Each year, a community of bloggers dedicates a weekend to issues relevant to the separation of Church and State. The project is called Blog Against Theocracy.
This year, one of my blogfriends closely involved with the project asked me to contribute a piece on marriage equality. It's an issue issue close to me...as a gay Christian, as a proud liberal and as someone that feels it's time to have my 15+ year relationship recognized as equal to my straight friends' relationships.
This is also crosspostedat aforementioned blogfriend's corner of teh intertoobs atMock, Paper, Scissors.
My take...after the jump:
- Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.
- Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
- Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
- Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn't changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can't marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.
- Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britney Spears' 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.
- Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn't be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren't full yet, and the world needs more children.
- Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
- Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That's why we have only one religion in America.
- Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.
- Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms, just like we haven't adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.
This tongue-in-cheek list has been clogging teh intertoobs for several years now. I found a linky to a posting going back to 1995.
I recently shared this with a blog-friend. The response I got back was "this is great and would make a great starting point for a ‘Blog Against Theocracy’ piece". Immediately, I began to suffer from performance anxiety. It’s really easy to snark and blog anonymously, but now I was being asked to actually share two things that I take VERY seriously: my Christian faith AND my desire to have full civil marriage equality. This anxiety has been magnified by the brilliant pieces that have been shared at Blog Against Theocracy and Mock, Paper, Scissors.
So, without further ado, I will attempt to put some pithiness on this "Top 10 List" that actually stands alone by itself, thank you very much.
My life is very similar to the chicken vs. egg conundrum. Was I a Christian before I identified as gay or vice versa? After 23+/- years of self-loathing, I (like so many other gay people of faith) decided it was impossible to be both gay AND Christian. So, also like so many others, I turned my back on my upbringing, my family, and in the process, my faith...All with disastrous side effects. If I had been taught to embrace my true self AND my faith, where would I be today? Would I have lived "the lifestyle" in all its debauchery and good times of the 1980’s and early ‘90’s?
Ironically, for me, it was being diagnosed with HIV/AIDS on (get this) Valentine’s Day, 1995, with a t-cell count of 2 and weighing a whopping 110 pounds that led me back to the values I thought I couldn’t reconcile and keep my sanity. The doctor gave me a generous 30 days to get my affairs in order and prepare to die. Well, if that won’t wake a man up I don’t know what will. 1995 was a bell weather year. That year has been catalogued in a daily journal.
Fast forward to the election cycle of 2004: By this time, my health had become stable and I found myself passionately involved in Democratic Party politics, elected to serve as a Precinct Chairman in my little uber-Red rural county. Irony has always played a major role in my life and politics, as it turns out, and I could have never predicted that my involvement in the Democratic Party would lead me back to a faith-based personal life...but it did. As it turns out, the most fertile breeding ground in my Precinct for finding and cultivating Democratic voters was our local African American Missionary Baptist Church. With major trepidation, I invited my equally Caucasian County Chair to attend services with me to encourage people to register to vote. That fateful Sunday, my up-to-this-point comfortable gay, partnered life was turned on its ear. Call it an epiphany. Call it Kismet. Call it a connection to another community that has, historically, struggled with their civil rights and equal protection under the law. Whatever it’s called, it has changed both my life and my politics.
I’ve been monogamously partnered for over 15 years now. Never once did I ever feel the need for any recognition of my relationship. Just having a mate was satisfying enough. Heck, I was even on that "don’t call it marriage" bandwagon for a while. My thinking was that as long as my community got its rights, they could call it a Dixie Cup for all I cared. But then I started evolving...again. More and more, semantics started to really matter to me. The louder the "Xristian Xrazies" started yelling, the deeper I found my heels digging into the dirt. The more they tried to equate my very settled life with my partner as something evil and dirty, the angrier I became. Once again, I was transported back to the period of my life when I came to terms with my sexuality. All the anger, resentment and bitterness came boiling back to the surface. I found myself rekindling the anger I felt for my fundamentalist sister (who I have affectionately renamed "Jeebus in a skirt"). There was a hole in my heart for the nieces and nephews and great-nieces and nephews that would never know their uncle as anything but that "dirty homo".
Bigotry cloaked in religion is wrong and it’s anything BUT "Christian".
When I have this discussion with my straight friends of faith, I always point them to the Sermon on the Mount. I find it fascinating that most "Christians" put more weight in a couple of obtuse references to same-sex couples by St. Paul than they do in the collective words that Christ, himself, had to say on the subject. In case any of you are wondering, that would be ZERO. ZILCH. NADA. If, indeed, the very foundation of society and "the Church" were threatened by people of the same gender loving one another, wouldn’t logic dictate that Jesus would have had at least made a passing reference to same-sex coupling? Nobody said the fundies that drape their religion in the American flag think logically. My bad for not picking up on that sooner.
For all these reasons, I’m more committed than ever to the separation of Church and State. For me, both play very important roles in my daily life. That doesn’t, however, mean that they need to intersect...EVER...ANY WHERE. If that’s so clear to this gay, Christian, partnered man, why is it so difficult for those who would use religion for politics to see? Until I can answer that question, I will continue to be ever diligent, ever outspoken, ever liberaldemdave.
UPDATE: Digg it!