Biblical standards of marriage (because you can’t have just one!). Click on the graphic if you want to go to a site where it’s a little more legible.
I can’t believe it took me so long, but it occurred to me this morning that the Biblical standard of marriage could best be described like this: Marriage is between one man and whatever woman/women he wants to marry. I could be snarky and add that it’s strikingly similar to the marriage standard of a number of prominent conservative male talkers and thinkers. But I won’t.
Now that the issue of equal marriage is once again front and center, there’s a lot of handwringing among progressive/liberal friends of mine, across a broad spectrum of religious and non-religious affiliations, regarding how to engage people who cherry pick verses from the Bible to justify their opposition to marriage equality.
Here are my thoughts on this, heavily influenced by my gaymarriage (we like to say it as one word in our house) to PW. Let me tell you, being able to love and live in gaymarriage with a Bible scholar, who mines both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament in their original languages, is like living in a research laboratory for religion. I find it thrilling, but then you probably already knew that I’m a big gaymarried weirdo.
Raise your hand if you’re tired of hearing people reduce scripture to prop up arguments that condemn people for love. As people are wont to say these days, “I know, right?!” This sort of scripture mumblety-peg seems to me to be an extremely unfaithful use of these ancient texts we have inherited. And, I would argue that even if you’re an atheist, you have inherited these texts, since they inform (for better or for worse) so much of the literature, art, music, language, laws, and architecture that surround us.
More and more I wonder, whatever happened to Jesus’ very simple teaching, “With God, all things are possible”? It seems to me that Christians who explain resurrection by citing this verse, but then suddenly exile it when the topic is queer people being able to be ordained or to marry each other, show an extraordinary lack of both faith and imagination. I would go so far as to suggest that the willful exclusion of one of the most expansive verses in the Christian testament demonstrates willful opposition to what the Bible relentlessly shows that God wants for all of God’s people: freedom, justice, and fullness of life. “With God, all things are possible” also happens to be the state motto of Ohio, a big swing state. I don’t know about you, but I find that to be a particularly delicious gaymarriage coincidence!
As I think I’ve said before here, I believe that the progress toward full inclusion of queer people in the Church and in society is God speaking to us, here and now, through a relentless urge of redeeming Love.
My suggestion to those of us who will find ourselves in these sorts of conversations–whether in real life or on the Internet–is: don’t get sucked into arguing with people who abuse scripture this way. Save your tootsies from scripture mumblety-peg. Stand tall, be out and proud (whether you’re family, ally, or queer), and represent all that is possible in Love. But if you’re tempted to to cite a Bible verse, feel free to lean on that expansive teaching from an ancient and still prominent unmarried, homeless, rebellious Jewish rabbi who, from the stories we have, never seemed interested in playing scripture mumblety-peg with anyone.
Thus ends my locker room pep talk. Now let’s get out there and win one in the name of Love!
I’d like to correct my scorecard. Based on today’s news out of the White House this afternoon, I think we did more than that. I think we scored a run on that play.
The Internet has been aflutter all afternoon with people complaining about President Obama’s statement today in support of same-sex marriage. It’s too calculated, it’s too late, it’s distracting to the “real” issues that are plaguing our nation, it’s not enough, it’s a ploy to invigorate his base, it’s cynical.
Whatever. Some folks, when given the opportunity to see a glass half-full or half-empty, will maintain that we’re all out of glasses.
One small step, one giant leap
For me, watching the sitting president of the United States, who is a biracial man with an unusual name, come out in support of my equal rights — well, this is as riveting as the moon landing. I’ve watched the clips several times, with that same combination of awe and disbelief that I had when I watched Neil Armstrong make his way down that ladder.
I still can’t believe I have lived long enough to see the kind of progress on queer civil rights that have happened in the past 15 years. I wish Maurice Sendak, who never came out to his parents, and who made a home with the same man for 50 years, had lived to see this day. I wish Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde and Matthew Shepard and Harvey Milk had lived to see this day.
My hope, my prayer, is that those of us who have the good fortune to live and love in these times will continue to live and love in ways that honor the mighty ones who came before us.
Thank you, President Obama.
Update at 9:56 pm Eastern Time: feel free to use the comments to add the names of friends or family of yours who you wish had lived to see this day. Thanks for the idea, Miss L.
