Category Archives: GLBT

Wheaton College Conference on Spiritual Formation: Part 3


As I continue to blog my experience at Wheaton College’s annual theology conference from last week, here are some highlights from Thursday night and Friday morning, plus the usual uppity feminist critique of same:

Dr. Gordon Fee was Thursday’s keynote speaker. He’s an emeritus professor of New Testament studies at Regent College, as well as an ordained minister in the Assemblies of God church (a Pentecostal denomination) and a heavy hitter in the world of New Testament commentaries. Fee’s pithy and provocative speech was called “On Getting the Spirit Back Into Spirituality.”

Sounding a common theme, he argued that the word “spirituality” is widely misused both inside and outside the church to mean anything non-physical or vaguely religious. What would happen if every time we saw the word “spirit” or “spiritual” in the New Testament, we understood it as a reference to the Holy Spirit? For instance, when Paul observes in Galatians that the only God-given antidote to legalism is a thorough-going reliance on the Holy Spirit, he encourages those who are “spiritual” to restore the brethren who are falling into sin. The chapter break at Gal 6:1 obscures the fact that he is talking not about a generic trait of “being spiritual” but about the fruits of the Spirit in Gal 5. Similarly, at the beginning of Ephesians, Paul says God has blessed us through Christ “with every spiritual blessing”, but what is a spiritual blessing? Is it the opposite of a material blessing? If we look at Paul’s usage of “spiritual” in its original, Trinitarian sense, Fee said, it is the divine origin of the blessing that is important, not its content.

Fee gave the mainstream church a serious scolding for being insufficiently Trinitarian. Most Protestant religious practice (in the Q&A he extended his indictment to Catholics too) is Father-Son only. The Spirit is boxed up in the creed instead of let loose to be a vital and scary part of church life. Evangelical believers, he said, need to check their tendency toward Apollinarianism, where the deity of Jesus is so foregrounded that his humanity disappears. We also tend to miss the fact that Christ’s miraculous and loving life on earth was made possible because God was with him exactly the way the Spirit is with and in us now.

Fee’s speech was short and his Q&A responses perfunctory, so we didn’t get to hear specifics of how this played out, but I for one was excited to hear a revered Biblical scholar make the case for a more fearless, trusting, and dynamic way of discerning how God is speaking to us now. To his credit, Fee seems pretty progressive on gender issues, as shown in this online summary of his thoughts on women’s equality in ministry. I skimmed through some pages of one of his books on Spirit-led interpretation at the Wheaton bookfair, where he urged Christians not to shrink from the New Testament’s radical relativizing of gender. In a society where traits like gender, ethnicity, and family status defined your whole personhood, the early church dared to suggest that these traits were secondary in God’s eyes.

My heart sank, however, when I saw his footnote on homosexuality. Oddly, though recognizing that there are persons with same-sex orientation and that what he was about to say would be “hard on them”, Fee insisted on the standard line that this was not God’s intention for humanity and that Romans 1:26 is correct in deeming it a source of shame.

I have to say that this caused me physical pain. Our families’ lives are not a footnote. If gender is relative for God’s love, why is it absolute for human love? Why does an illusory category suddenly become reified beyond debate? Family is the primary means of spiritual formation in love, for the majority of people who are not called to celibacy. It’s where we learn to trust, to serve, to be honest, to forgive and be forgiven…or not. Once you acknowledge that same-sex orientation exists and that gender is relative, you can’t slam the lid back on the Spirit box and condemn 5-10% of the human race to a disembodied solitude that fails to reflect the nature of the Trinitarian, Incarnate God.

Now, I realize that I am becoming the kind of person whose first question is always “Is it good for the queers?” Is it true, as one of my evangelical friends feared, that I am subjecting the authority of God’s word to human political standards when it should be the other way around? I’ve prayed and wept and worried about this a great deal, and I really don’t believe that’s the case. If the author of a treatise on kindness kicks his dog, I don’t care how lovely his arguments are. I am committed to following God’s will, but I won’t take the self-styled interpreters of His will at face value. I want to know whether their hearts and eyes are open, whether they value human beings more than texts, whether they would rather love than be right. As the evidence of happy, healthy, God-fearing gay lives becomes undeniable, opponents are increasingly thrown back on text-worship versus openness to the possible promptings of the Spirit.

