No Nonsense in November, II

There has been much discussion on the web about Texas's proposed constitutional amendment 2, which would ban gay marriage (and any legal status similar to marriage).

I don't want to make constitutional or legal arguments, because I don't think that's what this is really about. At its core, marriage is not about legal rights and responsibilities, it is not about licenses and laws, it is not about tax breaks and visitation rights (though all of these are and should be part of the broader discussion). Marriage is about creating family. Marriage is about joining yourself with another forever. Marriage is about love and a life together.

Some people do not believe that LGBT people can create families. Some people do not believe that LGBT people are capable of monogamy, that we are capable of being parents, that we are capable of building families and lives together. They do not believe that the relationships we have should be legally recognized because, for moral reasons, they do not believe they are valid. So they seek to ban our marriages and to tell us that our families aren't really families after all.

But look around. Lesbians and gays have been creating families for a long time. There are thousands of committed gay and lesbian couples in Texas. Many of these families are raising children (some estimate that there are over 1 million children being raised by gay parents in the U.S.). LGBT people are capable of giving and recieving love. We already give love as your children, your brothers, your sisters, and your friends. We, though, must now grovel and beg for the right to love romantically and to have that love recognized by society.

We will probably lose this fight. But we aren't going anywhere, and we don't plan to stop falling in love anytime soon.

Marriage, that millenia-old institution, has survived because it has evolved. Its survival depends on its relevance, and it will continue to survive only if it keeps pace with humanity. It is time for the next step. Recognize us as your fellow citizens. Recognize us as deserving of respect. Recognize us as humans capable of love and commitment. Vote No on November 8.

Quote o' the Day

From Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov:

Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.

Poem o' the Day

From William Blake's Songs of Innocence:

The Divine Image

To Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
All pray in their distress:
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
Is God our father dear:
And Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
Is Man his child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart
Pity, a human face:
and Love the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine
Love Mercy Pity Peace.

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, turk or jew.
Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too

Maggie Gallagher at Volokh

Maggie Gallagher is guest-blogging this week on same-sex marriage over at the Volokh Conspiracy (her posts are mixed in with the normal posts). Ms. Gallagher is one of the leading opponents of same-sex marriage (and typically writes graciously and intelligently), so I will be reading her posts all week and then will attempt a response.

Yes, I support same-sex marriage. But I also think it's important to hear from the other side.

I simply am, part II

Below is part 2 of an article by Andrew Sullivan on the interplay between his personal life and his Catholic faith. My comments follow

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II.

In a remarkable document titled "Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics," issued by the Vatican in 1975, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith made the following statement regarding the vexed issue of homosexuality: "A distinction is drawn, and it seems with some reason, between homosexuals whose tendency comes from a false education, from a lack of normal sexual development, from habit, from bad example, or from other similar causes, and is transitory or at least not incurable; and homosexuals who are definitively such because of some kind of innate instinct or a pathological constitution judged to be incurable."

The Church was responding, it seems, to the growing sociological and psychological evidence that, for a small minority of people, homosexuality is unchosen and unalterable. In the context of a broad declaration on a whole range of sexual ethics, this statement was something of a minor digression (twice as much space was devoted to the "grave moral disorder" of masturbation); and it certainly didn't mean a liberalization of doctrine about the morality of homosexual acts, which were "intrinsically disordered and can in no case be approved of."

Still, the concession complicated things. Before 1975 the modern Church, when it didn't ignore the matter, had held a coherent view of the morality of homosexual acts. It maintained that homosexuals, as the modern world had come to define them, didn't really exist; rather, everyone was essentially a heterosexual and homosexual acts were acts chosen by heterosexuals, out of depravity, curiosity, impulse, predisposition or bad moral guidance. Such acts were an abuse of the essential heterosexual orientation of all humanity; they were condemned because they failed to link sexual activity with a binding commitment between a man and a woman in a marriage, a marriage that was permanently open to the possibility of begetting children. Homosexual sex was condemned in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons as premarital heterosexual sex, adultery or contracepted sex: it failed to provide the essential conjugal and procreative context for sexual relations. The reasoning behind this argument rested on natural law. Natural law teaching, drawing on Aristotelian and Thomist tradition, argued that the sexual nature of man was naturally linked to both emotional fidelity and procreation so that, outside of this context, sex was essentially destructive of the potential for human flourishing: "the full sense of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love," as the encyclical Gaudium et Spes put it. But suddenly, a new twist had been made to this argument. There was, it seems, in nature, a group of people who were "definitively" predisposed to violation of this natural law; their condition was "innate" and "incurable." Insofar as it was innate - literally innatus or "inborn" - this condition was morally neutral, since anything involuntary could not be moral or immoral; it simply was. But always and everywhere, the activity to which this condition led was "intrinsically disordered and [could] in no case be approved of." In other words, something fundamentally in nature always and everywhere violated a vital part of the nature of human beings; something essentially blameless was always and everywhere blameworthy if acted upon.

