I started to go down this road in the previous post about black homophobia, after some thought, it seemed better to address in a separate post. Besides the previous post was getting kind of long. It's something I've actually wanted to blog about for a while, regarding homosexuality and morality. I started putting together a post a several weeks ago but then thought the moment had passed, but with Hillary and Obama's recent comments it became topical again.
It comes down to a basic question: Can you be gay and be a good person? Can you be good person and be gay? Can you be gay and good? Good and gay? From religious conservatives, there seem to be two answers: Maybe. And no.
In his remarks during and after the NBJC Black Church Summit, Bishop Harry Jackson seemed to go back and forth on this question, of whether homosexuality and or same-sex activity are inherently immoral, but then seemed to come down on the side that one can't be homosexual and moral. I started writing a post to address that assumption, but Leonard Pitts basically did it for me.
Pitts addressed African American homophobia in a column a few months ago. the previous post about black homophobia, and then went on to take Tim Hardaway to task for his remarks. But his recent column addressing Gen. Peter Pace's comments should apply to Harry Jackson and a few others.
If those who feel that objection would admit to being driven by instinct and not principle, I could at least respect their honesty. Frankly, it's not uncommon for heterosexual people to flinch at the idea of homosexual intimacy. But the problem is, that admission would cost gay-haters the pretense of principle.
After all, to admit that a response is visceral is to admit you haven't thought it through. Ergo, frame it as a ''moral'' issue. As a practical matter, it comes out the same, but it sounds more high-minded. And never mind that it makes no sense.
I have never understood how a people -- meaning individuals bonded by some racial, sexual, religious or geographical commonality -- can be immoral. Is it immoral to be Jewish? Immoral to be male? Is it immoral to hail from Idaho? How, then, can it be immoral to be gay?
At this point, of course, someone is frantically pointing to an obscure Old Testament passage as his or her authority for the immorality of homosexuality. Thing is, the Old Testament also requires the death penalty for disrespectful children, forbids the eating of meat cooked rare, and obligates the man who rapes a virgin to buy her from her father and marry her. I've seen no groundswell of support for those commands.
Morality, it has always seemed to me, has less to do with commonalities of existence than with how you treat other people. Do you lie to or about them? Do you steal from them? Do you cheat them? Do you walk by their suffering, oblivious? Do you, except in self-defense, harm them physically or mentally? The answers to those questions, I think, define morality more exactly than whether you're sharing a bed with someone who has the same sexual equipment you do.
Except that if you're gay, as far as some people are concerned, you are basically the same as people who lie, cheat, steal, turn a blind eye to suffering, and actively bring harm to others. And that's even if you don't do any of the above and never have. You're still have the same moral standing as people who do, and a lower moral standing than people who don't do any of the above and are also heterosexual. Celibacy won't necessarily get you off the hook either, because even having homosexual desires damns you as far as some people are concerned.
The closest to equality you'll get is the "we've all sinned, and fallen short blahdy, blahdy, blah" response. Congratulations, you're on equal footing with liars, thieves, murderers, adulterers, rapists, shoplifters, tax cheats, drug dealers, etc. And that's just from being gay (bonus if you're a "practicing homosexual," I guess). You're just as "intrinsically disordered" as the paranoid schizophrenic serial killer. And you get to enjoy the company of your moral equals even if you've never even come close to their accomplishments; even if you've spent your entire life avoiding the activities that earned them their spot next to you on the moral food chain.
And, actually, you may be even a bit lower than them on the morality scale if you consider that despite their crimes or misdeeds they are still granted one right you are not if you're gay: the right to marry. (Case in point, Tex Watson has the right to marry. I don't.)
If you're heterosexual and you do all of the above, you can stop doing all of the above, and
never do it again, and raise your moral standing at least somewhat above that motley crew. You can not, however, be gay and do the same. Unless, that is, you can stop being gay. Goodness, after all, is a choice. And if you can't be gay
and good, then gayness must be a choice.
It must be. Even in the face of evidence that sexual orientation doesn't change, it must be. Even in the face of evidence that there may be a biological component to sexual orientation, it must be. Because otherwise the implications, as Tony Campolo pointed out, are unacceptable to a great many people.
The reasons for these beliefs were all too obvious to me. If either of these theories had validity, then it could be said that homosexuals who wanted to change could do so by making the decision to be open to the work of God in their lives and getting some good Christian counseling. When I questioned such conclusions, the interviewers usually came back at me by claiming that if I did not accept what they were saying, then I must be implying that the homosexual orientation was inborn. That, to them, was unthinkable because accordingly, this would lead to the assumption that God created homosexuals the way they are, and that we should accept them as such. Over and over, I would have to repeat that nobody knows definitively what establishes same-sex attraction in persons - and again I would have to assert that what we do know is that it is practically never the result of any conscious decision.