As I have now spent several times more ink on this issue than Gordon Fee did, I’ll move on to Friday’s lectures.

Dr. Chris Hall, the Dean of Eastern University in Pennsylvania and a member of the Anglican Church, spoke about the theological foundations of lectio divina, a monastic prayer practice of rereading and meditating on short passages from the Bible. In a charming marriage of old and new, Hall uses his iPod for lectio divina, replaying a few verses several times in a row, to make the words sink into his heart and subconscious mind. Interestingly, the practice developed in part from technological scarcity, as monks had few reference books and commentaries in the era before the printing press, and had to chew over difficult verses patiently on their own.

There is something about hearing the Bible that helps it soak in better than visual reading, which can keep us stuck in our analytical minds. Mere analysis can be a dangerous way to read, because we may try to control and limit the text’s ability to transform us. Lectio divina is a way of reading that is not just information-gathering. It is connecting with the real voices of the Biblical characters as they live, love, suffer, and worship.

Undergirding lectio divina is the Trinitarian belief that the Eternal Word continues to speak to us through the Spirit. As we embrace Christ in faith by listening deeply to his words and imitating his actions, we are increasingly changed into the image-bearers we were always meant to be. Lectio divina can heal a disordered imagination and fill it with new thought patterns, so that we experience Christ’s mind as our own. It will beckon us to imitate Christ instead of false teachers.

I would have liked to hear some details about how lectio divina practice with particular verses led Hall to new insights and behaviors that he wouldn’t have found through an analytical reading alone. His evident delight in reading the Bible this way left me wanting to explore this prayer discipline further. (Here’s a YouTube video from Fr. Jim Martin explaining two methods of lectio.) Praying The Daily Office has some of the same effect because certain passages are repeated daily or monthly, but it’s become clear that I need more than 25 minutes a day with God. To say the least…

Dr. Susan Phillips, the Executive Director of New College Berkeley, was the conference’s first female s
peaker. Phillips, a sociologist and spiritual director, gave us an introduction to modern-day spiritual direction and how it differs from secular counseling. Before beginning her lecture, she lit a candle. This small liturgical gesture was somehow very comforting to me, making me feel that we’d moved into a prayerful space and were not merely addressing God with our intellects.

A century ago, she said, the sociologist Max Weber observed that our formerly unified worldview had been split into rational cognition and mystical feeling, with the former being privileged in public life. According to Weber, in our secularized world, privatized religious experience is the result of a search for meaning when the public worldview of science and reason, including secular psychotherapy, doesn’t seem to address important dimensions of the person. But the quest has become lonely and individualized, without church, tradition or community.

The contemporary resurgence of interest in spiritual direction has occurred because people need guidance and companionship in their spiritual formation. There’s been a proliferation of privatized spiritualities that are stitched together from many traditions, with no system or community. Spiritual directors help people “navigate” their lives according to the time-tested “map” of church history and doctrine. The test for any text or spiritual discipline is whether it helps us better attend to the Holy Spirit, follow Jesus, express God’s truth and love, and make us more integrated.

Phillips spoke eloquently of the “ministry of listening”. In modern culture, we have a lot of ways to communicate, but precious little space to be quiet with God or one another. Jesus was the great listener. For all of us, there is a special grace in regular, confidential, holy listening. Spiritual directors are particularly called to listen to how God is acting in another’s life, and then to keep redirecting that person’s attention to God’s presence. A spiritual director can remind a person about the ways God acted in his life, helping him hold fast to memories that sustain his faith. “Spiritual direction is one way of improving the acoustics in the temple of your soul.”