The paradox of this doctrine was evident even within its first, brief articulation. Immediately before stating the intrinsic disorder of homosexuality, the text averred that in "the pastoral field, these homosexuals must certainly be treated with understanding and sustained in the hope of overcoming their personal difficulties. ... Their culpability will be judged with prudence." This compassion for the peculiar plight of the homosexual was then elaborated: "This judgment of Scripture does not of course permit us to conclude that all those who suffer from this anomaly are personally responsible for it. ..." Throughout, there are alternating moments of alarm and quiescence; tolerance and panic; categorical statement and prudential doubt.

It was therefore perhaps unsurprising that, within a decade, the Church felt it necessary to take up the matter again. The problem could have been resolved by a simple reversion to the old position, the position maintained by fundamentalist Protestant churches: that homosexuality was a hideous, yet curable, affliction of heterosexuals. But the Church doggedly refused to budge from its assertion of the natural occurrence of constitutive homosexuals - or from its compassion for and sensitivity to their plight. In Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's 1986 letter, "On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons," this theme is actually deepened, beginning with the title.

To non-Catholics, the use of the term "homosexual person" might seem a banality. But the term "person" constitutes in Catholic moral teaching a profound statement about the individual's humanity, dignity and worth; it invokes a whole range of rights and needs; it reflects the recognition by the Church that a homosexual person deserves exactly the same concern and compassion as a heterosexual person, having all the rights of a human being, and all the value, in the eyes of God. This idea was implicit in the 1975 declaration, but was never advocated. Then there it was, eleven years later, embedded in Ratzinger's very title. Throughout his text, homosexuality, far from being something unmentionable or disgusting, is discussed with candor and subtlety. It is worthy of close attention: "[T]he phenomenon of homosexuality, complex as it is and with its many consequences for society and ecclesial life, is a proper focus for the Church's pastoral care. It thus requires of her ministers attentive study, active concern and honest, theologically well-balanced counsel." And here is Ratzinger on the moral dimensions of the unchosen nature of homosexuality: "[T]he particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin." Moreover, homosexual persons, he asserts, are "often generous and giving of themselves." Then, in a stunning passage of concession, he marshals the Church's usual arguments in defense of human dignity in order to defend homosexual dignity:
It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church's pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law.

Elsewhere, Ratzinger refers to the homosexual's "God-given dignity and worth"; condemns the view that homosexuals are totally compulsive as a "demeaning assumption"; and argues that "the human person, made in the image and likeness of God, can hardly be adequately described by a reductionist reference to his or her sexual orientation."

Why are these statements stunning? Because they reveal how far the Church had, by the mid-1980s, absorbed the common sense of the earlier document's teaching on the involuntariness of homosexuality, and had had the courage to reach its logical conclusion. In Ratzinger's letter, the Church stood foursquare against bigotry, against demeaning homosexuals either by anti-gay slander or violence or by pro-gay attempts to reduce human beings to one aspect of their personhood. By denying that homosexual activity was totally compulsive, the Church could open the door to an entire world of moral discussion about ethical and unethical homosexual behavior, rather than simply dismissing it all as pathological. What in 1975 had been "a pathological constitution judged to be incurable" was, eleven years later, a "homosexual person," "made in the image and likeness of God."

But this defense of the homosexual person was only half the story. The other half was that, at the same time, the Church strengthened its condemnation of any and all homosexual activity. By 1986 the teachings condemning homosexual acts were far more categorical than they had been before. Ratzinger had guided the Church into two simultaneous and opposite directions: a deeper respect for homosexuals, and a sterner rejection of almost anything they might do.

