Category Archives: Gay Rights

By the time this column hits newsstands, readers will have heard more than most of them ever wanted to hear about Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremy Wright. So I apologize in advance for belaboring the subject, but I remain steamed.

Why, you may ask, is a white Jewish grandmother (a demographic to which Hillary considers herself entitled) brooding over the coverage of an African-American Christian pastor? I’ll tell you: because I come from a tradition that is all about Justice. On matters of faith, any three Jews will hold at least five different beliefs; we’ll argue into the wee hours about politics, public policy and whether nice Jewish boys should attend medical school or law school. But most of us imbibed the Talmudic injunction “Justice, justice shalt thou pursue” with our mothers’ milk. And the brouhaha over Reverend Wright has been unjust on so many levels.

First—and most obvious—is the highly selective nature of the clips being shown endlessly on cable television. As many columnists and reporters have pointed out (notably, Anderson Cooper on his own blog), all of the Reverend’s hundreds of sermons are digitally available. Very few of them contained inflammatory passages. Indeed, even the statements that have aroused so much anger don’t sound nearly so incendiary when shown in context, as part of the larger message. (I shudder to think how I would sound—not being the most temperate person around—if someone selected the least reasonable statements I had made and presented them as representative.)

Second, there are the pious statements from people who were shocked, shocked, that Obama didn’t leave his church. How could he stay if he really disagreed with portions of his pastor’s sermons. Oh, yeah—as a Catholic friend of mine wondered aloud, how many of those people are Catholics who left the Church over the predatory priest scandals? As a student of mine remarked, “I’m a conservative Christian. I don’t agree with everything Pat Robertson says. But I agree with a lot, and I don’t stop being a Conservative Baptist just because there’s stuff I disagree with.”

Third—and perhaps most telling—where is all the righteous indignation about the homophobes and anti-Semites whose endorsement John McCain has actively sought?  Whatever the Reverend Wright’s positions on responsibility for 9-11 or AIDS in the African-American community, he has, according to the Washington Blade, “largely supported gay rights and welcomed gays into his 8,000-member congregation.” According to Equality Illinois, “Trinity [Wright’s congregation] has been among the strongest supporters of LGBT rights.” The church has a gay and lesbian singles ministry, and Wright has spoken up in defense of gay pastors.

Contrast that with pronouncements by Televangelist John Hagee, the virulently anti-gay, anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic Religious Right figure whose endorsement was actively sought and publicly welcomed by John McCain. (Hagee calls the Catholic Church “the great whore.”) Or with McCain’s acceptance of support from radical right leader Janet Folger, who—among other charming sentiments—has declared that “Anita Bryant was right.” Or the Reverend Ron Parsley, who McCain calls his “personal spiritual advisor.”  According to People for the American Way, “You won’t hear Parsley rail against Catholics, but you will hear him rail against gays, abortion, Islam, judges, and People for the American Way.” In Ohio, Parsley has built a political machine of “Patriot Pastors” who turn their churches into get-out-the-vote campaigns during elections—undoubtedly the “spiritual” element that most appeals to Mr. McCain.

If we are going to obsess endlessly over Rev. Wright’s less elevated pronouncements,  we might expect the media to give equal time to the considerably more florid and consistent positions of these “spiritual advisors.” If you have somehow failed to notice prominent reporting about the positions taken by Mr. McCain’s spiritual gurus, however, you aren’t alone—The Carpetbagger Report ran a Lexis-Nexis search to see just how many stand-alone articles were written about “McCain’s outreach to a bigoted and nutty televangelist” in the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. The total? Zero.

Will this focus on handpicked passages from Reverend Wright’s sermons sink Barack Obama? The answer is no. If Barack Obama loses, Reverend Wright may be the excuse; he won’t be the reason.

Obama has frequently said that this election is a choice between the past and the future. The use of Reverend Wright’s sermons to stir up racial resentments is consistent with the politics of the past. It remains to be seen whether Americans will vote for a different, fairer future.

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The Indiana Senate has demonstrated that it will spend its limited time during this short session on those matters most important to—who, exactly?

 

At a time when public passions are at a boiling point over our dysfunctional tax system, when citizens are demanding that we streamline Indiana’s wasteful, overlapping government structures, the Senate has decided to take decisive action—to ban same-sex marriage.