Spiritual direction, Phillips said, shares some methods with psychotherapy but differs in that its ruling paradigm is prayer and discernment, not treatment and cure. The church needs to rethink the modern practice of outsourcing character formation and soul care to secular professionals.

To read more about Phillips’ work and to purchase her book Candlelight: Illuminating the Art of Spiritual Direction, visit her website.

Dr. Dallas Willard gave the chapel address on Friday, as well as the keynote speech that evening (to be blogged next time). I appreciated that his talk was heartfelt and used language that was accessible to the lay person, without in any way sacrificing spiritual depth.

Willard said that a spiritual life, in the Christian understanding, is a life lived from the direction, power and motivations of Jesus. What does that look like specifically? See Matt 6:33, where Jesus says to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and everything else will be added to you. In other words, let your many concerns rest for awhile and pay attention to seeking God. Don’t even worry about finding, because God will find you if you seek Him. When you seek something, you look for it everywhere, and finding it is your first priority.

Why do we have to seek God–why isn’t His presence obvious? Seeking is important because our wants constitute who we are. We need to reorient our desires toward God. He leaves us free to decide what we want. That’s what determines the shape of our life. God could put an end to all deviations from His will simply by being fully present to everyone, but instead, as Jesus, He became incarnate as an inconspicuous person and only appeared to a few people after resurrection. God wants us to ask the spiritually formative question: what is my life really about? Do I want the kingdom of heaven, or do I just want a little help from God with my self-generated project?

When Jesus says “the kingdom of heaven is at hand”, he means “it is now available to you” as opposed to being a possession of a particular group. The good news of the Beatitudes is that the marginalized are equal in the kingdom.

(Unless you’re queer? That depends, I suppose, on whether queerness is an identity or a detachable sinful behavior. I think that’s an empirical question, like the age of the earth, and not a theological question, like whether Jesus is the Son of God. Therefore, my Scripture-based belief in the radical equality of all people compels me to defer to gays’ own self-understanding, because I don’t occupy a position of superiority to interpret their lives. Your average evangelical, on the other hand, might start and end with texts like Rom 1:26, just as his grandfather might have backed Genesis against Darwin.)

Okay, girlfriend…back to the main topic…humility!

Willard quoted Proverbs 3:5-6: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.” A spiritual life is the life of one who acknowledges God in all their ways and recognizes His presence in all that they do. People don’t find God because they’re trying to run their own lives. “God’s address is at the end of your rope.” Willard then cited 1 Peter 5:5-7: “Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another…Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.” When you trust God, you will lead a life of sufficiency, but from the hand of God–being exalted when God chooses, not when you choose. God wants to exalt you but only when it’s really in your best interest.

To be humble, Willard said, just means that you’re realistic about yourself. That will bring you to see that you can’t manage your life without God. You put yourself in God’s hands. It’s not about self-mortification. “It’s the person who very simply just is who they are.”

The three rules of humility: Never pretend. Stop wasting so much energy putting up a facade to protect your ego. Never presume. Don’t expect special treatment, don’t assume you are up or down, just be where you are without comparison to others. Never push. Stand for what is right, stand for who you are, stand for God, but let Him take care of the outcome.

The question that keeps coming up for me is: How can you be true to who you are, in Christian honesty and humility, and not “lean on your own understanding”? I’d like a clearer picture of the difference between integrity and arrogance. (And I’m sure everyone who knew me as a teenager wished that I had known the difference, too.)

Still to come: lectures on centering prayer, the sanctity of life, and Christian art, plus feminist commentary on this blog series from Teresa Wymore at Flesh & Spirit.

Best “National Organization for Marriage” Video Parody: Stephen Colbert


After the recent gay-marriage victories in Iowa and Vermont, a mysterious new conservative group called the National Organization for Marriage released an apocalyptic TV commercial, “There’s a Storm Gathering,” which alleged that gay-rights initiatives are taking away Christians’ religious freedom. Now, I could write a serious blog post about the contradictions of invoking the liberal-pluralist language of individual rights and tolerance to defend religiously motivated restrictions on gays’ civil rights. And maybe I will soon. But the parodies of the NOM video that have sprung up all over the web offer a more memorable rebuttal than I ever could.