If "God created homosexuals the way they are" then by extension — assuming that God doesn't make mistakes, and that what God created is good and has a purpose even if we don't understand it — there must be a moral context for homosexuality. It would have to be amoral rather than immoral. Just as heterosexuality is morally neutral, but is instead defined morally by how the individual uses his or her sexuality, so too would homosexuality be moral or not depending on how the individual uses his or her sexuality
That is, there must then be a way to be a "good" way to be gay; or simply a way to be "good and gay." Or as Campolo put it earlier when discussing Ted Haggard, the individual who's same-sex oriented must then decide what that means for his or her life. For some it might be celibacy, but for others it might mean finding a healthy outlet to express their sexuality.
And that's where the religious right hits a brick wall. There can be no outlet for same-sex orientation that is not morally corrupt. It's essential to their understanding of how the world must work. Gays have a specific role to play in that scenario, and goodness has very little to do with it. (And yes, there's a delicious irony in Ted Haggard being mentioned in the following quote.)
Ask Pastor Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and good cop to Dobson's bad cop at the top of the evangelical world, and he'll offer a more nuanced answer. Like most fundamentalists, Haggard believes that sexual sin is among the worst; he also knows it is the most common. Evangelicals, he'll say, aren't more obsessed with sexuality these days; rather, homosexuals are, somehow, more homosexual. The official line is that gay marriage marks a tipping point (Haggard, like many evangelicals, is a fan of Malcolm Gladwell's book of that name) into wholesale hedonism. The unofficial line, among leaders such as Haggard and Dobson is that it's a fight their side has already lost.
But the specter of gay marriage still serves a function. Christian conservatives take pains to distance themselves from the sexism of their forefathers. Every Christian man-guide emphasizes the claim that women play just as important a role in the maintenance of what evangelicals view as society's all-important unit, the family, and it's more than dishwashing, suckling, and sex (though what else they are to do is not often discussed). Women must submit to their husbands, but their husbands in turn must commit to "serving" their wives. The phrase that comes to mind is "separate but equal."
But with Christian womanhood restored and redeemed, a crucial character in the Christian conservative morality play has gone missing: the seductress. It is no longer acceptable to speak of loose women and harlots, since sexual promiscuity in a woman is the fault of the man who has failed to exercise his "headship" over her. It is his effeminacy, not hers, that is to blame. And who lures him into this spiritual castration? The gay man.
As E.J. Graff points out in What is Marriage For?: The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, when the world doesn't work they way they believe it must, these folks have to have someone to blame, according to her theories about the moving target that is the generally accepted "purpose of sex," and where various social changes have finally brought us.
If refraining is the right thing, then sexual pleasure is evil. If reproducing is the right thing, then the "crime against nature" is any act that prevents babies — whether coitus interruptus or drinking pennywort tea as a contraceptive. If sex is for refreshing each other's spirits, then someone besides contrascepting pairs must become society's sexual scapegoat.
And since it's unlikely we'll turn back the clock far enough to undo the social changes that have brought us to this point, guess who wins the scapegoat lottery?
If there's a context in which it's possible to be "good and gay," somebody loses their scapegoat, and even more than that. Graff points out in her book, as Stephanie Coontz does in hers, the social changes that brought us to the point of even discussing the possibility of same-sex marriage initially brought about greater independence for women; including the advent of contraception, which separated sex from the inevitable possibility of procreation. Says Graff, "contraception and female emancipation went hand in hand." As did education and female emancipation, property rights and female emancipation, or economic independence and female emancipation.
The threat of legal same-sex marriage, then, is actually doubled. It carries one step further the progress that's lead to women no longer having to "submit to their husbands"; they might volunteer, a'la the "surrendered wife" model, but not many women have to marry and thus "submit to their husbands" as a necessity for survival. Social progress changed the status of women, and the same people who oppose same-sex marriage would like to undo that progress to whatever degree they can. Legal same-sex marriage further cements those social changes, and makes it even harder to turn back the clock.
It's no coincidence that the political forces opposed to same-sex marriage or marriage equality also oppose gender equality and advocate returning to more strictly enforced gender roles. The Institute for Progressive Christianity recently published a paper titled "The KIngdom of God and the Witness of Gay Marriage," which includes among it's premises:
- Gay marriages demonstrate the possibility and desirability of gender equality in any marriage by modeling a relationship where the parties to the marriage do not distribute roles and responsibilities based on gender. This modeling supports the positive transformation of the curse of gender conflict, and subsequent patriarchal domination pronounced at the Fall from Paradise into gender egalitarianism .
2. Gay marriage’s ascendancy and resilience in society participates in a fundamental shift of the culture’s understanding of marriage. That is, marriage is being transformed from a utilitarian arraignment grounded in the idea that women are sexual property to an egalitarian life journey with a partner who one chooses to develop and share mutual love, affection, respect, and support.
... One of the most obvious issues to which gay marriage speaks is gender equality. One of the strongest and most relied upon objections to gay marriage from the Right is that it violates the concept of gender complementarity. Gender complementarity is the metaphysical claim that men’s and women’s social functions in the world are determined dichotomously by their biological sex, such that where men are convex women are concave.