When I was a kid, I was pretty fast sprinter. I remember participating in only one track meet, held at the athletic fields behind our local high school on a raw, windy spring day. I was a skinny nine-year-old kid with gangly arms and legs. As I was shivering, my bony arms and legs felt like clattering wind chimes.
My parents were in the bleachers, and I guess they couldn’t bear watching me shiver, so my dad came down to the fence between the track and the bleachers and called me over. He had a bulky, corduroy coat in his hand, a hand-me-down from my older brothers. It had a big hood that zipped onto the back. Dad told me that he and my mom wanted me to wear it.
I happily put the coat on and waited for the heat of my race to be called. Seeing the other kids shivering made me even more glad for the coat. Then our heat was called. I looked for my dad, to give him the coat back, but I had no idea where my parents were sitting. I assessed the other shivering kids in the race, and knew I was much faster than all but one of them. That one kid was a stranger, so in my magical nine-year-old thinking, I figured he’d be eating my dust even with the coat on.
We got in our starting crouches. Five freezing nine-year-olds, and one perfectly warm one wearing an enormous coat. It must have looked ridiculous.
The gun went off and I hurled myself down the track, legs churning. The coat restricted my arm movements, so it was hard to find a good rhythm. And then there was that zip-on hood.
As I labored down the track, I apparently compensated for my inability to move my arms freely by turning my torso in an exaggerated manner. The result was that the hood slapped me in the face with every other stride.
I came in last. I couldn’t hold the tears back, as I saw my parents approach me. “Why did you MAKE me wear THAT COAT?!?!?” I asked incredulously. My dad smiled and said, “Well, honey, I didn’t think you’d wear it while you were running.” I blurted, barely coherently, “BUTYOU [sob] TOLDME [sob] IHADTO [sob] WEARTHECOATAAAAAAUUUUHGH….”
This was the story that was running in my head like a movie this morning as I sat on the bus and read my Facebook news feed of people reacting to the passage of North Carolina’s Amendment One.
What I want to say is enough. Enough with the shame. Shame is like that heavy corduroy coat. It restricts our movement, weighs us down, and slaps us in the face with the regularity of a metronome. Stop casting “Shame on North Carolina.” Stop wearing shame like that coat. It is shame that enables short-sighted people to win small, temporary victories like the passage of Amendment One. But shame will not overturn Amendment One. Only Love will do that.
The last time North Carolina’s constitution was amended with regard to marriage was in 1875. That lasted 96 years which, while a mighty long time, is nowhere near the forever that those amendment authors were hoping for.
At Heretic School yesterday, one of our band of scripture strugglers referred to the passage from John’s depiction of Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse” as being written with a key signature of farewell. In the passage we read, the most repeated words were “you” and “love.” My friend’s lovely musical metaphor enabled me to wonder whether the “Farewell Discourse” is Jesus as musical conductor, teaching us how to sing in the key of Love.
The opportunities of shucking off the coat of shame and singing in the key of Love in the face of Amendment One are enormous. In fact, by virtue of having Amendment One on the ballot, the work of Love has already begun. Disparate constituencies have found allies in each other, conversations about justice have erupted. People are talking, openly, at a NATIONAL level about marriage between same-sex couples. That, in and of itself, is victory. It is a sign that the shame that kept queer people and our allies silent for centuries is being cast aside, right now, right here, in our lifetime. We all know how toxic shame is, which is why it’s vital to not give into our desire to cast it on others as we remove it from our own shoulders.
Amendment One is the death rattle of a species on the verge of extinction. Or, if you prefer a baseball metaphor, how about this: In baseball, a player who gets a hit 30% of the time is considered a good hitter. That player is even better when s/he routinely does little things that don’t show up in the batting average, like moving runners over, or scoring runners while making an out.
In losing the battle over Amendment One, forces of justice and equality may have made an out, but we moved the runner into scoring position. So if you need a pick me up this morning as you read the stories about Amendment One, read some of the baseball box scores from last night, along with the little news descriptions of some of the games.
Then get back out there and sing in the key of Love. Find others to sing with, too.
And whatever you do, NEVER attempt to run the 100-yard dash while wearing a heavy coat with a zip-on hood. Unless, of course, you feel your track meet needs some comic relief.
All the churchgoing I’ve done in my adult life has been in urban settings. When I compare this to the churchgoing of my childhood, the biggest differences seem to be that, as an adult, I’ve attended churches with a lot more people who are either visibly mentally ill, or homeless, or both.