First prize goes to The Colbert Report’s spot from Thursday night. Noting that New York’s Gov. David Paterson has introduced a same-sex marriage bill, our favorite mock-conservative mourns for “the good old days when our  governor upheld the traditional definition of marriage as being between a man, a woman, and an Emperor’s Club hooker.” There’s a great gay storm gathering, and “pretty soon the winds will be blowing each other.”

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Colbert Coalition’s Anti-Gay Marriage Ad
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

The characters in Zane Johnsen’s spoof ad speculate on what will happen when a nice hetero family sees gay couples on TV: “It is like a flood in the living room and the whole family is being washed away by the wiles of Satan and his dark army of homos…Peter begins playing with Molly’s dolls…Your wife leaves the house a mess and goes back to college…”

This more serious ad from GoodAsYou.org debunks the factual claims of the original. “There’s a bullshit storm gathering.” Indeed.

And for sheer creativity, as well as some adorable visuals, the prize goes to this ad sponsored by The National Association of Organizations Against Cat(s) Licking Each Other(s) Organizations Committee (NSOACLEOOC).

Thinking of creating your own video for marriage equality? Enter it in Project Pushback’s contest before May 18 and you could win $2,500. Project Pushback is an initiative of the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center.

Defense-of-Marriage Laws as Religious Violence


On the progressive Christian website Religion Dispatches, John Pahl, a professor at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, makes some concise and cogent arguments that “defense of marriage” laws such as Proposition 8 are a form of religious violence. Laws restricting civil marriage to one man and one women, Pahl writes, “violate sacred texts, are idolatrous, and scapegoat a powerless group.” I particularly appreciated this argument, which I hadn’t heard before:

DOMA Laws perpetuate an association of sex with power, and thereby do damage to any sacramental sensibility that might remain in association with even heterosexual marriage. As Hendrik Hartog and other historians have shown, marriages have shifted in the modern era from patriarchal patterns of coverture to social contracts in which couples seek mutual fulfillment. Such contracts might be compatible with a sacramental sensibility, since they entail pledges of sexual fidelity and commitments to share social resources and responsibilities, along with (one might argue) other gifts of God. DOMA Laws associate sexual fidelity with legislated forms of coercive power, and inhibit the deep trust and mutuality intrinsic to modern (and sacramental) marriage. They establish hierarchies of relationships, and associate heterosexual unions (and sexual practices) with dominance.

Read the whole article here. Other recent articles of interest at Religion Dispatches include an overview of progressive Christianity’s diverse roots, and an investigation of the Christian Patriarchy movement.

Equal Marriage Rights Win in Vermont


The Vermont legislature today voted to override the governor’s veto of a marriage equality bill that had passed last week. The law permits same-sex couples to marry, and recognizes such marriages performed in other states. Vermont now becomes the fourth state to recognize same-sex marriage, and the first to have done so by direct legislative initiative rather than a court decision. Thanks are due to Vermont Freedom to Marry, MassEquality, and all the other activists and volunteers who contacted their elected officials to speak up for equality. From the Vermont Freedom to Marry e-newsletter:

This is a proud day for Vermont and Vermonters. Throughout this three and a half week process, we have engaged with one another with as much civility and respect as possible given the intensity of the heartfelt views many of us — across the spectrum — brought into this debate. And in the end, we did the right thing. The forces of justice, fairness and love proved far stronger than one man’s veto pen.

And along the way, we built new bridges. The debate galvanized the majority of Vermonters in the quest for fairness and inclusion, uniting the business community, clergy and ordinary folks from the four corners of our state. In our editorial pages we’ve seen compelling calls for justice, personal stories, and thoughtful analysis. And in communities around the state, thousands of Vermonters stepped up to the plate — writing your legislators, coming to the Statehouse, knocking on doors, and making phone calls. Some of you have never engaged in the political process before, and some hadn’t thought much about the freedom to marry until it hit the front page. But you opened your hearts, heard a better future calling, and dedicated yourself to making our world a more loving place.

