A Letter to Religious Conservatives

A letter to religious conservatives, especially Christians, concerning the recent ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States overturning state bans on marriage equality for same-sex couples:

          As I and other supporters of marriage equality celebrated the Court’s decision, you reacted with a wide range of emotions, from indifference, to disappointment, to sadness, to outright anger. Most of your emotions are fear-based. We expected that of you because fear seems to be the modus operandi of most conservatives.

          However, let’s take a moment to play the “what-if” game. I’ll go first. What if you’re right, and I’m wrong. Come to find out, sexual and affectional orientation is, indeed, a choice, and I have chosen wrongly. On judgment day, when I stand before my Maker—who apparently creates everyone with the capacity for this choice—I will be judged for having chosen to spend my life with a member of my own sex; for having loved and cherished him until death separated us; for enjoying life’s ups and enduring its downs as equal partners in the journey. I will be judged for believing those verses in the Bible (which we both respect and revere, by the way) a bit too literally. You know, the ones that say “Two are better than one…” and so on (see Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 for the whole bit). I will be judged for having forced a good man into my family and having adopted his family as my own. You know, like Ruth did with Naomi. I will be judged for advocating politically for the same rights and responsibilities as opposite-sex couples, so he and I could share our resources more completely and not have them taken away by the state or by greedy family members (not that either mine or his would; they are not like that, thank the Lord) in the case that one of us predeceases the other, and so we could make medical decisions for each other and have hospital visitation rights like opposite-sex married couples. I will be judged for having kissed him hello and goodbye and sometimes for no reason at all. I will be judged for having held his hand and hugged him close. And yes, I will be judged for having had some fantastically fulfilling monogamous sex with him despite the fact that neither one of us could make the other pregnant without a miracle even greater than the Virgin Birth. God will say, “Depart from me, ye worker of iniquity! I never knew you!” Because that’s what God says to everyone who goes to hell, right? Am I on track here? That is what you conservatives believe, right? I should know; I spent the first quarter century or so of my life surrounded by the likes of you.

          OK, your turn. Let’s pretend I’m right and you’re wrong. Sexual/affectional orientation is not a choice; gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people are, indeed, born that way, and God loves us just the way we are. God is much more concerned with how well we’ve loved than with whom we’ve loved, and the Bible does not, after all, forbid same-sex marriage. What will you be judged for? You will be judged for your part in perpetuating centuries of exclusion of LGBT people from your religious communities. You will be judged for lumping them into the same categories as idol worshippers, child molesters, and animal rapists; I’m pretty sure that violates the ninth commandment. Remember those? You like to post them on public property and then forget the ones about stealing and adultery and coveting and so on. You will be judged for your complicit participation in the violence that your less self-controlled counterparts have inflicted on LGBT people because they saw your vitriol and took that as permission to commit horrendous acts against LGBT folks. You will be judged for the thousands upon thousands of LGBT youth who found themselves on the streets after their families learned who they were because those families believed their precious children were an abomination. The blood of LGBT children and teens who killed themselves rather than endure the constant bullying at school and at home will be on your hands. You will be judged for having believed a lie based in misogyny perpetuated by patriarchal religious hierarchies. You will be judged for not having loved others as Christ first loved you. You will be judged for having judged others with often very harmful consequences.

          Remember, this is just a game. And let us heed the words of the Apostle Paul and remember that “…now we see through a glass, darkly.” The fact is that probably neither side of this argument is completely right or completely wrong. Maybe God does like opposite-sex marriage only, or maybe God likes it better than same-sex marriage, or maybe God doesn’t give a rat’s ass about marriage. Jesus did say in Matthew 22 that, like the angels, people won’t be married in Heaven. If marriage is such a big deal to God, then why won’t there be marriage in the afterlife?

          Allowing same-sex marriage will in no way whatsoever affect opposite-sex marriages. The United States is the twenty-second country on the earth to extend civil marriage equality to same-sex couples. None of the others have burned in fire and brimstone. Does that mean that God only cares about American politics? How arrogant to presume so! God doesn’t love America! God loves Americans…and Chinese and Koreans and Japanese and Brazilians and Kenyans and all the other people of all the other countries on this planet we all share. God loves people. And gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered individuals are people loved by God and worthy of dignity and respect.

