Blog carnivals!
Queer/Bi
{advertisement}
Free Speech for Evil, Hateful, Repulsive Nutjobs? You Betcha!
Never, in the worst of my worst nightmares, did I think I would ever have to write anything at all defending Fred Phelps.
But it looks like I do.
Dammit, dammit, dammit.
Quick precis, for those who don’t know the story: You know Fred Phelps? The evil, hateful, repulsive nutjob who pickets the funerals of prominent gay people, with signs saying things like “God Hates Fags”? Who lately has been picketing the funerals of U.S. soldiers killed in the Iraq war, on the grounds that their deaths are punishment for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality? (I told you — evil, hateful, repulsive nutjob.)
He — or more accurately, his church — was recently ordered to pay nearly $11 million in damages, in a civil suit filed by the father of a soldier whose funeral Phelps picketed. The suit was won on the grounds that the picket constituted “invasion of privacy and intent to inflict emotional distress.”
And I’m finding myself very disturbed by this.
Don’t get me wrong. I am feeling a certain amount of visceral Schadenfreude about the decision. I won’t deny that. As Molly Ivins once said, “Mama may have raised a mean child, but she didn’t raise no hypocrites.” But as much as I personally enjoy seeing the bastard suffer, I am far more disturbed by the extremely chilling effect that this decision could have for freedom of political speech and expression.
For all of us.
And that’s a whole lot more important to me than my personal Schadenfreude.
According to the reports I’ve read, this was not an Operation Rescue type of deal. There was no disruption of the service, no getting three inches from the mourners’ faces to scream at them. The plaintiff himself said at the trial that he didn’t even see the protesters or their signs at the funeral. They kept their hateful, repugnant protest a reasonable distance away. So the invasion of privacy thing seems to be pretty much bullshit. It’s the “intent to inflict emotional distress” that’s the real core here.
And when it comes to political and religious speech, I think the infliction of emotional distress is — and should be — a guaranteed, First Amendment-protected right.
Take a look at my Atheists and Anger piece. And take a look at the deluge of comments. 749 comments as of this writing, and still climbing. Almost half from people who were very emotionally distressed indeed by the piece. I knew when I wrote it that the piece would inflict emotional distress on a lot of people (although I didn’t quite expect the deluge)… and I wrote it anyway.
I want to be able to write like that again without being sued.
Not a perfect example, I’ll admit. People come to my blog voluntarily (although some of them seem to have forgotten that fact), so it could be argued that I didn’t inflict anything.
So let’s use a different example. I want the right to picket church services with a sign saying, “How’s Your Invisible Friend Today?” To picket the opening of a new steak restaurant with signs that vividly describe slaughterhouse conditions. To picket George W. Bush’s eventual funeral singing, “Ding, Dong, The Witch Is Dead.” I probably wouldn’t do any of those things, since I’d consider them in bad taste; but I think I should have the right to do them.
And if this ruling stands, I might not.
Free speech is a human right, one of the central foundations that this country was built on. And that’s not just true when the speech in question goes the way we want it. The First Amendment does not exist to protect popular speech. It exists to protect unpopular speech. That’s the whole point. We don’t need Constitutional protection for our right to publish apple pie recipes or pictures of cute puppies. We need Constitutional protection for our right to say things that make people flee in horror… from “God Hates Fags” to “Gay Is Beautiful,” from “Stop the War” to “Bomb Them Into The Stone Age,” from “God Wants Our Soldiers To Die” to “God Does Not Exist.”
And the more I think about this case, the more I think it’s bad strategically as well as ethically. And for much the same reason. I think this case can and will be used by the Right to argue that queers are demanding “special rights.” “Sure, they want First Amendment protections for themselves,” they’ll say. “But they sure are quick to get off their First Amendment high horse when it’s someone they don’t like!”
And they’ll be right to do so.
I mean, I think that. I’m saying that right now. And I’m queer.