And the courage of every single legislator, and the commitment of every single volunteer and donor, has made a difference. We made it over the top without a cushion. Every single one of us has truly mattered.

Your actions matter to Sandi and Bobbi, who can finally get married right here in their own home state after 42 years of committed life together — through life-threatening sickness, job loss, and the challenges of parenting, as well as the joys of raising a child, being grandmothers, and sharing each other’s company.

Your actions matter to Nina and Stacy who have spent a dozen years advocating for children of gay and lesbian parents — including their own. It matters to their son, Seth, who deserves to grow up in a world that recognizes, respects, and protects his family as much as any other.

Your actions matter to Scott, who as an adolescent struggling with his sexuality regularly contemplated suicide because he felt less worthy than his heterosexual siblings. And to the next generation of Scotts whose load will be lighter in a world where our laws don’t reinforce outdated social stigmas.
Your actions matter to kids that haven’t yet been born, youngsters who don’t yet realize how we made a better world for them, and soulmates yet-to-be-joined by fate or good fortune.

Vermont can serve as a beacon of hope to the kid on the playground in Indiana, bullied by his peers because he’s not macho enough. To the lesbian mother in Georgia in fear of losing custody of her child because she’s gay. And to the worker in Montana who is afraid to come out to his boss for fear of losing his job.

To all of you — thank you for making this difference!

Meanwhile, a gay-marriage bill has passed the New Hampshire House and is awaiting action in the Senate, and similar bills are pending in Maine and New Jersey. Also today, the Washington, D.C. city council voted to recognize same-sex marriages that were performed legally in other states. Washington, D.C. already has a civil-unions law and is considering a move to full marriage equality, which will need approval from Congress.

To volunteer for phone-banks targeting these states, contact MassEquality.

Gay Marriage Victory in Iowa, Veto Threat in Vermont


Gay marriage became a little more mainstream Friday when the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously upheld a lower court’s ruling that the state’s ban on same-sex unions was unconstitutional. The high court agreed that a law restricting marriage to one man and one woman violated the state constitution’s equal protection clause. The legislature “excluded a historically disfavored class of persons from a supremely important civil institution without a constitutionally sufficient justification,” the justices concluded. Read the court’s decision here.

According to news reports, state lawmakers have little interest in pushing for a constitutional amendment to overturn the ruling. California, watch out: the mantle of progressive leadership may be passing from you.

Meanwhile, in Vermont, both chambers of the state legislature voted by a large majority to pass a law that would grant equal marriage rights to same-sex couples. Vermont’s civil unions law offered many of the same legal benefits as marriage but GLBT advocates had argued that the two-tier system created the appearance of second-class citizenship.

Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas has vowed to veto the law. The override vote could occur as early as this Tuesday. Call the governor’s office at 802-828-3333 and ask Gov. Douglas to respect the will of the people and not stand in the way of civil rights for all families. MassEquality is also organizing a phonebank to call Vermont voters this weekend. You can make calls at their Boston office or use their nifty new telecommuting software to call from home. 

“Blogging for Truth” Counteracts Hate with Stories of GLBT Lives


A new collaborative website for GLBT folks and their allies, Blogging for Truth, is collecting examples of virulent anti-gay propaganda from the radical right, and urging pro-gay bloggers to counteract those lies with the stories of their own loving, wholesome, spirit-filled lives.

Want to help? Sign up to be added to their blogroll; then, during the week of May 25-31, 2009, “LGBTQ bloggers and all allies are invited to write articles about the truth of our existence and lives. To blog facts and/or the results of real scientific studies carried out by real scientists. To blog your personal experiences, and how the hate affects you personally.”

Trusting One’s Self More Than One’s Culture


Teresa Wymore, an author of lesbian erotica who blogs at Flesh and Spirit, has posted an incisive rebuttal to Eve Tushnet’s critique of James Alison’s gay-affirming Catholic theology, which I wrote about here. (If that’s too “inside baseball” for you, read Teresa on Why Sex Matters instead.)

