potatoes Christians are Afraid to Touch." A fairly well-respected voice in the evangelical community, at least among college students, Campolo made the radical claim that gays and lesbians have the same inherent worth as their heterosexual relatives.
What's more, he gave practical examples of people who behaved in a way in keeping with the uncompromising love Christians claim to uphold as their model: a minister who officiated at the funeral of a gay man who had died from AIDS complications and stayed afterward for two hours, comforting the companions of the deceased; and a church that gave several thousand dollars to help AIDS victims.
My senior year the AIDS quilt came to Lackawanna College. Other members of the campus Christian fellowship stayed away, concerned they might send the wrong message, that they approved of homosexuality.
I not only went and looked at all the quilts, I volunteered to help read the names of those who had died.
That might not seem like much, but it was a beginning. During the next five years as my faith deepened, I had to ask myself hard questions about what it means when Christ calls his followers to love friends, enemies and strangers alike; and about what St. James means when he writes that faith expressed only as words is no faith at all.
I also had to look into the darkness of my own soul and consider honestly whether my own sins were any more acceptable to God than somebody else's.
In November 1997, I took a position as a reporter for The Princeton Packet just after one of my co-workers there had told her parents that she was a lesbian. Heather was a hard-working, professional, no-nonsense type of reporter. She reported things as they happened, called them as she saw them, and wasn't afraid to ask public officials tough questions, or to stand up to them.
About six or seven months later, another co-worker told me that he was bisexual. Like Heather, Bill is about as non-threatening as people come, and his high-octane personality and sense of humor make him a lot of fun to work with.
Neither of them is an evil or malicious person, nor is any other homosexual I've had the good fortune to know in the years since, either professionally or privately. The whole of the "agenda" I ever heard any of them pursue was nothing more sinister than getting the same respect, opportunities and treatment as their straight colleagues and co-workers.
That doesn't sound very awful to me. To be honest, I'm really not sure why I ever thought it did.
Jane -- that's not her real name, which I won't use for obvious reasons -- is 18 years old. She's come to realize over the course of her high school career that she's a Little Bit Different from her friends. She's gay.
Unfortunately for Jane, her parents found out before she was ready to tell them. Her mother spent most of the next few days crying, the entire family went to see a psychiatrist, and everyone in the family forgot how to laugh. All told, it sounds like a fairly miserable experience.
I've never actually met Jane in person. I know her through an online humor forum created and maintained by a mutual friend, but when I learned what was happening, my reaction was the same as if she attended my church or lived down the street from me.
All day Monday and Tuesday, she was on my mind as I alternately prayed for her and her family, and tried to dig up resources that they could use, such as contact information for chapters of Parents and Friends of Lesbians And Gays in her area.
That's actually a fairly major departure from how I would have reacted a few years ago. Although my moral views on homosexuality have remained largely unchanged in the past 10-odd years, my attitude toward gays and lesbians themselves has undergone a steady migration from homophobia to tolerance.
Homophobia is a funny word to use. It's certainly not a term I would have used to apply to myself back in college. After all, as a devout Christian since a conversion experience when I was almost 18, I recognized a need to "hate the sin and love the sinner," a popular cliche in evangelical circles often used to provide a safe cover for not loving people regarded as sinners.
It's a common thing in evangelical circles to view homosexuality with hostility. You hear all sorts of comments about "the homosexual agenda," along with arguments that the growing acceptance of homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle will lead to the deterioration of the family as an institution and to the destruction of society as a whole.
The basis for all this invective is found in about six or seven places in the Bible, including one verse in Leviticus that actually prescribes the death penalty for gay sex, a penalty also prescribed for adultery.
Elsewhere, in the New Testament book of 1 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul mentions homosexuality in a fairly comprehensive list of human behavior that also includes sins like gluttony, rage, drunkenness, greediness, malicious speech and other offenses.
Mix these Scriptures with a pervading sense of fear that the bad guys are winning and society slowly is being subverted, and it's easy to see why many otherwise decent people latch onto the growing acceptance of the gay lifestyle as one of the root causes for all that's wrong with the world today.
I'm sorry to say that I bought into it. While I professed to care about all people, including gays and lesbians, the truth probably is that I came across as more concerned that people know how I felt about what they were doing than about how I felt about them -- which means, of course, that they really didn't mean that much to me at all, however much I protested otherwise.
Things started to change my junior year when a friend of mine lent me Tony Campolo's book "20 Hot Potatoes Christians are Afraid to Touch." A fairly well-respected voice in the evangelical community, at least among college students, Campolo made the radical claim that gays and lesbians have the same inherent worth as their heterosexual relatives.
What's more, he gave practical examples of people who behaved in a way in keeping with the uncompromising love Christians claim to uphold as their model: a minister who officiated at the funeral of a gay man who had died from AIDS complications and stayed afterward for two hours, comforting the companions of the deceased; and a church that gave several thousand dollars to help AIDS victims.
My senior year the AIDS quilt came to Lackawanna College. Other members of the campus Christian fellowship stayed away, concerned they might send the wrong message, that they approved of homosexuality.
I not only went and looked at all the quilts, I volunteered to help read the names of those who had died.