If you want to make an argument that this ruling doesn’t violate the First Amendment, then I’d be very open to hearing it. I’m the first to admit that I’m not a legal or Constitutional scholar, and it’s possible that a reasonable case could be made that the Phelps protests are not protected speech under the First Amendment.
But I’ve seen too many arguments on this topic that say, “Free speech isn’t an absolute right, there are limits, look at libel laws, fraud laws, etc.”… without making any argument for why this particular case should be one of those limitations. Other than just, “The speech is hateful.” So far, nothing I have read on this particular case suggests any interpretation other than, “the plaintiffs are getting $11 million because they were upset by the content of Phelps’s speech.”
Deeply upset, and rightfully so. I get that. But again, that is exactly the sort of situation that the First Amendment is meant to protect.
And I’ve seen too many arguments on this case that essentially say, “First Amendment, Shmirst Amendment — I wanna see this bastard go down.” I would respectfully like to suggest that that is one lousy argument. The First Amendment is not to be casually tossed aside when it happens to protect a repulsive creep who we want to see fry.
A lot of progressives, people who are normally all over the First Amendment/free speech thing, are unusually willing, even eager, to drop their love of the Amendment in this particular case. And I understand the impulse. This particular case — this particular person, this particular group — makes people profoundly angry and upset. It makes me profoundly angry and upset. There’s a part of me that would love for some Constitutional scholar to come up with some legal loophole in the First Amendment, just so I can feel good about watching this bastard go down in flames.
But once again — that’s the whole point. The First Amendment to protect speech that makes people profoundly angry and upset.
See, this case is not just about a delicate legal nitpick. It’s not just about practical political strategy. It’s not even just about the pragmatic, enlightened self-interest desire to protect other people’s First Amendment rights so our own will be protected. This case is about the basic ethical principle of free speech. And it’s about whether we care enough about that principle to defend it, even when it hurts. It’s about whether people have the legal right to say what they want, no matter how vile or upsetting we find it… simply because they do.
So do we really have to defend this guy? Do we really have to stand up and say, “Yes, Fred Phelps has the right to go to funerals and carry signs saying ‘God hates fags’ and “Thank God for dead soldiers’?”
Yes. We do.
We have to stand up and defend anyone who’s trying to communicate an unpopular message that profoundly upsets people. That includes a lot of horrible, evil people with repulsive ideas. But that’s the whole point of the First Amendment. It doesn’t exist to protect popular speech. It doesn’t exist to protect Cute Overload. It exists to protect speech that makes us want to vomit.
Sorry.
Dumbledore Is Gay: Good Guys and Literary Closets
Every single person I have ever met in my life has sent me this piece of news.
I wonder why. 🙂
The news: J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books (yes, I’m a fan, suck it up), announced recently that the headmaster character, Dumbledore, is gay. It came up at a recent reading at Carnegie Hall; a fan asked about Dumbledore’s love life, and Rowling answered, “My truthful answer to you… I always thought of Dumbledore as gay.” She went on to explain that Dumbledore had been in love with the wizard Grindelwald in his youth, and that Grindelwald turning out to be evil was the great tragedy of Dumbledore’s life.
(As it turns out, the subject of Dumbledore’s sexual orientation had come up previously during the making of one of the movies; the director had some reference in the script to a girl in Dumbledore’s past, and Rowling had to pass him a note to gently point him off that track.) 
I pretty much have just three things to say about this:
One: Neat.
I think it’s cool that Dumbledore is the moral center of the book, the apotheosis of goodness, the one character that all the good guys look to for both political and ethical leadership.
And he’s gay.
That’s just nifty.
Two: I think it’s too bad she couldn’t have said so in the books themselves.