At the beginning of the 1986 document, Ratzinger bravely confronted the central paradox: "In the discussion which followed the publication of the [1975] declaration ... an overly benign interpretation was given to the homosexual condition itself, some going so far as to call it neutral or even good. Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder." Elsewhere, he reiterated the biblical and natural law arguments against homosexual relations. Avoiding the problematic nature of the Old Testament's disavowal of homosexual acts (since these are treated in the context of such "abominations" as eating pork and having intercourse during menstruation, which the Church today regards with equanimity), Ratzinger focused on St. Paul's admonitions against homosexuality: "Instead of the original harmony between Creator and creatures, the acute distortion of idolatry has led to all kinds of moral excess. Paul is at a loss to find a clearer example of this disharmony than homosexual relations." There was also the simple natural-law argument: "It is only in the marital relationship that the use of the sexual faculty can be morally good. A person engaging in homosexual behavior therefore acts immorally." The point about procreation was strengthened by an argument about the natural, "complementary union able to transmit life," which is heterosexual marriage. The fact that homosexual sex cannot be a part of this union means that it "thwarts the call to a life of that form of self-giving which the Gospel says is the essence of Christian living." Thus "homosexual activity" is inherently "self-indulgent." "Homosexual activity," Ratzinger's document claimed in a veiled and ugly reference to HIV, is a "form of life which constantly threatens to destroy" homosexual persons.

This is some armory of argument. The barrage of statements directed against "homosexual activity," which Ratzinger associates in this document exclusively with genital sex, is all the more remarkable because it occurs in a document that has otherwise gone further than might have been thought imaginable in accepting homosexuals into the heart of the Church and of humanity. Ratzinger's letter was asking us, it seems, to love the sinner more deeply than ever before, but to hate the sin even more passionately. This is a demand with which most Catholic homosexuals have at some time or other engaged in anguished combat.

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A few brief comments:

1. Our church must determine how it will respond to the “growing sociological and psychological evidence” of which Sullivan speaks. Many acknowledge and accept this evidence. Many, though, still hold to the belief that homosexuality is some sort self-destructive choice made by a few confused individuals, and that those individuals can be “cured” if they just work hard enough and pray long enough. Which position do you take? And how does that decision affect the “issue”? Is it the “condition” of homosexual orientation that is immoral, or just the behaviors flowing therefrom? And is it all behaviors, or only certain behaviors? For example, is it immoral for two straight men to hold hands and, if not, is it immoral for two gay men to hold hands? Why?

2. I think the distinction drawn between “homosexual” and “homosexual person” is important, and I wish Churches of Christ more often emphasized the distinction. Christians often forget that those gay folks are, in fact, folks just like them. We are persons worthy of respect. We are persons who deserve to be treated fairly. We are persons who often give of ourselves only to be spat upon. We are your daughters and sons, your sisters and brothers. Very often we are the persons who, because of our own struggles, can best understand the struggles of others. Very often we are the persons who have something real to say about justice, because we often have experienced injustice. We are persons who deserve better than to be talked about abstractly as those who are out to “destroy the institution of marriage.” We are more than an issue to be debated, and I ask that you treat us as such.

Also, an aside to those of you pat us on the head, tilt your head to the side with (what is supposed to look like) an expression of empathy, and then tearily tell us that we are “broken,” and need “healing.” I hesitate to criticize you; you are doing so much better than your forebears. But to patronize us is to treat us as children, not as persons who are your intellectual and spiritual equals. To say that we are “broken” (whatever that means), but that you are not because you have sex with those of an opposite gender is to miss the point entirely. Thank you for loving us and for not spitting on us. But please, take one more step.

3. “Love the sinner, hate the sin” is an immensely problematic statement; a statement that attempts to cover a whole host of evils. It is acceptable to send your minor child to an institution to be healed, because you are doing it out of love. It is acceptable to tell your gay son he may no longer enter your home or speak to his brother or sister, because you are doing it out of love. It is acceptable to wrest a foster child (whose foster parents happen to be lesbians) from the only home she has ever known, because you are doing it out of love. It is acceptable to oppose laws that would ban discrimination against LGBT persons, because you are doing it out of love. “Love the sinner, hate the sin” is a statement that has the word “hate” in it. How is that acceptable to a Christian?

Gay Marriage, Continued

Following up on the last post, I thought I'd post an article by Jonathon Rauch. What is gay marriage all about? Is it an attempt to undermine an important social institution, or an attempt to honor that institution (albeit by entering it in a slightly different way)?