 

By this point, the arguments against SJ7 are well-known. It “solves” a problem that doesn’t exit, by denying still-theoretical gay couples access to hundreds of legal rights that heterosexual citizens enjoy. Those include the right to be appointed as a guardian of an ailing or injured partner, the right to take family leave, and the right to half of the partnership’s accumulated property if the relationship dissolves. Same sex partners pay more taxes because they aren’t entitled to spousal gift and estate tax exemptions and deductions. They can’t seek damages for a partner’s wrongful death. There are hundreds more—rights enjoyed by heterosexuals married two days, but denied to gays who have been partners for 30 years.

 

Worse, as constitutional expert Aviva Orenstein testified, part B of this poorly-drafted Amendment is likely to hurt all unmarried couples, not just gay ones, and is an invitation to the “judicial activism” that proponents claim to detest. No one has a clue what “legal incidents of marriage” are.

 

SJR 7 is opposed by Indiana’s largest employers, by many clergymen and religious organizations, by university professors, by dozens of professional organizations, and in recent polls, by a majority of Indiana citizens. So what compelling justifications are offered for cluttering the Indiana constitution with this confusing and discriminatory language?

 

Basically, proponents say gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry because some religions teach that homosexuality is immoral. (Of course, all religions teach that rape and murder are immoral—but Indiana allows rapists and murderers to marry. Go figure.) They say marriage and sex are for procreation (although we allow sterile folks to marry). Most of all, they insist that recognizing gay unions will undermine families and the institution of marriage. (Similar claims were made about interracial marriage, and about allowing women to own property and vote.)

 

Let’s at least be honest. This isn’t an effort to protect families—it is an effort to privilege some families at the expense of others. SJ7 is not about religion or morality—it is about whose religion, whose morality.

 

This is also not about our Senators responding to some groundswell of public opinion. This is an issue rapidly losing its salience with most voters, who are understandably a lot more concerned about taxes, crime, access to health care and other bread-and-butter and quality of life issues. To the extent the Senate is responding to public pressure, it is pressure coming from a small but highly vocal constituency.  

 

We can only hope that when SJR7 arrives in the Indiana House, our Representatives give it the priority it deserves—and bury this bad bill whose time has thankfully passed.

 

 

 

   

 

 

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Word Column                                                              Sheila Suess Kennedy

January 29, 2008                                                          811 words

 

A Post-Culture-War America?                                                                        

Okay, let me begin with an admission—I’m obsessed with the Presidential campaign. Totally, hopelessly obsessed. I spend really embarrassing amounts of time emailing back and forth with two of my sons who are equally obsessed, and equally enamored of “my” candidate.

By the time this column appears in print, the primary may well be decided. Worse, on those rare occasions when I force myself to be realistic, I have to admit that the odds are against my guy; the smart money says he isn’t going to be the candidate. The thing is, it has been so long since there has been a national candidate I could wholeheartedly support; it’s sort of like falling in love, even when you know—as my husband keeps warning me—you are likely to get your heart broken. Again.

When I sat down to write this column, I wasn’t going to write about the primary. But then I thought about why it is that I am so enthusiastic about Barack Obama, why his emergence has made me feel almost hopeful for the future of the country I love, and it seemed a phenomenon worth exploring, because his candidacy has a particular message for America’s minority communities, including the gay community.

The past seven years have been a disaster for America, and if polls are to be believed, a significant majority of Americans recognize the dimensions of that disaster. We are a sour, dispirited electorate. (My husband says I’ve been in a really bad mood since 2000.) In the immediate aftermath of 9-11, there was a rush of national solidarity and the best kind of patriotism, but it didn’t take long for this Administration to slam that window shut, and to turn us against each other. “Good Christian Amuricans” were under attack by “Islamofascists,” “homosexual deviates,” “secular humanists” and other assorted heathens—and they weren’t going to let us forget to be very, very afraid.

Fair is fair; this Administration didn’t invent the culture wars. They just used culture war issues to gain and retain power. I don’t have to remind readers of The Word how Karl Rove and his political disciples sliced and diced the electorate in order to win elections; anyone who voted in a swing state in 2004 knows just how well the cynical use of state constitutional marriage amendments worked—bringing out the haters to vote against the “queers” and not coincidentally to pull a lever for George W. Bush.