          Those of us who profess to follow Christ will be judged according to how we have treated “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40). We will also be judged for how well we’ve loved our neighbor as we’ve loved ourselves. Aren’t people who are excluded and reviled among the least of these? Aren’t LGBT people your neighbors? Aren’t we all called to love one another, without condition or exception?

          If fear truly is your modus operandi, then you need to let the love of Christ into your heart. Christ’s love is perfect, and “…perfect love drives out fear.” (1 John 4:18). If, however, you claim to “love the sinner but hate the sin,” then I challenge you to really get to know a same-sex couple. Visit their home. See how they live. Hear their stories. Eat with them. Laugh at jokes together. Play some board or card games. Attend movies and sporting events and concerts and plays together. Meet their families. Maybe even visit the churches and places of worship they attend and see how their congregations worship and fellowship.

Beware, though: conversion and transformation are likely to occur, and you might be surprised at whose heart will be changed.

Marriage Equality

          June 26, 2015 will go down in history as the day that the Supreme Court of the United States declared that states do not have the right to deny marriage to same-sex couples. There was much celebrating across the country by people who labored, prayed, and waited for this decision. There were also expressions of disappointment, sadness, and even anger from those who do not support marriage equality for all couples, most of these coming from Republicans and the Religious Right.

          Whatever one believes about marriage personally, this occasion will someday be merely a note in a history book, much like Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case of 1967 which resulted in the abolition of state laws banning interracial marriage. At that time, conservatives and others (mostly Christians probably) expressed the same type of disapproval of the Court’s decision. In fact, the last state to strike anti-miscegenation laws from its books was Alabama, in 2000—more than thirty years after the Court’s ruling. Today, most people take interracial marriage for granted, with even most conservative evangelical Christians hardly batting an eyelash at a marriage between two people of different races. In the same way that most of today’s children and teens find it hard to believe that two people of different races were once prohibited from marrying in the United States, young people in years to come will wonder why two men or two women who loved each other were once prohibited from marrying. What is now the new normal for us will be simply normal for them.

          Even the one man-one woman model of marriage is a relatively new concept in human history. In most cultures around the world throughout time, men have been allowed to have more than one wife, either through formal marriage arrangements or through having concubines. In a few cultures, women were allowed more than one husband. In one traditional culture of China, marriage doesn’t even exist. Women may be with any male they prefer, and if a pregnancy results, she raises the child with the support of her parents and siblings. The father usually visits the child and participates in the childrearing, and may even come to live with the mother and her family, but marriage as we understand it isn’t a part of their tradition.

          The Old Testament of the Bible shows us lots of alternative marriage arrangements. Abraham was married to his half-sister, Sarah, with whom he fathered Isaac, but he also fathered a son, Ishmael, with his concubine, Hagar. It was common practice for men to take a concubine if their wives were unable to conceive a son. Isaac’s son, Jacob, had at least two wives. And Old Testament law provided for marriage arrangements that we today would find appalling: for example, if a woman was raped and her rapist agreed to pay her bride price, she was forced to become his wife; if a woman’s husband died before giving her a son, his surviving brother was to take the woman as his wife and impregnate her. Women were usually given in marriage to the highest bidder as soon as they reached childbearing age (a practice still done in many countries). And Ruth seduced a male relative of her deceased husband (because he had no surviving brothers), got pregnant by him, then gave the child to her mother-in-law to raise. All of this sounds like fodder for modern reality TV, but I suspect the motivation for these laws was the care that sons provided to elderly parents, especially mothers. No son, no retirement plan.

          The point I’m trying to make is that marriage has always been more of a civil contract than a religious sacrament. In fact, the Christian church didn’t institute marriage as a sacrament until around the twelfth century. Up until that time, Christian communities abided by local traditions and laws when it came to marriage. When it comes to marriage as a sacrament, there are as many widely varying opinions as there are religions. In a secular nation, there is separation of church and government, at least to the point that no one church or faith governs the state. If religious freedom is valued, then all religions must have equal protections under the law of that nation. To define marriage from a religious perspective is to inject religion into government, which is actually a threat to religious liberty, the freedom to practice—or not practice—religion as one chooses.