As Christians, how should we react to this wedding? With disgust, with pity, or with joy? Should we join the United Church of Christ in affirming that this marriage is blessed by Christ's church? As voters, should we seek to ban this marriage, entered into out of deep and true love? As voters, should our religious belief in the normativity of heterosexual marriage trump the religious beliefs of those (like the UCC, the MCC, the UUs, and others) whose religious beliefs impel them to sanction and affirm such marriages?


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At A Same-Sex Wedding, The New Is Made Old Again

By Jonathan Rauch, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Oct. 14, 2005

A cloudy afternoon on a recent Saturday in western Massachusetts. Rain sprinkles the Berkshire hills. Strolling in twos and threes along paths between broad lawns, 80 or so wedding guests make their way to a performance barn on the grounds of Jacob's Pillow. Rustling, cheerful, curious, they take their seats. Gray light filters through high windows and casts soft shadows among the rafters. The barn is not a sanctuary, but it feels like one today.

A violinist, one of the relatives, begins a Corelli prelude, and the wedding party enters. Both grooms wear tuxedos and boutonnieres. The minister, a young seminarian in the United Church of Christ, tall in his robes, begins. Under order of the state Supreme Court, same-sex marriage is legal in Massachusetts, and today the minister will marry Jamie Beckland and Michael Pope.

"Every relationship of love is holy, sacred, and worthy of public affirmation and celebration," he says, with a touch of emphasis, slight but sufficient, on the word every. "We pray that this couple will fulfill God's purpose for the whole of their lives." Emphasis again, this time on the word whole. Not everyone in the hall picks up the inflection, but the grooms do.

Jamie is 27, originally from Wisconsin, now a development officer at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Michael, also 27, works at a private research company. They plan to move to Massachusetts, the place where Jamie lived when they met and the only state where their marriage has legal force. Jamie is taller, blond, bespectacled, thin, with the bearing of the former dancer that he is. Michael is dark, heavyset, as reserved as Jamie can be bubbly, a product not of the liberal Upper Midwest but of conservative southwestern Virginia, a state notorious for its gratuitously anti-gay legislation.

For all the differences, Jamie and Michael and their families have this in common: divorce. The newlyweds' immediate families count eight divorces between them, four on each side. Michael's parents divorced when he was 6, Jamie's when he was 10. "I think there's a whole generation of kids from broken homes who only want to be married once," Michael says. This marriage of two men, so radical by some lights, aspires to reconsecrate the deepest of marital traditions.

A few weeks before the wedding, over coffee at Starbucks, I asked Jamie why he wanted to marry. For my generation of gay men (I am 45), legal marriage was unthinkable, and emerging into the gay world often meant entering a cultural ghetto and a sexual underworld. Jamie, who could just about be my son, replies with an answer that turns the world of the 1970s and 1980s upside down. Once he realized he was gay, he says, he simply expected to marry.

"Why does anybody get married?" he asks. "I wanted the stability, I wanted the companionship, I wanted to have a sex life that was accepted, I wanted to have kids. For me, it's not a choice. A marriage evens you out."

The couple met on May 18, 2002. The next day, they exchanged telephone numbers at church (both are Christian). Within weeks, they knew it was serious. In February of this year they took a trip to Massachusetts and went snowshoeing on the grounds of Jacob's Pillow, a dance center where Jamie had worked when they met. There, on an outdoor stage, Jamie got down on one knee. "Which was hard, because we were in snowshoes."

He gave Michael a compass inscribed, "May we always find our way together," and launched into his carefully planned proposal, doing fine for about a minute before starting to cry. Michael began laughing, Jamie pulled himself together long enough to propose, and the two kissed, their faces stung by freezing tears.

Most weddings occasion unambiguous joy, but at this one, reactions run the gamut from delight to incredulity. Jamie's mother, Laura, freely confesses to having been a "monster mom" when Jamie first told her he was gay, seven years ago. He recalls her blaming a demon that might have possessed him one day while he was using a Ouija board. Today, however, she is fighting a losing battle with her false eyelashes as the tears flow, and the tears are happy ones. "It's amazingly wonderful and appropriate," she says of the marriage, "and it breaks my heart" -- not that Jamie is gay or is marrying a man, but that he is making this final transition out of childhood.