Don’t get me wrong. I totally understand why she didn’t. If she’d made Dumbledore overtly gay in the books, then in the general public eye, that’s what the books would have been about. Everything else that the books are about — moral complexity, the realities of a resistance movement, what it’s like to be a child growing up and figuring out that the adult world is seriously messed-up, all the lovely and ridiculous magic stuff — would have become suddenly and dramatically secondary. It would have become the children’s book series about the wizarding school with the gay headmaster. It would have become the seven-volume fantasy version of “Heather Has Two Mommies.” I think it was the right decision, and if I’d been Rowling, I would have done exactly the same thing.
I just think that’s too bad.
I think it’s too bad that we live in a world where the mere presence of a major gay character in a children’s book automatically makes it a Kids’ Book About Gay.
I think it’s too bad that I now have to wonder: How many other characters did Rowling envision as gay, but wasn’t able to say so? (My money’s on Draco…)
I think it’s too bad that the single most popular author in the known universe, the one author who could write her own ticket more than any author living today, still had to keep the gayness of one of her central characters a secret until the series was completed.
It is better now than it used to be, forty years ago or even twenty. Imagine if L. Frank Baum had announced that Glinda the Good Witch was gay. Or Tolkein with Gandalf. Or Madeleine L’Engle with Mrs. Whatsit. There would have been a shitstorm. But it’s a different time now, and the people who are mostly going to be upset about Dumbledore are the fundies who aren’t buying the books anyway because they promote witchcraft.
But I still think we have a long way to go. I still think it’s still too bad that a major children’s book can’t have a major gay character in it without that becoming the central defining feature of the book.
Maybe in twenty years.
Three: Now I have to read the whole series again. Or the last book, anyway.
Damn. What a shame.
Oh, and P.S.: Snape.
No, I’m not saying he’s gay. I’m just saying: Snape. Because I am constitutionally incapable of writing an entire Harry Potter post without mentioning Snape.
National Coming Out Day, October 11
Today is National Coming Out Day, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to tell you all:
I’m queer.
That is all.
Short Memories: AIDS Denialism and Vaccine Resistance
A friend of ours was telling Ingrid about this new woman she’s been dating. Things were going along swimmingly… until it turned out that the new inamorata, a youngish thing in her early thirties, was an AIDS denialist. She was swallowing all that bullshit about how HIV doesn’t really cause AIDS, AIDS drugs are what causes AIDS, and the whole thing is a vast conspiracy by the drug companies to get rich selling people drugs they don’t need and that just make them sick.
This was absolutely the wrong thing to say to our friend, who had been an AIDS activist since the early days of the epidemic, had nursed several beloved friends through the illness, had seen way too many of those friends die… and had seen others come back from the brink of death when the protease inhibitors and combination therapies finally came out.
So Ingrid and I were talking, not only about how ignorant AIDS denialism is and what a perfect example of the Galileo Fallacy it’s proving to be… but also about how profoundly insensitive and clueless it was for this woman to talk this way to someone who’d been through the worst days of the epidemic. Doesn’t she remember? we said. Doesn’t she know what AIDS was like before the drug cocktails came along?
And it occurred to both of us:
No. She doesn’t remember.
And that’s the problem.
There are some AIDS denialists who were around in the ’80s. But an awful lot of them don’t remember. They weren’t around during the early days of the epidemic, when there was absolutely no treatment and your life expectancy when you got diagnosed was a few months, a year or two if you were lucky. They don’t remember the days when a diagnosis was pretty much a death sentence — a sentence to a slow, painful death. (Some people with AIDS lived through those days to tell the tale, but not many.) They don’t remember having half their gay male friends get sick and die. They don’t remember people lying in the streets screaming for the medical establishment to fucking pay attention and work on a treatment, some treatment, any treatment at all.
And they don’t remember what it was like when the cocktail came along, and suddenly people started getting better and living longer. They don’t remember the wonderful (although not entirely trivial) “problem” of people with AIDS who had quit their jobs and run up huge credit card debts, and now actually expected to live for a while. They don’t remember what it was like when AIDS turned, almost overnight, from a deadly illness to a chronic but often survivable one.