          From a purely secular and civil perspective, the rights and responsibilities of marriage should be extended to all persons in the nation regardless of age, race, gender identification, sex assigned at birth, sexual or affectional orientation, physical ability, or other traits or characteristics which are innate to the individual. If two consenting adults want to enter into a marriage contract, then so be it. Religions that disapprove of same-sex relationships do not have to conduct same-sex marriages in their religious houses. Nor do they have to conduct interracial marriages, or second (or third or fourth or--) marriages, or marriages between infertile couples, or interfaith marriages, or any other marital arrangement their religion forbids.

          No religion, however, can dictate how one treats others outside of one’s religious house of worship in a secular nation. No religion gives anyone the right to be racist, sexist, faithist, heterosexist, or a bigot of any sort. NONE. Period. You don’t believe in same-sex marriage? Fine. Don’t marry someone of the same sex. Disapprove all you want to. But do NOT stand in the way of another citizen of this nation striving for the same rights and responsibilities you have. Religion does not give you that right. If you work for the government or serve the public in some way, neither does your religion grant you the right to discriminate against those with whom you disagree. Can you imagine the outrage that would ensue if I refused to teach a Republican student on the grounds that that student’s conservative lifestyle choices offended my religious sensibilities (which they do, by the way)?

          As a gay follower of Christ, I celebrate yesterday’s decision by the Supreme Court of the United States, but I will not marry simply because I now can. I will marry when it is the right decision for me and my partner. A civil document guarantees certain rights and responsibilities to each other, so marriage is a serious decision to make with much prior thought and (for us) prayer. It represents a union of two lives becoming one, of the creation of a new family—be that a family of two or a family of ten—and a partnership where two are better than one. Sacrament or not, marriage is serious business, not to be entered into lightly.

          It will be interesting to note in the coming years how the same-sex couple divorce rate compares to that of opposite-sex couples. Opposite-sex couples’ current divorce rate is about fifty percent, so they aren’t exactly the standard bearers for traditional marriage values. After so much hard work to gain marriage equality, could it be that same-sex couples will become the new bastion of family values and sticking together through thick and thin, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do they part? Only time will tell.

Why are we so uncomfortable with transgendered individuals?

          Anybody who watches any television at all, or looks at the Internet even occasionally, or even pays attention to what other people are talking about, has most likely heard of Caitlyn Jenner by now. The former U.S. Olympic gold medalist Bruce Jenner recently identified as transgender and has completed her transition to female. Caitlyn debuted her new look in a recent preview of Vanity Fair’s July issue.

          Responses have been mostly supportive, but those that aren’t are often cruel and ignorant. Sadly, many of these are from people who claim to be followers of Christ. They say God doesn’t make mistakes, that if a man is effeminate or a woman is masculine, it’s because that’s the way God intended them to be. This argument is rubbish. If a child is born with her heart outside her body, do we glibly say, “Well, that’s God’s will, so be it”? Of course not! We live in a day and age where medical science can correct this defect so that the child can grow up healthy. We turn to medical science to correct all sorts of defects and impairments and incongruencies so that we can be “normal,” whatever that means to us. Even in the case of accidents, when one loses a limb or an organ, we seek ways to restore the lost or damaged appendage and to be whole again. Few criticize such efforts, and most praise the science that makes restoration possible.

          Yet when gender or sexuality are involved, many among us express disgust and even anger, purporting to defend God and God’s ways. How arrogant to presume that God has appointed us God’s mouthpiece! Isn’t God perfectly capable of speaking for God’s self? Perhaps our yapping and trolling and posting and criticizing and judging keep our brains and mouths busy enough so our hearts and ears don’t have to listen to what God is trying to say to us through the lives of the very people we are beating up with our words.

          Any patriarchal society—including most in Christendom—honors, reveres, and even worships the phallus. Many of my fellow Christians will be angry at this statement, because they don’t bow to a phallus statue like our ancient ancestors once did. But we do put humans with penises above those who don’t have them. How many Christian denominations still don’t ordain women for the ministry? Or allow women to teach in church? Or exclude gay men? Or deny women the use of birth control? Some fringe Christian sects even treat women as little more than baby factories and live-in domestic help.

