Category Archives: GLBT

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.

Hate Crimes Bill, Prop 8 Update


A brief roundup this morning of some news of interest to gay-rights activists:

Recently I sent an email to my legislators through the MassEquality website, asking them to sign on to the hate-crimes bill that’s pending in Congress. Back when I was a young libertarian, I had my doubts about hate-crimes legislation. As I saw it, violence and bullying were uniformly bad, whether motivated by bias against one’s group affiliation or by plain old personal cruelty. Why did we need to single out some forms of victimization as more worthy of attention than others?

As I now see it, one reason we need the federal government to pay special attention to hate crimes is that the attitudes motivating the bullies may be shared by local law enforcement and juries. This was certainly the case during African-Americans’ fight for civil rights in the mid-20th century.

The office of Senator Ted Kennedy (D, Mass.) sent me back a form email expressing his support for the hate-crimes bill, which I’m reprinting below because it does such a good job of explaining the difference that this legislation would make:


Thank you for your recent letter about the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act. I understand your concerns and appreciate this opportunity to respond.

The United States is a nation founded on the ideals of tolerance and justice for all. We cannot accept violence motivated by bias and hate. According to the FBI, over 9,000 Americans a year are victims of hate crimes, and that number does not include the many hate crimes that go unreported. These crimes have a reach and impact far greater than the individual victim. They target whole communities, attacking the fundamental ideals our nation was founded on.

No member of society deserves to be a victim of a violent crime because of their race, religion, ethnic background, disability, gender, gender identity or sexual orientation. It is long past time for Congress to do more to prevent hate crimes and insist that they be fully prosecuted when they occur. That’s why I’m proud to join Republican Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon in sponsoring the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act.

This important legislation will strengthen the ability of federal, state, and local governments to investigate and prosecute hate crimes. It will authorize the Justice Department to assist in investigating and prosecuting hate crimes, when requested by local authorities. The bill will also provide grants to assist localities in meeting the extraordinary expenses involved in hate crimes cases, and in training law enforcement to combat prevent such crimes. Cities and states will be given the assistance and resources they need to protect all members of society.

The House of Representatives has already passed this needed legislation. It now moves to the Senate, and I look forward to working with my colleagues to approve it soon.


In other news, the California Supreme Court today will be hearing oral arguments in the lawsuit to overturn Proposition 8. Ken Starr, whom you may remember for his fascination with Bill Clinton’s ding-dong, is the lead counsel for the Yes on 8 folks. He will be arguing not only that the ban on gay marriage should stand, but that the court should invalidate the 18,000 same-sex marriages that were performed before the ballot referendum passed.

Starr’s brief in the case repeats all the old lies about how nontraditional families are harmful to children. You know what was harmful to our nontraditional family, Ken? Sexism, secrecy, job discrimination, and religious condemnation.

Sign the Human Rights Campaign’s petition telling anti-GLBT extremists to “End the Lies” here. Their wall of shame shows quotes from other prominent figures in politics, religion and the media who are spreading dangerous misinformation about sexual minorities. There’s also a link to suggest your own favorite offenders. I nominate Brian Camenker of MassResistance, who was kind enough to link to my video of the November 2008 Join the Impact rally. Thanks for the hits, Brian.

Michael Broder: “The Remembered One”


Poet and classics scholar Michael Broder presented his work at a panel discussion on “Poetic Responses to AIDS” at AWP Chicago last week. He has kindly given me permission to reprint one of those poems below.

The Remembered One

The good die young, but sometimes
    they come back, dripping with something
        we can’t name or identify,
an acrid perfume, or they reach for us
        like a taproot, draining
our sweet wells of oblivion
        until we lie drenched in a common sweat,
        our bed sheet their burial shroud, their moldering crust.

I dreamt of Marcos last night.
    I thought he came to be buried,
        to be done with; but no, that caramel devil,
leaving his tangerine swim trunks wet on the floor,
        toweling his gorgon hair as he sits in my lap,
numbing me with the poppies
        of his opiate grin and reasserting his claim:

Why should you get the house,
    the husband, the PhD, while I chew on dirt
        and feed succeeding generations
of night crawlers?
        I can crawl the night too, you know, the night is crawling
with me, with mine, with ours—
        us—
        while you pretend to walk, awake, alive.

Come with me, why don’t you, make once and for all
    the descent you practiced so ably for so many years.
        I know a place with many darkened corners
where you can crawl on hands and knees
        like in the old days—
What’s that you called it? “the old ich-du…”

We are beautiful there, and legion.
    We will keep you busy for centuries.
        And think what precious memories he will have,
here above—

This is the song you have waited so long to sing, isn’t it?