Bush and his crowd will be gone in November, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief. (Hell, we can have a party! I certainly intend to.) It is certainly true that almost anyone who takes the oath of office next January will be an improvement. But we have a chance to do more than trade a sleazy, incompetent Commander in Chief for a sleazy, competent one. We have a chance to elect a post-culture-war President, and begin to put the nastiness and intolerance behind us.

When the campaign began, I’d have gladly taken any of the Democratic front-runners. (Someday, perhaps, if the sane people retake control of the GOP, I can feel that way about Republicans again…). But after watching the Clintons’ willingness to say and do anything in South Carolina—their willingness to distort, smear and shamelessly use the race card a la Karl Rove—I no longer feel that way.

The Clintons have been allies of the African-American community for decades—but they were clearly willing to throw blacks under the bus when they thought it served their purposes. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” gave the gay community a taste of how lasting their commitment to gay rights was. Hillary is running well among Hispanics, but she was quick to retreat from her statement at an early debate that undocumented workers should be able to obtain drivers’ licenses—an issue very important to that community. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Clintons’ alliances are strategic—and disposable—rather than principled and enduring.

As Ted Kennedy said when he endorsed Obama, we have a chance to make this a transformational election. We can put a new kind of candidate in office; multi-ethnic, multi-racial and post-culture-war. As Obama himself said in his South Carolina victory speech, this is not an election about gender or race or ethnicity—it is about the old politics versus a new politics. It is about the past versus the future.

I am so ready for that future.

It may be that by the time you read this column, the primary is effectively over. It may well be the case that the “old politics” has won. (There’s an old saying that goes, “age and treachery will beat youth and skill every time,” and for all I know, that’s true.) But for right now, for the first time in a very long time, I’m in a good mood.

 

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Well, I see that in addition to recipes for cooking squirrels in popcorn poppers, Mike Huckabee has shared some wisdom about God’s plan for the U.S. Constitution, specifically His desire to insert provisions prohibiting abortion and same-sex marriage. As in, God doesn’t want us aborting or cavorting (with or without state sanction), and we ought to revise the U.S. Constitution to reflect God’s will on those matters.

Leaving aside the broader issue—i.e., why, if I wanted to live in a country where some people’s narrow vision of religiosity was made the law of the land, I wouldn’t just move to Saudi Arabia—I want to address one claim Huckabee made, because it is a common theme of arguments against same-sex marriage. Huckabee said, “Marriage has historically, as long as there’s been human history, meant a man and a woman in a relationship for life.”

Except that’s simply untrue. And not just untrue around the edges; it is massively, demonstrably, wildly untrue.

In Ancient Greece, marriage was important, but for entirely practical reasons. Parents chose their children’s partners for economic reasons, and the purpose was to produce children. Women were considered inferior to men, who were free to indulge their romantic and sexual desires elsewhere; as Demosthenes famously explained, “We have prostitutes for our pleasure, concubines for our health, and wives to bear us lawful offspring.” Many men also established sexual and emotional relationships with young boys, and those relationships were widely accepted. Husbands could divorce relatively easily, especially if the wife proved infertile.

In Rome, marriage was personal and optional, and evidently so widely disregarded that the Emperor Augustus found it necessary to pass laws compelling people to marry. Even then, there were three kinds of marriage: one called “usus” where the couple simply moved in together; a more formal variety that involved a ceremony with witnesses; and an upper-class version requiring ten witnesses and a priest. Divorce was common for all three types, and tended to be pretty informal.

In early Israel, a man could have several wives and concubines. You’d think that Huckabee, who is so hung up on God’s law as revealed in the bible, might recall the story of Jacob, who married two sisters, Leah and Rachel. Or that of Solomon, who had 700 wives and 300 concubines. (Solomon was evidently one busy dude!)  Divorce was permitted if you were the husband—wives weren’t so lucky. Both marriage and divorce remained entirely civil matters.

Over the following centuries, marriage came increasingly under the influence of the Catholic church, which was extending its authority over more aspects of life generally. Catholic theologians decided that marriage was for life (although there were grounds for annulment), and imposed a number of other rules. Even so, however, it wasn’t until the 12^th Century that priests got involved in the marriage ceremony, and not until the 13^th that they actually took charge of it. Marriage continued to be a practical, economic arrangement.