          Most Christians will turn to the creation stories in Genesis to explain their viewpoint: “Male and female, he [God] created them.” (Genesis 1:27 and 5:2). Yet they ignore the New Testament reference to God’s opinion about gender, among other things: “…there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28). If we are all one in Christ Jesus, and God doesn’t discriminate on the basis of gender, then why do we, as followers of Christ, continue to do so?

          Let’s get something very clear: your sex is between your legs, but your gender is between your ears. For most of us, the two match up just fine. But for some, they don’t. And that incongruence can make life miserable for people who live in a society that places so much emphasis on sex roles and gender conformity. Instead of looking at a person’s spirit, we evaluate what sort of genitals we think they have and then expect them to live up to certain expectations merely on the basis of whether they have a penis or a vagina (God help the intersexed, who are born with both!).

          In the ancient world, men who identified as female and women who identified as male were often allowed to live their lives as they identified. In many Native American tribes, such people are referred to as two spirit, or berdache. These ancient cultures understood something that we seem to have a hard time grasping, that sex and gender are two different things.

          And why do we, as believers in the God of Abraham, have such a hard time with gender fluidity and non-conformity when the very God we worship has no gender? We call God “he” simply because the English language doesn’t have a gender-neutral pronoun appropriate for a person; calling God “It” seems disrespectful. Some languages in the world have no gender-specific pronouns at all, and they don’t adopt English pronouns when speaking about God. And if we examine Biblical references to angels and the souls of people in the afterlife, we can surmise that neither angels nor we will have gender once we depart this earthly plane of existence (see Matthew 22:30 and Mark 12:25). At least, at that point, gender and sex will be irrelevant.

          So why do we berate and criticize and judge people like Caitlyn Jenner and Chaz Bono and countless others around the world who seek medical assistance to help their outsides match their insides when the Bible is clear that gender is not such a big deal? I’ll tell you why. It’s because it upsets the status quo and makes males and male-worshipping females feel a loss of power and control, and perhaps even question their own gender-based biases and assumptions. Because it forces us to confront God’s very own feminine characteristics (there are many references in both the Old and New Testaments that use feminine pronouns in the original Biblical languages to refer to God, and use female metaphors for God; just look them up, if you dare). Acknowledging these aspects of God’s nature compels us to reflect the same in the world we live in, a calling that truly terrifies many Christians because it makes them vulnerable to the same judgment and derision that they may have doled out themselves.

          I personally believe we are so uncomfortable with transgendered individuals—especially male-to-female individuals—and with effeminate gay men and masculine lesbians, as well, because at our core many of us are misogynistic. For thousands of years we have demeaned and exploited and abused and neglected God’s pinnacle of creation (if you are a creationist, you cannot deny that God wasn’t done until God made woman!). Men who identify as women, effeminate gay men, and even straight men who display personality traits that are perceived as feminine (sensitivity, creativity, a caring heart) have been the objects of derision because of their feminine qualities. Aren’t all people made in the image of God? Does God make mistakes? No? Then how hypocritical of us Christians to demean people for simply trying to be who they are in as authentic a way as possible.

          It is easy for me to write these words because I do not identify as transgender, and because I do not personally know a transgendered individual (at least, not to my knowledge). No one in my family or immediate circle of friends is transgendered. No one in my church or workplace is transgendered that I know of. I certainly know men who display feminine characteristics, as well as women who possess masculine traits, but none of them have come out to me as transgendered. I even hesitate to use those words “masculine” and “feminine” when talking about one’s characteristics, because all of that is merely a social invention. There is no biological basis for being strong or sensitive or caring or authoritative. These are all just human qualities that we are all capable of possessing and cultivating and fine-tuning as we grow and develop. But when the day comes that I am privileged to be in the company of a transgendered individual, I pray that I can respond with the grace, compassion, and dignity that my Lord Jesus would have shown that person, and that I can show them the love of Christ and accept them as they are, which is how I am accepted by the God who made me.