****

Michael Broder holds an MFA from New York University and is completing a PhD in Classics from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His poems have appeared in Bloom, Court Green, and Painted Bride Quarterly, among other journals and anthologies. His essay on Sappho is included in My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them, edited by Michael Montlack and due out from the University of Wisconsin Press this spring. His book manuscript, This Life Now, is awaiting a publisher. Visit www.mbroder.com for links to online publication. Michael can be contacted at mb*****@*****er.com .

Keith Olbermann Receives HRC Straight Ally Award


MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann received an Ally for Equality Award at the Greater New York Human Rights Campaign’s gala dinner two weeks ago. Olbermann, you may recall, made waves for his heartfelt denunciation of Prop 8. Below is a video of his speech, in which he talks about the experiences that awakened him, as a straight white man, to perceive prejudice against other groups and fight discrimination in all its forms.



I especially appreciated this insight, which Olbermann shares at around 9:30 minutes into the 13-minute video:


…We live at a time when everybody—especially, it seems, the purveyors of hatred and prejudice against religions, or races, or sexual orientations, or height, or hair color—everybody actually believes that they are also the victims of some kind of prejudice: the horrors of affirmative action, the destruction of the religious sanctity of marriage, or of course bias in the media. Yet very few of these folks ever make the great mental leap—if you are a victim of prejudice, the specifics of the prejudice become almost irrelevant. It is the hate that counts. If you have been on the receiving end, if you are even for the briefest of moments merely mistaken for a member of a victimized group…if you really are just brushed by this plague of hate, you have been given a gift. It’s brief, it’s cheap, it’s everlasting. You have, as the old saw goes, walked the mile in the other person’s shoes. If you are a victim of prejudice, you should now hate prejudice.

Olbermann understands the wrongness of the zero-sum thinking that calls same-sex partnerships a threat to heterosexual marriage. Shoring up our status at the expense of any group–sinful or not!–is exactly the opposite of what Jesus told us to do. Rather, our experience of suffering should make us more attuned to the humanity of someone else who is now suffering in the same way. This, I think, is one lesson we can draw from the parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18:21-35. 

In our complex, diverse society, it’s not uncommon for the same person to be disadvantaged by some characteristics while actually accruing privilege from others, or to be privileged in some contexts in their life but disadvantaged in others, even for the same trait. A conservative Christian may experience secular-liberal prejudice in her job as a university teacher, and sexism when she tries to buy a car, but when she casts her vote at the ballot box for Prop 8, she is still standing with the interests of the power structure–wielding the church-backed power of the majority to disenfranchise a stigmatized minority. One grievance drives out another.

In my experience, spiritually hungry people who can’t bring themselves to consider Christianity are not stymied by rationalist worries about miracles, evolution, or reason versus revelation. That may have been an older generation’s main concern, but not now. Now they’re upset because Christians seem to be the enemies of compassion and human rights. Someone has to step outside the vicious cycle of entitlement and prejudice. If it’s not us, what kind of gospel are we preaching?

Rescuing the “Argument from Nature”?


Eve Tushnet, a lesbian-oriented Catholic who accepts Church teaching on celibacy, has posted an interesting rebuttal to an article about gay Catholic theologian James Alison in a recent issue of Commonweal. The article is only available to subscribers, but it appears to reiterate Alison’s frequent argument that new scientific and psychological evidence requires a reassessment of the prohibition on same-sex intimacy. Homosexuality, once seen as some people’s willful rejection of our universally heterosexual nature, more and more appears to be a naturally occurring biological variation. As Alison wrote in this essay from 2007 (emphasis mine):


…[W]e are witnessing the fleshing out in a particular local Church of the mechanisms which the Catholic faith has given us to maintain unity, work through our being scandalized by change, and enabled to learn what is true over a time of discernment. The overarching priority is not to allow scandal at change to block us from receiving the grace which Our Lord seeks to give us through the sacraments. And then to make sure that this grace, and the new life it produces in us is available in ecclesial form so that others can be invited in as well.

I think this has come about because Church authority has become aware that the advent of “matters gay” in recent years may not primarily center on sexual ethics at all. Rather it concerns an emerging anthropological truth about a regular, normal and non-pathological variant within the human condition. In other words, it is not that the Church’s teaching about sexual ethics is being challenged by insufficiently heroic people, but that the field of application of that teaching is being redefined by emerging reality. And of course it is proper to the Catholic faith, where Creation and Salvation are never to be completely separated, that it takes very seriously “what is” as informing “what should be” rather than trying to force “what is” to fit into an understanding of “what should be” derived from other sources.