Teresa writes (Eve’s comments in italics):


Like many converts who are drawn to the Church, she seems to be seeking a perpetual engine of moral clarity, as if one’s hard moral choices shouldn’t rely on time, place, or circumstance but come in a handy indexed volume. Post-modern morality is a challenging thing because, like a box of squirming puppies, it means you have to be alert to changing priorities and consequences.

She begins her argument with her own coming out story. And then, there is this:

Experience is itself a kind of text, and texts need interpreters. How often have we thought that we understood our experiences, only to realize later that we had only the barest understanding of our own motives and impulses?

Yes, she’s an apologist. Do you recognize the first step of any institution seeking control? Don’t trust yourself. Tushnet continues:

To my mind, Johnson’s approach places far too much trust in personal experience. He views our experience as both more transparent and less fallible than it is. To take personal experience as our best and sturdiest guide seems like a good way to replicate all of our personal preferences and cultural blind spots. Scripture is weird and tangly and anything but obvious-but at least it wasn’t written by someone who shared all our desires, preferences, and cultural background. At least it wasn’t written by us.

At this point, I see Tushnet has abandoned her reasonableness. Scripture is a result of personal experience, both produced and interpreted by the personal experiences of a fraction of humanity during ages of class oppression. I do believe it is divinely inspired; I’m just waiting for the divine interpretation. The Tradition that has given us our current understanding of Scripture is based in patriarchal culture, which Tushnet herself seems to acknowledge with a nod early, but now forgets.

And so I ask, with what experiences and values shall we interpret that Scripture? Who is wise enough that they should trust themselves to understand? Finally, Tushnet sums up her experience:

The sacrifices you want to make aren’t always the only sacrifices God wants.
…
I feel as if every week or so I discover yet another hidden treasure of the church that speaks to me in exactly the way I need in order to deal specifically with my struggles, resentments, longings, and strengths as a woman and a lesbian.

I want to ask why she gave up sexual relationships. Did she surrender that expression through discipline or did one desire replace a stronger one in her? My question, you see, is whether she chose her own sacrifice and finds more rewards when she chooses to support tradition and live in conformity with official teaching on sexuality. And yet, she seems to be telling other lesbians who find greater rewards in personal sexual relationships that they are not listening to God.

Tushnet has chosen to make a sacrifice of her lesbian sexuality, but maybe God wants her to sacrifice her attachment to a patriarchal tradition. I would say only she knows the answer to that. She would say the Church knows better than she does.

What would make me more open to Tushnet’s ideas is if she simply made the point that she chooses celibacy because she finds greater rewards in it, not because she’s choosing the moral high ground.

Teresa has hit upon the central question in the gay Bible wars: can I trust myself to know God’s will for me, or must I always defer to the institutional interpreters of the text? If, as individuals, we must be vigilant against letting our judgment be distorted by sin, that potential for error is only increased at the corporate level. It is a lot easier to hold an individual accountable than an institution, which is why scapegoating is such a powerful agent of social cohesion (as Alison tirelessly points out).

I’m sure I will be citing Teresa’s blog again in this space. Like me, she is working to stake out a position that is pro-erotica but anti-porn, that affirms the libido of the creative imagination while acknowledging how that imagination has been co-opted by our culture’s misogyny and violence. (Read her post “Mythbusting Women’s Erotica“.) Hey, anyone who’s a fan of James Alison and Bob Jensen has got to be an interesting thinker.

The Guardian’s Andrew Brown Makes Christian Case for Gay Marriage


In today’s blog post, Andrew Brown, a religion columnist for Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, makes a pithy case for why Christians should support gay marriage. Brown deftly avoids both the liberal fallacy that sex between consenting adults has no public moral dimension, and the conservative fallacy that gays are just disordered straight people.