Listening to the radical teachings of a homeless rabbi to the marginalized people of a land occupied by a hostile foreign army is a lot more intense when some of my pewmates are marginalized people who stink to high heaven because they don’t have a regular place to bathe or wash their clothes, and/or who are clearly struggling to keep any sort of grip on their minds. Some have been given to what I think of as Liturgical Wandering, where they get up and mill about at inappropriate moments. Some have come storming down the center aisle, hollering incoherently and angrily. Some have panhandled during communion. You get the idea.
We have a few regulars at my church who are in the category that PW refers to as “the least, the last and the lost.” Like all the rest of us who more easily pass as “normal” (even though in our own ways we are also “least, last, and lost”), some are higher functioning than others. Recently, one of our “least, last, and lost” responded to an announcement in the worship folder that offered pastoral care services to anyone who needs them.
I will call this person Z.
Z’s pastoral care needs include help with laundry, grocery shopping, and getting rides to and from church. I don’t know if there’s any diagnosable condition involved, but Z is consumed with fear and suspicion. This results in incredibly tense situations at church, especially around personal contact (touching) and food. I’ve seen more than a few well-meaning people tenderly touch Z on the shoulder while trying to find out what it is that Z needs, only to find themselves on the other end of Z’s outraged, “Get your HANDS OFF OF ME! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE??”
Yesterday, I volunteered to give Z a ride home from church. Well, I didn’t exactly volunteer. PW asked if I would do it. I didn’t want to do it, but when my inner Bartleby the Scrivener muttered “I would prefer not to,” I took a deep breath and said “too bad” to it. Then I responded to PW with, “Okay.” There were at least a thousand other things I would rather have done, but it’s a shallow, flimsy, and ultimately worthless commitment to a difficult and demanding faith tradition if I only show up for the people I enjoy. There’s at least one thing I’ve learned in all these years of church-going: if we’re really following the example of our homeless rabbi, being a Christian is less like a garden party, and more like mud wrestling.
At the exchange of the peace during church yesterday, the co-chair of the pastoral care committee, B, hugged me and wished me “many blessings” on my afternoon adventure with Z. B knows how important those blessings are. She recently spent something like 5 hours sitting in a laundromat while Z did laundry and refused all help. I didn’t realize that such a simple exchange with someone I love would end up becoming a life preserver that I would cling to desperately in order to get through the afternoon.
Giving Z a ride home was excruciating – it took way too long, it overwhelmed every one of my senses in bad ways, and it tapped the bottom of qualities I think of myself as having in abundance: patience, kindness, compassion, empathy, and good humor. I completely underestimated the effect that an hour’s worth of Z’s paranoia would have on me. I knew that I was only experiencing a sliver of what it is like for Z to navigate the world on a daily basis. This simultaneously comforted me, made me feel ill, and shattered my heart. I squeezed the life preserver of B’s blessings and hung on tight.
As you may have gathered from the description of the scene at the laundromat, Z moves at a glacially slow pace. After a complicated and time-consuming trip to the grocery store, where I thought Z might collapse from stress, we arrived at Z’s apartment. I carried the groceries up and stacked them precariously on one of the few available flat surfaces. Z thanked me awkwardly, and looked smaller than ever as I closed the door behind me. When I left the tiny, chaotic room that Z calls home, I got in my car and took a deep breath. I didn’t know if I would throw up or start sobbing, or both.
That's me, out of formation in the lower left corner
More and more, I think the practice of going to church is, basically, swimming in the School of Love. It’s about learning that sometimes love is as simple, and as difficult, as escorting a nausea-inducing person to your car, opening the door, and helping the person sit down on the once pristine passenger seat. It is about remembering to hold your breath while you reach across to help that person, who does not want to be touched, with the seat belt. It is about wielding a grocery cart and 20 bucks to buy diet soda, blueberry muffins, pita bread, hummus, and taboule. It is about choosing to be compassionate, even when everything about it makes you feel ill.
One of my swim coaches once told me, “You won’t get any better if you back off from the pain. So if you want to be better, when you get to the pain, just swim through it.” He made it sound so easy. Oh sure, la dee dah! Just swim through it! La la! Even when I knew there was an endorphin rush on the other side, I always found it terrifying to swim through the pain. That was several decades and two shoulders ago, before I found that most of life’s swimming doesn’t happen anywhere near a pool.
