My benighted brother recently became a pastor. He was doing a good thing, in some ways. The gig doesn't make him a cent and uses up an inordinate (pardon the pun) amount of his time, but he took it on for noble reasons.
It's national coming out day, and it made me think of this brother of mine. He says some of the rules in the Bible are not congenial to a modern spirit, but the point is, they are God's rules. God doesn't ask if you like them but requires that you follow them. You might not love the rules, but there they are.
Being politically to the right of Genghis Khan, just as my father was during his lifetime, he is particularly eager to show that God agrees with his views, and so, of course, for my brother, God does. I notice that, with every stamp of Christian. Somehow God himself agrees with their own ideas, no matter what ideas they come to the Bible with. And my brother would as soon see gays lose all their civil rights, so he loves Leviticus.
In Maine, we passed a law last year mandating equality in marriage through the state legislature, and the governor signed it. Right away, a referendum on the question was prepared and circulated by my brother's kind of folk, and it'll be on the ballot this November along with a lot of other froth and folderol. Maine people get to do this, that is, have statewide referenda on issues. The record is rather mixed concerning how much attention the results of the referenda receive.
What is happening in my state, then, is that everyone is being asked what they think of same-sex marriage, on the ballot. It's Question One.
It looks to be close, frankly. Marriage-equality laws have been proposed before in Maine, and gone down to defeat, but each time by a smaller majority, culminating in last year's session, when one of them passed. Like racism before it, homophobia has faded in America as time goes on. But Question One does not ask if everyone should be able to have the same civil rights, it asks about same-sex marriage. People say they have to vote with their dictionaries on the matter, and so on.
I'm pretty sure no one should be asked this question on a statewide ballot, where the result might mean something. It's presumptuous. No one should get to opine on my way of life, not in a context that implies I become a criminal if they don't approve. I burn wood, which some people dislike. I smoke, which lots of people execrate. I own guns, another thing which a lot of people seem to believe they have a right to pronounce on. I don't particularly care what everyone else thinks about that stuff, and I surely don't want some legislature barging in.
This Question One, though, is a clear, easy to comprehend civil-rights issue.
As a married person, I stand to inherit my wife's goods when she dies. I stand unquestioned as her next of kin, the one they will ask about her wishes when she might have her life prolonged by heroic measures when the clay is no longer viable. I can name her as my beneficiary for insurances without making anyone raise an eyebrow. She can name me beneficiary, and stand as my next of kin, and inherit from me. We both have parental rights and responsibilities for our minor children, and can sign permissions on those minor children's behalf. We enter mortgage contracts jointly without a lot of static about it. I can opt to have my retirement cover her, if she should survive me, and vice versa. We file joint tax returns. There's a whole raft of things our marriage makes it ordinary and usual for us to do, both jointly and mutually, that same-sex couples did not get to do before this law passed.
If we had been a lesbian couple, every one of those things would have been a problem, and some of them impossible, like the retirement options and the joint tax returns, for example.
If I were her lesbian partner, unconscious and brain-dead, they would not ask her what measures I would have wanted done to prolong my life artificially, but probably some cousin or aunt somewhere, whom they'd have had to research to find. This relative, likely as not, might have disapproved of our lesbian household, though our union had lasted, as mine actually has, for almost forty years, because of her church. And that church would not have had to be Pat Robertson's church, but only one like my asshole brother's.
That cousin would have had little contact with me, since I would have been an abomination to the Lord. But she'd be my legal next of kin, just the same. Who knows what she'd want done, on my helpless body? She would surely not want my lesbian partner's wishes to govern. I could be kept alive, contrary to my will, in a welter of medical torture. Is torture too strong a word? Listen. My wife works in an emergency room. Any family member who asks that "everything be done" should be forced to watch.
But Question One is not couched in civil rights terms. Its proponents worry extremely about the "homosexual agenda." They cite God's laws. They are like my brother. It's fear of the Other, pure and hot. People in Maine have to come out this November and stop this crazy thing.
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Comments
This part hit hard: "My wife works in an emergency room. Any family member who asks that "everything be done" should be forced to watch."
Yep. Very well written. HIGHLY rated.
Homosexuality makes conservative people think about penises and anuses and vaginas and tongues. It doesn't matter if the gay couple is in their 60s, a couple for 40 years, suffused with radiant good will and the very model of early 50s decorum.
In the 60s we busted up the joint, humped in the parks, wore clothes that screamed "later we will pull the frayed edge of these cutoffs to the side a few inches and ___, _____, and then _____, all night long!"
It makes sense to them, to vividly associate gruntsexanimallust with gays, because of gay pride parades and a lifetime of faith that says "we are not animals!"
I get it. I sympathize with the quandary they are in. I even appreciate the stabilizing influence they theoretically have. I lived in NYC circa 1980s, the west village, and watched the halloween parade with my little daughter. The drag queens were great, the moron with the transparent underpants and the huge erection, working the crowd, was not.
But their problems with sexual flamboyance, their misunderstanding about our real biology, their fantasy that we are smooth barbie/ken snowflakes invented by a platonic God, their admirable demand that we stand up with decorum sometimes, have NOTHING to do with your point: rights iz rights, fair iz fair, equality must be served, and we must stop this crazy thing.
Your post is coherent, carefully written, an exemplar essay -- but amiable, personal. Well-done.
I always believed the in-your-face gay pride was mostly done because it just felt so damn good to do. I hope no one tries to tone the thing down just for the sake of practical politics; the younger people deserve the outlet as much as you fellows did in the day.
But, of course, you might be right that it stokes the alarm these people feel. In my view, honestly, the biblical belief stuff comes after the homophobic alarm. It comes under the general heading Rationalizations. Like all "faith" arguments, it is not capable of responding to reason, as well; it signals intransigence.
Whatever happened to the premise that Church and State do not mix.
Rated for keeping their Bible out of my politics.
Because it's become a church thing, loads of people with no particular dog in the fight have become involved, because the church they belong to has violated the law. The churches do not get to preach a vote choice from the pulpit. They receive tax exemptions, a condition of which is that they not get into the pulpit and urge the flock to vote for one candidate or another. But they seem to be able to, and with impunity. Predictably, members of these flocks feel that they have been told that voting a particular way is a religious duty, as indeed the pastors say, many times in so many words. Political advocacy of one position or another is a civil right, but the wall of separation in the constitution rests upon that limit. The prosecuting attorneys here ought to go right around the state pulling church's exemptions.
Separating Church and State is one of the wiser ideas the Enlightenment people had. Three hundred years had passed since Luther, with hardly time to take a breath between religious wars and massacres. But Luther was hardly the beginning. Pagans, Arians, Moors, each in their turn suffered campaigns of torture, burning and despoilment, and that long history was peppered also with pogroms and rapine, slaughter and displacement of Jews. The Founders might not have given much of a damn about the Moors or the Jews, but they could scarcely have missed the way European history had been driven by the acquisitiveness of kings and the acrimony between religious factions.
Their allies in this ("no religious test," a godless Constitution, and freedom of religion with no established church) were, among others, the very evangelicals who now are set on seizing power. Then as now, most of the country subscribed to one religion or another, after all. The smaller groups representing the byways of faith stood to lose if any of the larger churches became the new country's official church, and supported the idea. They knew all too well what repressions and injustices always followed when one church got the nod over the rest.
Now they see their moment come 'round at last.
But in the end, if you don't like gay marriage, by all means don't have one. Luther himself took his stand, in the beginning, against the idea that marriage should be a sacrament. It was just a scam to make churchmen more money, he said. Marriage is important, but no business of the Church. Its importance is especially civil, regulating the care of minor children and inheritances of land and other property.