The first time a soccer player picked up a ball and ran with it, we were clearly talking about a disobedient soccer player, since it is intrinsic to soccer that only the goalie under tightly regulated circumstances can handle the ball. But over time it did become possible to talk about the game of rugby as something where the overall purposes of sports playing, shared with soccer, are faithfully maintained within a different set of practises. My point is that for the referee to blow the whistle on a ball-handler in a soccer game is very proper. And for as long as it is clear that there is only soccer, he is right. However, as it becomes clear that there may also be a game called rugby, he must learn to be very careful indeed, since attempting to referee a rugby match as though it were soccer being played by perverse rule breakers would degenerate into insanity.

To which Eve responds, with some justification, that a lot of things occur in nature that aren’t ideal or ethically defensible (rape, killing, addiction). In a follow-up post, she adds:


…”[N]ature” isn’t obvious. Cultures define what is natural, and those definitions need not match up at all well with your own morality, whether or not you’re an orthodox Catholic. So when you rely on “nature” arguments, you need to be fierce, be careful, and be anything other than complacent; and–my old hobbyhorse–maybe you’d be better off just leaving the “natural” category alone, and making your arguments on other grounds.

I happen to agree, but I don’t think we can leave it at that. We have to contend with the “argument from nature” because St. Paul uses it in Romans 1:26-27. This is the most extended reference to same-sex intimacy in the Bible (not counting ambiguous relationships like David and Jonathan), and arguably the only one that seems to condemn homosexual acts as a general category, rather than specific abusive situations like the rape of captured enemy leaders in Leviticus. The quote below starts at Rom 1:22 because the idol-worshipping context is important:


22Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. 24Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. 26Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. 27In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. (NIV)

St. Paul is working with a definition of “natural” that is more sophisticated than “something occurring in nature”. As Eve says, the latter definition is so slippery and overbroad that it easily puts a divine imprimatur on our personal desires or the culture’s existing power relations. So it’s not enough to say that homosexual desires are inborn or even that they’re found in other species. But neither is that an irrelevant bit of data. We can’t get away from the fact that in this passage, St. Paul is making empirical claims about the created order and the consequences of ignoring it, claims that are open to disproof.

One component of idolatry, as this passage shows, is a misunderstanding of creatures’ true nature. The Gentiles here mistook animals and humans for God. They were unable to see through the specific instance of God’s creation to the infinite creator they had in common. St. Paul therefore finds it unsurprising that people prone to category confusion would also depart from mainstream heterosexual relations.
 
Now, is St. Paul here proving, or merely assuming, that heterosexuality is natural for all people? I think that the last sentence of 1:27 makes this an assumption open to disproof, by St. Paul’s own standards.
 
St. Paul is making a pragmatic argument for what is natural, unlike modern conservatives whose arguments often depend on subjective, essentialist metaphors about what is “truly” masculine or feminine. He reads backward from consequences to explain which human behaviors are properly aligned with reality and our own best interest, and which are not. He could simply have said “Idol worship is wrong because God (or Scripture) forbids it” and left it at that, just as contemporary opponents of gay rights have treated certain texts as self-justifying and demanding blind obedience. But instead, he encourages readers to test his theology against common-sense observation. We can see for ourselves that idol-worship is bad because it leads to disorderly behavior, one example of which is the same-sex intercourse practiced by pagans, and we know that that is bad because the men “received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion”, which perhaps refers to sexually transmitted diseases. 

In this view, what is “natural” for us is what is conducive to human flourishing, according to our nature. This is a smaller category than “anything humans naturally happen to do”, the concept that Eve was rejecting. The confusion about “natural” may stem from the fact that both Jews and Greeks in St. Paul’s time had a teleological understanding of creation, whereas our society is accustomed to see Nature as the realm of blind, amoral, material forces.

Now, if there were discovered, or rather recognized to have always existed, a configuration of same-sex intimate relationships that did not naturally have any negative consequences for the individuals involved or anyone around them, i.e. that produced exactly the same spiritual fruits as heterosexual marriage, when the warping effect of social stigma was removed–what effect would that have on St. Paul’s argument? 

I believe it does no violence to Scripture to limit St. Paul’s example to its facts. This passage is not primarily about homosexuality, but about idol worship, with certain pagan sexual practices being cited as a (random?) example of its unhealthy effects. Same-sex intercourse may well have been “unnatural” (in the sense of “not God’s intention for them”) for the people St. Paul was describing, either because they were seeking a decadent thrill outside their normal inclination, or being promiscuous, or engaging in temple prostitution and pagan fertility rites that denied the true God. His argument does not depend on its being unnatural for all people everywhere, at all times, in every type of relationship. And as I have tried to show above, he would not have deemed it inappropriate to cite sociological evidence in a Scriptural argument, or to consider the real-world effects of a theological position as a guide to its truth or falsehood.