To them, AIDS has always been what it is now. They look at HIV and AIDS, and they see a bad disease, one that still kills a lot of people and makes a lot of people pretty damn sick, but also one that people have a decent chance of surviving for a good long time. They see the cocktail making some people feel crappy. And they see the cocktail being really expensive, and making drug companies very rich indeed.
What’s more, they have little or no awareness of what AIDS is still like in Africa, and other places where prevention and treatment still range from lousy to non-existent… and where the pandemic is as bad or worse as it ever was in its early days in the U.S. 
So it’s much easier for them to ignore or dismiss the effectiveness of the cocktail, and to treat it as a drug-company conspiracy. It’s easier for them to see themselves as brave Galileos for resisting the “lie” of HIV drugs… because they have no memory of the harsh, horrible truth of HIV before the drugs came along.
And I think the same thing is happening with the vaccine resisters: the people who insist that vaccines — measles, mumps, rubella, polio, tetanus, what have you — are useless poison, foisted on an unsuspecting public by a Big Pharma cabal of cackling men in expensive suits.
The problem, again, is that they don’t remember.
They don’t remember what the world was like before the vaccines. They don’t remember the polio epidemic that killed thousands of children and disabled tens of thousands — in 1952 alone. They don’t remember the rubella pandemic of the 1960s, when tens of thousands of babies were born dead or with birth defects because their mothers were infected. (FYI, I could easily have been one of those babies — my mother got rubella shortly after I was born, and it could easily have been just a little earlier when she was pregnant with me.) They don’t remember the time when people routinely died of lockjaw… and they don’t live in non-industrial parts of the world where people still do.
All they see is a world in which polio, rubella, tetanus, etc. almost never appear… and people are immunized against them for no apparent reason. 
See, this is the problem with public health efforts that work. When they work, they quickly become invisible. It’s very hard to see prevention working: when it works, you don’t see it. So it’s easy for people to see things like immunization as pointless. They do happen for no apparent reason… “apparent” being the operative word. The reason is very good indeed, the reason is unassailably excellent — but unless you’ve lived in a world without immunization, the reason isn’t very apparent at all.
(Interestingly, the conspiracy theorists linking vaccination with, for instance, autism don’t seem very interested in the actual, documented, verified conspiracy in which the researcher who originally published the now-discredited “vaccines cause autism” study was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds by trial lawyers trying to prove that vaccines were harmful. Links here and here, via Wikipedia.)
Look. I’m no great friend of the drug companies. I get that the way health care is handled in this country is — how shall I put this? — evil. Its purpose is largely to make insurance and drug companies rich, not to help healthy people stay healthy or sick people get better. Ingrid works in health care in this country, and she could tell you stories that would curl your hair. See “Sicko” if you don’t believe me.
But that doesn’t mean that AIDS drugs don’t work. And it doesn’t mean that vaccines don’t work. The evidence is overwhelming that they do.
Yes, our country’s health care system sucks. But our educational system sucks as well. And one of the ways it sucks the most is in its failure to teach reasoning, cause-and-effect… and history. The history of AIDS drugs, and the history of vaccines, are a history of the prevention of pointless suffering and death — millions of times over.
P.S. I will warn you right now: I am not going to get into debates with AIDS denialists or vaccine resisters in this blog. I don’t have the patience, and other people make these arguments better than I can. AIDS denialists or vaccine resisters are hereby directed to Denialism and to Skeptico. My apologies in advance to the keepers of those blogs. I’m putting you both on my blogroll to make up for it.
Addendum: Or you could go to Aetiology, where they linked to this post and are having a lively discussion about it. And thanks to both Aetiology and Denialism for the links!
Sacrificing Your Legal Rights, or, Why Robin Tyler is an Asshole
A little backstory first.