That might not seem like much, but it was a beginning. During the next five years as my faith deepened, I had to ask myself hard questions about what it means when Christ calls his followers to love friends, enemies and strangers alike; and about what St. James means when he writes that faith expressed only as words is no faith at all.
I also had to look into the darkness of my own soul and consider honestly whether my own sins were any more acceptable to God than somebody else's.
In November 1997, I took a position as a reporter for The Princeton Packet just after one of my co-workers there had told her parents that she was a lesbian. Heather was a hard-working, professional, no-nonsense type of reporter. She reported things as they happened, called them as she saw them, and wasn't afraid to ask public officials tough questions, or to stand up to them.
About six or seven months later, another co-worker told me that he was bisexual. Like Heather, Bill is about as non-threatening as people come, and his high-octane personality and sense of humor make him a lot of fun to work with.
Neither of them is an evil or malicious person, nor is any other homosexual I've had the good fortune to know in the years since, either professionally or privately. The whole of the "agenda" I ever heard any of them pursue was nothing more sinister than getting the same respect, opportunities and treatment as their straight colleagues and co-workers.
That doesn't sound very awful to me. To be honest, I'm really not sure why I ever thought it did.
Friday, July 18, 2003
provide equality
A community pool might seem like an odd place to strike a blow for equal rights and fighting discrimination, but it's as good a place as many, and it's an area where bad policy recently has come to light.
We're talking about the case of Patti Jaworski and her partner, a same-sex couple told they don't qualify for family membership at Clark's pool because -- despite being together for eight years, and despite having held a private commitment ceremony together four years ago -- they're not considered a family under the state's definition. With the state definition providing the underpinnings for the pool policies, it's that simple: If you're not a legally married heterosexual couple, then you're not a family.
That's a defensible argument, legally speaking, but it leaves a bad taste. Is the intent here to serve the community, or to find legal justification to avoid taking a potentially risky stand? It seems like the latter. The hot potato of whether a same-sex couple should qualify for family rates has been passed up the chain of command from the word go. Assistant Pool Manager Rose Tomchak told Jaworski to ask the Pool Advisory Board, which passed the responsibility on to the Township Council, which let the township attorney dismiss the request with an embarrassing swiftness.
That's not just irresponsible, it's cowardly. At any point, somebody could have stepped forward and displayed some much-needed leadership on this issue, but no one did. As a consequence, an essentially discriminatory practice has gone unchallenged, and that's a shame. Does anyone seriously believe that the pool membership policy is intended to favor one living arrangement or sexual orientation over another? That's absurd. Such policies exist out of a recognition that families are an essential building block of any community, and that communities possess an obligation to accommodate those families. That accommodation should exist for nontraditional households as well as traditional ones.
To that end, the pool utility should alter its membership structure to include one for households. A wider catch-all than "family," which is more narrowly defined, household memberships could be available to domestic partnerships such as Jaworksi's, but also could encompass other arrangements such as unmarried boyfriends and girlfriends, with or without children; adult siblings living together; and so on. Such a setup recognizes the township's civil obligation to treat different lifestyles and situations equally, but does not tamper with the traditional definition of family used elsewhere in the township and in the state.
Given the glacial speed that municipal government moves, there clearly is no chance the Township Council fully can rectify its error before the end of the pool season is in sight. What it can do is offer Jaworski and her partner a formal apology for its decision, and take steps to remedy the situation for next year.
We're talking about the case of Patti Jaworski and her partner, a same-sex couple told they don't qualify for family membership at Clark's pool because -- despite being together for eight years, and despite having held a private commitment ceremony together four years ago -- they're not considered a family under the state's definition. With the state definition providing the underpinnings for the pool policies, it's that simple: If you're not a legally married heterosexual couple, then you're not a family.
That's a defensible argument, legally speaking, but it leaves a bad taste. Is the intent here to serve the community, or to find legal justification to avoid taking a potentially risky stand? It seems like the latter. The hot potato of whether a same-sex couple should qualify for family rates has been passed up the chain of command from the word go. Assistant Pool Manager Rose Tomchak told Jaworski to ask the Pool Advisory Board, which passed the responsibility on to the Township Council, which let the township attorney dismiss the request with an embarrassing swiftness.
That's not just irresponsible, it's cowardly. At any point, somebody could have stepped forward and displayed some much-needed leadership on this issue, but no one did. As a consequence, an essentially discriminatory practice has gone unchallenged, and that's a shame. Does anyone seriously believe that the pool membership policy is intended to favor one living arrangement or sexual orientation over another? That's absurd. Such policies exist out of a recognition that families are an essential building block of any community, and that communities possess an obligation to accommodate those families. That accommodation should exist for nontraditional households as well as traditional ones.
To that end, the pool utility should alter its membership structure to include one for households. A wider catch-all than "family," which is more narrowly defined, household memberships could be available to domestic partnerships such as Jaworksi's, but also could encompass other arrangements such as unmarried boyfriends and girlfriends, with or without children; adult siblings living together; and so on. Such a setup recognizes the township's civil obligation to treat different lifestyles and situations equally, but does not tamper with the traditional definition of family used elsewhere in the township and in the state.
Given the glacial speed that municipal government moves, there clearly is no chance the Township Council fully can rectify its error before the end of the pool season is in sight. What it can do is offer Jaworski and her partner a formal apology for its decision, and take steps to remedy the situation for next year.
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