Martin Luther declared marriage “a worldly thing” that belonged to the realm of government, not religion, and the English Puritans decreed that marriage was purely secular. (When the English Reformation occurred, the religious significance of marriage was reasserted.) The Protestant reformers also allowed divorce.

Here in America, there have been various experiments with marriage. In 1848, the Oneida community cultivated a form of group marriage. They called it “complex marriage” and every woman was married to every man in the community. (They also practiced so-called “scientific breeding.”) And we all know about Mormon polygamy. While the Mormons have formally renounced the practice, polygamy persists in many parts of the Middle East to this day—among President Bush’s princely pals in Saudi Arabia, for example. (Not only that, a so-called “Christian polygamy movement,” unrelated to Mormonism, began in the U.S. in 1994.) In Senegal today, it is estimated that 47% of marriages are “plural” or polygamous.

Why this brief—and incomplete—excursion down history lane? Because it really fries me the way the radical right manufactures history out of whole cloth. They have succeeded in promulgating an ahistorical mythology in which the Founding Fathers—most of whom were Deists—created a “Christian Nation” that looks remarkably like their own version of Christianity. Like Huckabee, they blithely fabricate wholly fanciful historical “facts”—confident, evidently, that no one reads  history anymore.

Mike Huckabee knows a lot more about fried squirrel than I do. But he obviously doesn’t know  much about other countries, world history, U.S. history or the Enlightenment philosophy that guided those who drafted our Constitution.

 

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Word Column                                                              Sheila Suess Kennedy

October 8, 2007                                                          611 words

 

Lessons from the Closet                                                                                               

 

I remember laughing at my mother because when the newspaper came each morning she turned first to the obituaries, to see if anyone she knew had died. (As she got older, she told me that she wasn’t looking for the names of friends—“I look to make sure I’m not there. If I’m not, I get up and get dressed.)

 

Well, that was then, and now is now, and I find myself scanning the death notices just as faithfully as she used to do. And every once in a while, you see an obituary like the one I noticed this morning. Beneath a photograph of a square-jawed, severe-looking woman was a column attesting to a long life with numerous accomplishments—a doctorate, many civic and charitable activities, devotion to nieces and nephews. She had never married, never had children. The eulogy was delivered by her “close (female) friend” of many years.

 

I have no way of knowing whether this elderly woman and her “close friend” were lesbians, but it is a reasonable assumption. Hers was a generation born before coming out days and gay pride celebrations. Recently, one of the news magazines featured a personal essay by an 88-year old woman who had just lost her life partner, and had decided to declare her orientation publicly for the first time. As she wrote, “What can happen to me now? I don’t have a job to lose, or parents who will be scandalized or humiliated.”

 

As difficult as it can be to be gay and out today, those who were born 75 or 80 years ago rarely felt that they had the option to be honest about their identities. They usually remained closeted to everyone but a handful of others who were similarly situated, often living in fear that their secret lives would become known. When the AIDS epidemic hit, many gay men went to their graves insisting they’d contracted the disease from a blood transfusion.

 

I can’t imagine living a lie your entire life, living in fear that someone will figure out that you aren’t who you pretend to be. Just think of the amount of energy it must take to erect and maintain that sort of facade—energy that might be devoted to more productive and enjoyable ends. Think of the psyches that the need for secrecy has twisted, the Larry Craigs and Ted Haggards and others who have tried to escape detection by being more homophobic than the homophobes. 

 

To make matters worse, at least for men, the gay community has not been particularly hospitable to its elders. Gay men seem to put a premium on youth and muscle tone and good looks, in much the same way that heterosexual men prize good looks and youth in women. (Trophy wife, anyone?) But just as heterosexual women of a “certain age” feel bypassed, older gay men can feel isolated and rejected. 

 

As the LBGT community continues to make significant strides toward inclusion and equal rights, I can’t help feeling a pang for those who have lived their whole lives in the closet, never experiencing the relief that comes from not being constantly “on guard,” never knowing the joy of being accepted and valued for who they really are.

 

The next time you are angry over unfair treatment, outright discrimination or the general hatefulness of the not-very Christian Right, you might pause to consider that America is still a far better place than it was 30, 40 or 50 years ago. And then remind yourself that all of us—gay and straight—need to redouble our efforts to ensure that it will be better still 10 or 20 years from now. 

 

 

 

    

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