Laura's parents, Lee and Ludene, both in their early 70s, have shown up at their grandson's wedding on the advice of their priest, who counseled support for their family even if they could not condone a same-sex marriage. They say they are open-minded Catholics, but today's event has pushed them to their limit. "I feel that it's wrong," Lee volunteers. "I don't think it's real. I kind of wish it hadn't happened." He loves his grandson, no doubt about it. But "this is hard for me, to see it happen." Ludene, who believes that marriage is for procreation, struggles to find a more conciliatory note. "We're living in a different age," she says.

Jamie's two younger brothers are enthusiastic about the marriage. It never occurs to them to regard a same-sex marriage as anything but real. His father, Kim, has been supportive all along. But his paternal grandparents, Jim and Carol, are guarded as they sit on a bench awaiting the ceremony's start. "We love Jamie, and I'm not going to drive a wedge in the family," Jim says. Carol mentions that both are Christians who are close to the Bible. "This will be interesting," she says. "I'm not the judge."

Opponents of gay marriage have argued that same-sex couples, especially men, will undermine marriage by regarding it merely as a path to legal benefits, rather than as a moral and spiritual commitment. Gay couples may get married, goes the criticism, but will not act married. To judge by Jamie and Michael, there is little cause for worry on that score.

For their part, gay couples have had reason to worry that their marriages, however valid in the law's eyes, might be regarded as less than authentic in the eyes of family, friends, religious institutions, employers. After all, a marriage is a marriage not just because the law certifies it but because the community accepts and underwrites it.

Jamie's and Michael's relatives will face a question that never comes up after a straight wedding: whether to inform their friends, neighbors, and colleagues that their son or grandson or brother or nephew is married to a man. Among the parents' and grandparents' generations, most people said they would share this information selectively, or they would play it by ear, or they just didn't know what they would do. The marriage is no secret, but neither does it bask in the social sunlight that straight spouses take for granted.

Yet marriage has its own dynamic, one that deepens bonds between spouses and forges links to kin and community. From time immemorial, parents have expressed ambivalence, even dismay, over their children's choice of spouse, yet have been won over, if not to the choice, then to the marriage and the stability it provides. Michael's mother, Kathy, is from the town of Buena Vista, Va. She was raised in a strict Brethren Church but now considers herself "spiritual." She has been married and divorced twice. "This is truly not what I expected to see in his marriage," she says of Michael, her only son. But she adds: "I hope this is going to be a stabilizing factor in his life, because he's been at loose ends for a long time."

Marriage creates kin, a process in evidence today. Laura, Jamie's onetime "monster mom," toasts the couple with the words, "I'm so happy to have a fourth son." Jamie's father says, "I've seen these two together enough to know that this is the kind of relationship that marriage is about." Times may change, and marriage may change, but parents are ever parents.

It is almost 5 p.m. The minister has given his blessing, invoking Solomon's song that many waters cannot quench love. "Remember this," he says, "remember this, remember this. Amen."

Then: "Before God and all present, do you, Michael, enter into this marriage with an open mind and heart and promise to love Jamie as long as you both shall live?" Michael firmly answers yes, and then Jamie, less steadily, gives the same answer, wiping away tears as he says, "Most importantly, I will work every day at loving you better." The minister calls for the rings, and laughter relieves sniffles as Jamie, flustered, offers his right hand.

That mistake corrected, the minister makes a pronouncement that I never thought I would live to hear. "By the authority vested in me by the state of Massachusetts, I declare that you, Jamie and Michael, are joined in the covenant of marriage, with the blessing of Christ's church. You may kiss."

They do. It is done.

No Nonsense in November

I have been monitoring my site traffic and have noticed that a huge segment of my readers live in Texas. Though I am not currently in Texas, I was born and raised there and am still registered to vote in that state. So, on November 8, I will be voting against Proposed Constitutional Amendment #2, which seeks to ban gay marriage. I ask those of you who are Texans to consider doing the same.

No Nonsense in November

I am not (at this moment) asking you to change your religious beliefs about homosexuality. I am not asking you to condone same-sex marriage. I am asking you to consider the possibility that your gay and lesbian friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintences should be treated the same as you; that they are your equals in the eyes of the law.

It is one thing to morally disapprove of someone's actions or "lifestyle." It is quite another to say that you are willing to use the law to prevent them from engaging in that behavior. I defend your ability to disapprove of me. But defend my right to marry.

Register to vote. Call your friends and tell them to do the same. Support me and those who, like me, want to be your equals.