What do I want to be when I grow up? Better. Better at compassion today than yesterday. Better at love this year than last. Better at doing the next right thing than I was just a moment ago. And so I keep swimming in the School of Love, clinging to the lifeline of my many blessings.
“Whatever fear invents, I swear it makes no sense.” — Peter Gabriel, from the song “Come Talk to Me”
In the summer of 1987, I quit a job I loved because I felt a burning need to spend time interviewing and hanging out with my two remaining grandparents, my maternal grandmother, Mammaw, and my paternal grandmother, Nana. I don’t remember if any particular event sparked this burning need, or whether I just suddenly realized that they probably wouldn’t live forever.
I bought a video camera and a decent tape recorder, packed up my un-air-conditioned Honda Civic sedan, and headed from Washington, DC to Mobile, Alabama, where Mammaw had spent most of her life. Mammaw was 88 years old, sharp as a razor, and a complete spitfire. Her macular degeneration had advanced to the point that she only had the barest slivers of peripheral vision. She still loved to watch TV, though, so throughout the week that I stayed with her, I often found her in the living room, chair pulled up to within inches of the TV, head turned to the side, watching TV out of the corners of her eyes. She talked back to the TV a lot, a trait I seem to have inherited.
The effects of macular degeneration
Like many people with visual impairments, Mammaw did a lot of things by feel. One of the things she couldn’t do by feel any more was driving. Mammaw had always loved to drive so this was a particularly difficult loss for her. My childhood memories of riding in the car with Mammaw and Pampaw involve giggling quietly with my brothers and/or cousins while Mammaw peppered Pampaw with reasons why he needed to pull over so that she could take the wheel: he was lost; he was going the wrong way; he was driving too fast; he was driving too slowly; he wasn’t passing cars she thought he ought to pass; or she just plain didn’t like how he was driving.
I was more than a little nervous when we set out one morning for a day trip Dixonville, Alabama, where much of that side of my family is buried. Mammaw had made that trip probably thousands of times in her 88 years, and she probably could have driven it herself if there had been no other cars or pedestrians to worry about. So when I took a particular route past Flomaton, she started complaining that we were going the wrong way. I checked the map to make sure, and we had a little verbal back and forth for awhile before she muttered, “Well, you know, this is not the way AH would have gone.”
In Dixonville, Mammaw gave me a tour of “our” little cemetery. The video footage from that day is hilarious to me because every now and then I would stumble over a stone and the camera would suddenly be pointing at the ground, or the sky, but you can still hear Mammaw telling a story about someone. The woman couldn’t see a lick, but she sauntered and glided through the bumpy ground of the cemetery in her high heels as if she were Ginger Rogers. I lurched and careened through it as if I were a one-legged rodeo clown wearing a blindfold and a shoe with a broken heel.
On our way back to Mobile, it started raining, and Mammaw cranked up the volume of her fretting. She kept telling me to pull over to the side of the road. I channeled Pampaw and insisted that I could see just fine. Finally, she scolded, “Now Jo-wah, ah want you to pull ovah like all these othuh cahs.” I looked around and all I could see were the pine trees that lined both sides of the highway. There weren’t even any other cars ON the highway, much less pulled off to the side. “What cars, Mammaw?” She turned her head toward me, glared and waved her crookedy finger, “See? ALL those CAHS on the SAHD of the ROAD!” I took a deep breath. “Those are trees, Mammaw. Not cars.”
Five minutes of heavy silence passed. Then Mammaw’s spirits rallied and she broke the silence: “You know, ah still think you should pull ovah, Jo-wah.” “Why’s that, Mammaw?” “Well, you know, theah’s a drawbridge up ahead a ways. It might be open.”
Judge Vaughn Walker
This is the story that came into my mind when I wondered what to write about Judge Vaughn Walker’s recent ruling that California’s Proposition 8 violates the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. I’ve been worried that my license for queerness might get revoked if I let that occasion pass without comment.
I always suspected that Mammaw’s irrational fears — the drawbridge that might be open, my ignorance of or refusal to acknowledge whatever imminent danger had prompted every other driver (or tree) to pull over — were fueled in part by her severely limited vision. Macular degeneration had left her navigating a world of shadows and dim light, as described in this excerpt from Google health on the symptoms of the disease:
Often objects in the central vision look distorted and dim, and colors look faded. A patient may have trouble reading print or seeing other details, but can generally see well enough to walk and perform most routine activities…As the disease becomes worse, you may need more light to read or perform everyday tasks. The blurred spot in the center of vision gradually gets larger and darker. In the later stages, you may not be able to recognize faces until people are close to you.