Brown observes that before the issue was forced into the open, the Church of England quietly ordained gay men who were in stable long-term partnerships, on the theory that they made better priests than potentially promiscuous singles of either orientation. Writing about one London bishop who had this sub rosa policy, Brown says it is important to recognize that “it wasn’t in the least bit liberal. He did not believe that the sex lives of his clergy could be a private matter, still less that they ought to be. He would have agreed with St Paul that sex could be so disruptive and so dangerous that it must be channelled.”

This insight about sex informs the conservative Anglicans who feel that gay marriage is a threat to the family. They’re protecting important values, they’re just wrong about where the real threat lies. Brown continues:


When they say that they are defending the family, they are sincere. They understand that families matter, and that restraints have to be put on adult sexual behaviour if children are to be brought up reasonably selflessly. Children need hope and self-discipline: they don’t invent them all by themselves, and if they do they don’t hang on to their inventions without encouragement. They learn them from the adults around, who can only teach by example.

And the adults, in turn, keep themselves on the strait (not straight) path of righteousness partly because they are afraid of being found out. It may be reprehensible to do the right thing for a squalid and ignoble reason, but it is better than to do the wrong thing for a squalid reason. So one of the great slogans of the liberal society, that it doesn’t matter what consenting adults do with each other in private, turns out to be false. It does matter what other people do in private, even when they are not parents. Our natural prurient interest in gossip reflects this fact in a rather repulsive way. Other people’s sex lives are a legitimate matter of public interest – not just in the News of the World sense that they interest the public, much though they do – but because they also affect everyone around them, and influence their behaviour as well as their feelings.

Thus far the strong case for a conservative sexual morality. But there is a final twist. The stronger the case is for reining in sexual appetites, the more wicked it becomes to scapegoat gay people, and in particular open, monogamous ones like Gene Robinson. They are not the problem. As the wonderful New Yorker cartoon has it “Gays and lesbians aren’t a threat to my marriage. It’s all the straight women who sleep with my husband.”

What the Akinola-ites deny is that there is such a thing as a natural homosexual. To them, a gay man is merely a turbocharged straight man, like the Earl of Rochester, who boasted of his penis that “Woman nor man, nor aught its fury stayed.” On the other hand, what many of their opponents deny is that there must be painful restraints on our sexual (and other) appetites if civilisation is to survive. It’s hard to tell which are furthest from Christianity. But the people who believe in unrestricted sexual freedom tend to grow out of it; the pleasures of scapegoating and self-satisfaction only increase with age.

(Emphasis mine.)

Transgender Civil Rights Video: “Everyone Matters”


As the Massachusetts legislature considers the Transgender Nondiscrimination Bill, a coalition of activist groups (MassEquality, GLAD, and the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition) has put together this moving and informative 10-minute video about the lives of transpersons and their need for civil rights protections:
 
 

If you live in Massachusetts, call your representatives and ask them to vote for the bill.

Poem: “Wedded”

This poem of mine was chosen by Chris Forhan as a runner-up for the 2008 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry from The Broome Review, and also appears in their Spring 2009 issue and on their website.

Wedded

Why can’t the dog and the cat get married,
the postman to the bishop, the nurse to the queen?
In the days when mud was chocolate
we could march the egg cups down the table,
humming that universal tune.
The teddy bear and the piggy bank,
the lightbulb and the tomato.
Not all of these relationships would work out,
as we knew from the sound
of cloth tearing in another room.
Still we imagined,
in those days when peppermint was money,
that a bit of lace thrown over
the cat’s spitting head would make her beautiful,
and a dropcloth would stop the parrot quarreling
with his mirror mate.
We were dizzy with weddings,
even when the books fell to the floor
inky and torn, face-down like bridesmaids
with their mascara running.
Why do the things that were sold together,
the obvious salt and pepper,
rows of rolled socks like dull neighbors,
always go missing?
So we married the glove to the mitten,
in those days when morning was bedtime,
when lunch was rice flung in the street
after the tin-can fugitives,
we matched the boot to the baby’s shoe
and no guests came.