There’s a big kerfuffle in the world of gay politics about the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, now in front of Congress, that would ban job discrimination against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transpeople. Kerfuffle in a nutshell: Some politicos and gay-rights lobbyists are advocating for, or else not speaking very strongly against, stripping the bill of its protections for transpeople, and limiting it to the LGBs in the LGBT community. (To be more accurate, there are now two versions of ENDA, one with the language protecting transpeople and one without: the question is whether we should support both bills or just the stronger trans-inclusive one. To be even more accurate would require me to write a whole goddamn novel. Google “Employment Non-Discrimination Act,” or visit the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, if you want to know more.)
Which brings me to what Robin Tyler, longtime lesbian activist, had to say about it:
I agree with Barney Frank. I support full transgender rights. However, when I have been invited to the legal weddings of some of my transgender friends, not one of them has said “we will not get married until Diane and you and other same gender couples can get married”. They did not sacrifice their legal rights on the alter of political correctness, to give up the benefits of marriage. And yet the lesbian and gay community is expected to do so, leaving millions and millions of us in the majority of states, once again, unprotected.
There are so many things wrong with this, I don’t even know where to begin. So I’m going to limit myself to three.
One: How exactly would this help?
In the absence of a well-publicized nationwide boycott on marriage, how would individual transgendered heterosexuals refusing to marry until same-sex couples can get married in any way help the cause of same-sex marriage?
I’ve had hetero friends nobly say that they won’t get married until same-sex couples can get married. I think the sentiment is sweet, but I also think it’s completely pointless. Their refusal to get married does me — and the cause of same-sex marriage — no good at all. It’s a touching personal gesture, and if they feel that strongly about not wanting to participate in an injustice I won’t argue with them… but as an effective political act, it’s totally useless.
On the other hand, pushing for trans inclusion in ENDA — and refusing to accept or endorse ENDA if it’s not trans inclusive — does help. As many people in this debate have pointed out, ENDA isn’t going to become law while Bush is President anyway. It may not even pass the Senate, even in the watered-down version. It’s going to take several practice runs until it gets passed by both houses and signed by the Pres. And if we insist that gender identity be included in this practice run along with sexual orientation, it familiarizes Congress with the issues and the language of trans rights, and makes it that much easier to get the gender identity language included when we actually do get the thing passed.
Two: For lesbians, gays, and bisexuals to ask transpeople to make “sacrifices” for us is laughable. T’s have been getting the short end of the LGBT stick for years. The fact that heterosexual T’s have one goddamn right that G’s and L’s and same-sex-oriented B’s and T’s don’t have… this hardly balances the scales. It’s hardly the injustice of the century. To present transpeople as a privileged class who should be willing to sacrifice some rights to be in solidarity with their oppressed gay/ lesbian/ bi siblings… it’d be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic.
Is Ms. Tyler prepared to give up the rights she has in cities and states where GLB’s have legal protections but T’s don’t? Is she willing to not sue for discrimination, not file hate crime charges, etc., in cities and states that give these protections to gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, but not to transpeople? If not, then she absolutely does not have a point. Or rather, she has a point, but it’s shaped like a corkscrew.
Three: She spelled “altar” wrong.
I’m just sayin’, is all.
How Gay Marriage Is Destroying Normal Marriage — No, Really
There’s a trope that I hear a lot among people who support same-sex marriage. It goes like this:
“What are these people so afraid of? How does same-sex marriage destroy marriage? How on earth could my marriage in any way affect anybody else’s?”
Or, when spoken by heterosexual supporters of same-sex marriage: “How on earth could somebody else’s marriage in any way affect mine?”
Of course I see what they’re getting at. And I certainly appreciate the sentiment and support behind the statement. But I actually think it’s somewhat simplistic, maybe even a bit naive. I think same-sex marriage does, and will, have an effect on opposite-sex marriage.
Not in an immediate cause-and-effect way, of course. When Adam and Stephen get married in Massachusetts, it doesn’t send out magical death-rays across the country to destroy the marriage of Alan and Evelyn in Kansas.
But I think it has an effect. Not a trivial one, either. And I think the movement to legalize same-sex marriage does itself a disservice by acting like it doesn’t.