Whenever I read the various cases people make against equal marriage, I hear that same sort of irrational fear, that same macular degeneration that reduces queer people and our families to unrecognizable shadows. Although Judge Walker’s fact-based ruling picks apart those fears with the same efficiency of Bayou people picking apart crawfish, I doubt that many of the foes of equal marriage will be swayed. As anyone knows who has ever tried to convince a child that there are not monsters in her closet, or trolls under his bed, irrational fears, and the intellectual/ideological macular degeneration that spawn them, are immune to reason. To quote Emilia’s great speech about jealousy from Shakespeare’s tragedy, “Othello:”
“But jealious souls will not be answer’d so;/They are not ever jealious for the cause,/But jealious for they’re jealious. It is a monster/Begot upon itself, born on itself.”
Othello playbill
Having recently watched “Othello” performed on the Boston Common, it occurs to me that, whether consciously or subconsciously, the foes of equal marriage borrow heavily from Iago’s toxic fear-cultivating agenda. Whispered insinuation, reliance on frightful stereotypes, planting a corrosive seed and then urging the person in whom it is planted to not let it grow (also known as “hate the sin, but love the sinner”), these are but a few of the weapons used to sanction, encourage, or at least tolerate the oppression, imprisonment, and execution of queer people around the globe, based on the notion that any evidence of our innate queerness makes us sub-human, or at least not as equal as other humans.
One of the clearest examples of the irrational argument against equal marriage comes from moderates, people who are willing to acknowledge a fundamental right of queer people to enjoy the legal status and protections of marriage, but only if the union of queer people is not actually called “marriage.” You can have the thing, you just can’t call it what the REST OF HUMANITY calls it. One such moderate is our own president, Barack Obama, who cites his Christianity as his reason for understanding that marriage ” is something sanctified between a man and a woman.”
As the product of an interracial marriage that was illegal in many states at the time it occurred, Barack Obama should know better. As a constitutional law scholar and professor, he should know that marriage as “something sanctified between a man and a woman” is a DEscriptive statement, not a PREscriptive statement.
Look again at the symptoms of macular degeneration: “You may not be able to recognize faces until people are close to you.” That sentence describes how legislators in Massachusetts who had never before supported equal marriage had their vision cleared and their minds changed when equal marriage was debated here. People came to them with stories about their queer sons, daughters, siblings, parents, grandparents, and neighbors. Queer people came to them with happy stories about family acceptance, finding love, building a family, as well as tragic stories of being shut out of hospitals, funerals, their own homes, or family photographs because they weren’t considered “next of kin.”
I’m willing to cut Obama a little slack for his macular degeneration on equal marriage because he’s a politician dealing with all the demons that are part of that particular lifestyle choice. He’s reminding people that he’s a Christian, not a Muslim. He’s trying to remain electable, and support for equal marriage is, for now, the third rail in U.S. political life – touch it and you die, especially if you have national political aspirations. Based on Obama’s stances on issues like repealing the Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, I think he’s trying to hew to what he knows is right: that queer folks deserve equal rights. Still, I believe he has planted his marriage flag in the Land Where Trolls Live Under the Beds. I also believe he knows it, given this passage from his book “The Audacity of Hope:”
“It is my obligation, not only as an elected official in a pluralistic society but also as a Christian, to remain open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided…and that in years hence I may be seen as someone who was on the wrong side of history.”
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a Birmingham Jail
Would that more of these separate-but-equal moderates such as Barack Obama would reacquaint themselves with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” and not just because it’s one of the greatest treatises on civil rights ever written. Moderates should memorize huge swaths of this document because they were who King had in mind when he wrote it. Here’s one such passage that moderates of all stripes (political, environmental, religious, queer, etc.) should etch into their brains. To my mind, the statement below — indeed, the whole letter itself — can be easily expanded to address moderates of ALL colors and religious persuasions, not just the white Christian and Jewish moderates of King’s time. Indeed, the entire document might well be one of the more powerful treatments for the intellectual and ideological macular degeneration that plague our current cultural climate. The emphasis of the last two sentences is mine:
“…I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
I’ll leave you with this video that Lulu posted on my Facebook page the day of Judge Walker’s ruling. It’s a whole ‘nother way of making the same points as this post, but it lacks, among other things, the color and character of my Mammaw’s grace and grit.