Here’s why.
In order for our society to accept or even tolerate same-sex marriage, a lot of fairly basic, deep-rooted ideas have to change. The way we define family. The way we think of what it means to be a man, and what it means to be a woman. The importance of sex and sexual fulfillment. What we consider natural and normal. Etc., etc., etc.
All of these things shape our practice of marriage, our understanding of what it is and what it’s for. And in order for us to accept or even tolerate same-sex marriage, all of them will need to change.
Thus changing the shape of marriage.
All marriage.
Including the opposite-sex ones.
If for no other reason, the standard default answers to these questions will quit being standard and default. If these changes happen, people will still be free to define family, maleness, femaleness, etc., in the old traditional ways. But they’ll be forced to think about it, to see the traditional way as just one choice among many, to live that way because it works for them… instead of unthinkingly falling into it as the one right choice that works for everybody. What’s more, they’ll be forced to see all these different questions and choices as, well, different questions and choices, instead of a package deal.
And that’s a big-ass change.
Of course, while the fight for same-sex marriage is a catalyst for some of these changes, it’s hardly the only one. Lots of these changes were already happening, even before same-sex marriage got put on the table. In fact, same-sex marriage couldn’t have gotten on the table in the first place if these changes hadn’t already been happening. But it is a catalyst for change, and I don’t want to ignore that or pretend it isn’t true.
What I don’t understand is why that’s a bad thing.
Opponents of same-sex marriage talk about marriage as if it’s been an unchanging institution for thousands of years, one that can’t be altered even a little without risking its destruction. But this is clearly absurd. Marriage has been many different things in human history — radically different things. A property transfer from father to husband. A political and military alliance between nations. A means of producing and caring for children. A means of preserving a religion or race (think of the intense resistance throughout history to both interracial and interfaith marriage). A practical arrangement for keeping a family farm or business. A romantic love match that’s meant to last until death. A spiritual bond that’s meant to last for eternity. And more. And any combination of any of these.
And marriage has taken many forms in its checkered history. From the hundreds of wives of Solomon and others, to the passing down of a wife from brother to brother (also described in the Bible), to a permanent inescapable contract with mistresses and lovers on the side, to the serial monogamy-in-theory that seems to be the contemporary model… the literal, practical shape of marriage has taken wildly different forms over the centuries, and will no doubt continue to take more.
So the fact that the institution of marriage is changing  that’s hardly devastating news. People resisted the legalization of interracial marriage with every bit as much fervor as they resist same-sex marriage now, and for many of the same reasons… and yet the institution of marriage has absorbed that change quite handily, and has soldiered on. The institution is changing, it has always been changing, and it will almost certainly continue to change.
And again I ask: Why is this a bad thing?
And why are these particular changes, the ones that same-sex marriage is both the cause and result of… why are they so much to be feared?
Our definition of family should be broadened. The way we think of maleness and femaleness should be more flexible. Sex should be acknowledged as a central part of human life, and as a basic human right. What we consider to be natural should be more in keeping with the actual reality of nature. And we should be questioning, not only what is and isn’t normal, but whether normality is even a quality we should be prizing.
Not just so we can get to a place where we can accept same-sex marriage… but so we can help make opposite-sex marriage, and all relationships, and life in general for everybody, happier and more fulfilling.
View from the Fourteenth Floor
I’m working on several different blog pieces now, none of which is finished yet. So tonight you get a dirty story from the archives. Note: This is a very nasty story, and family members and others who don’t want to read my porn or know too much about my fantasies may want to stop now. FYI, while I usually illustrate my blog posts with lots of pictures, I’m not going to do that here, since I want you to be able to picture the characters and the scenario on your own. Enjoy!
“A magnetism that will not let go”: The Drooling Homophobe Series, Part 764
Do these people listen to what they say?
Don’t they know how obvious this “lady doth protest too much” thing is starting to get?
Pandagon has the story of right-wing Christian extremist Dave Daubenmire of Pass the Salt Ministries, who, with his flock, has been on a crusade to disrupt the church services of gay-friendly churches. But that’s not even the best part of the story. As is so often the case, the best part of the story is in an almost offhand remark.
In a Bible-spewing homophobic rant earlier this year about a visit to the Gay Pride Parade, Daubenmire had this to say:
“The ‘meat’ on display will forever change the way you view homosexuality. Sin has no boundaries, no clutch, and no emergency brake. Once you dip your toe into the pool of sin, especially sexual sin, there is a magnetism that will not let go.” (emphasis mine)
Ummmm…
Let me put it this way. The straight guys I know who visit the Gay Pride Parade do not describe the event as having “a magnetism that will not let go.†Their reaction is more along the lines of, “Nice dress, dude.” They describe it as interesting, entertaining, touching, hilarious, kind of tedious when the “polo-shirted employees of boring corporations” contingents go by, etc. But they do not describe it as a pool of sin with a magnetism that will not let go. The straight guys I know are not forever changed by the sight of gay male “meat on display,” and they are quite capable of resisting the magnetism of homosexuality. They find the magnetic pull of homosexuality pretty gosh-darned unmagnetic. That’s kind of what makes them, you know — straight.
So I just have to ask: Do Dave Daubenmire, and Ted Haggard, and all the rest of the right-wing Christian leering brigade, really not know what they sound like? Do they really not see that frothing at the mouth closely resembles drooling?
“What are we afraid of?” NJ State Senator Raymond Lesniak on Same-Sex Marriage
I cried when I read this.
I’m crying again now as I re-read it.
This is a person who gets it. He didn’t always get it — he didn’t always support same-sex marriage — but he gets it now. Not just as a matter of fairness or justice, not just as a matter of rational public policy. He gets it about why it matters.
It’s New Jersey State Senator Raymond Lesniak, in a blog post on the NJ.com blog titled Why not gay marriage? And I’m just going to quote the whole damn thing.
What are we afraid of? That we’ll tear the fabric of society apart?
Seems like the fabric of society is already torn apart. Fifty percent of first marriages end in divorce. Less than 40 percent of eligible voters go to the polls. There’s rampant corruption in government. There are random acts of violence in Virginia and Newark, random acts of violence committed every day in our cities and our suburbs. Religious figures commit sexual assaults. Anti-gay political and religious figures are caught in the same sexual trysts they condemn in their public pronouncements.
I love my church, being raised a Roman Catholic. The Catholic Church does wonderful charitable works for the poor throughout the world, yet when I attended Mass recently, the priest gave a homily condemning those who do not follow the rules of the Church. Not a word about the gospel of the day, a beautiful reading from the gospel by Matthew on loving thy neighbor as thyself.
I left after the lecture and waited for my friends in my car, crying and feeling abandoned and not loved. But I digress.
Civil unions in New Jersey give committed gay couples the same rights as heterosexual married couples. Except the right to get “married”. The very law that gives these loving couples the rights of marriage deprives them of the loving feeling of being married. Outcasts only because of their love for each other.
Allowing gay couples to marry is not going to repair the fabric of society, but it’s not going to tear it apart either.
To paraphrase John Lennon, let’s give love a chance. We might just find out that it works.
BTW, to the folks in this blog who have been arguing that civil unions should be the legal contract and marriage should be the religious ceremony — for everyone, not just same-sex couples — I’d just like to repeat what Lesniak said:
“The very law that gives these loving couples the rights of marriage deprives them of the loving feeling of being married.”
That’s the part that keeps making me cry.
I don’t just want a legal contract that mimics marriage. I want the experience of marriage. Marriage is an institution/ ritual/ relationship that has existed for thousands of years, one that has tremendous resonance in our culture, in a way that civil unions simply don’t. Separate but equal is not equal. It never has been, and it never will be.
And I am touched beyond words that this Catholic state senator from New Jersey gets it.