... Undergirding the concept of gender complementarity is the assumption that men are metaphysically meant to rule over women (ideally in the spirit of love, of course) and women are metaphysically meant to serve men
... Thus, from the gender complementarian perspective, those who act as though women and men gain equal spiritual, emotional, psychological, and existential satisfaction and dignity from leading and serving, and are meant to experience both of these sides of the human psyche, are disordered, as are those who advocate this notion of equality and balance.
The possibility of gay marriage invites heterosexuals to view their intimate partners (or potential intimate partners) not through a lens of gendered otherness primarily —that is through the lens of gender complementarity— but through the lens of sameness, that is through the lens of sharing a common human dignity, as it was in the beginning.
As much as it may seem like a tangent, the above both reinforces the relationship between sexism and homophobia, and places gay & lesbian equality in general and marriage equality specifically in the context of earlier progressive social movements, all of which — from the abolitionist movement, to women's suffrage to the civil rights movement — had strong foundations in moral principles; progressive moral principles like those Pitt referenced in his column.
But legal same-sex marriage also threatens to take away the much needed scapegoat and, as more same-sex couples get legal status and more people live with the reality of same-sex marriage or marriage equality, it forces a redefinition or reframing of same-sex relationships. And it does this by taking away the tactic of reducing same-relationships to mere physical acts.
You can see the benefits of this point as a strategy. Reducing love, friendship, passion and companionship—the critical elements of most gay relationships—to a simple physical act is extremely reductive. We’d never talk about heterosexual marriage primarily in terms of vaginal intercourse, or merely sexual needs. It slights the depth and variety of the heterosexual relationship. Nevertheless, it remains a simple fact that a large amount of the opposition to gay equality (especially among heterosexual men) comes from a visceral association of gay relationships with sodomy.
As Pitt's said, "to admit that a response is visceral is to admit you haven't thought it through." But the visceral response also suggests that they understand the connection between same-sex marriage and women's freedom. The quote above is from an essay on sodomy laws, and it's worth noting the repeal of sodomy laws probably has at least part of its roots in the legalization of contraception and the de-stigmatization non-procreative sex. It's thus no coincidence that the some of the same people who oppose marriage equality support the idea of sodomy laws, and for the same reason; the advent of the former and the demise of the latter both have the effect of putting same-sex relationships on the same moral footing as heterosexual relationships.
And that means establishing a moral context for same-sex relationships and same-sex activity. It means, rather than simply establishing "Gay is good" or "Gay is okay" as generalized values, erecting a social structure within which being gay is neither good nor back, but in which it is possible to be "good and gay."
In his remarks at the NBJC summit Harry Jackson expressed concern about "sexual responsibility" but doesn't seem to consider the possibility of a model for sexual responsibility in same-sex relationships, at least not beyond celibacy. There, again, is the "visceral reaction" to same-sex activity. But, as the essay on sodomy laws points out, the social changes mentioned earlier have brought us to a point where same-sex activity may be seen asserving many of the same purposes as heterosexual activity.
You can think of sex—within marriage and in other relationships—as a form of bonding; as a way to deepen and expand the meaning of intimacy; as a type of language even, where human beings can communicate subtly, beautifully, passionately—but without words. And in a world where our consumer needs are exquisitely matched by markets, in which bourgeois comfort can almost anesthetize a sense of human risk and adventure, sex remains one of the few realms left where we can explore our deepest longings, where we can travel to destinations whose meaning and dimensions we cannot fully know. It liberates and exhilarates in ways few other experiences still do. Yes, taking this to extremes can be destructive. And yes, if this experience trumps or overwhelms other concerns—the vows of marriage, the trust of a faithful relationship, or the duty we bear to children—then it can be destructive as well as life-giving. But the idea that expressing this human freedom is somehow intrinsically and always immoral, that it somehow destroys the soul, is an idea whose validity is simply denied in countless lives and loves.
To return to Pitt's essay for a moment, the soul destroying idea that sexual expression through same-sex activity is always immoral — even in the context of committed monogamous relationships — has moral implications for the religious right when it leads to advocating discrimination against same-sex partners.
Morality, it has always seemed to me, has less to do with commonalities of existence than with how you treat other people. Do you lie to or about them? Do you steal from them? Do you cheat them? Do you walk by their suffering, oblivious? Do you, except in self-defense, harm them physically or mentally? The answers to those questions, I think, define morality more exactly than whether you're sharing a bed with someone who has the same sexual equipment you do.
The moral implications for advocates of anti-gay legislation are even more significant when you consider that it's possible to make a conservative Christian case for same-sex marriage
I suppose you can dismiss these people's stories. You can argue that they are so depraved and so in love with their sin that they are incapable of responding normally and humanly to such strong incentives. You can believe that, as long as you understand that in doing so, you are in the name of Christian morality judging all homosexual persons to be categorically sub-human. You might also argue that these people are simply lying. And you can believe that too, as long as you understand that such a cavalier dismissal seems to lack the diligence God expects from us in keeping his ninth commandment not to bear false witness against our neighbor.
Why not simply take the common sense route? Why not acknowledge that apart from a miraculous work of God, it appears that for the most part a gay person's chances of successfully adopting heterosexual feelings are about the same as a straight person's chances of successfully adopting homosexual feelings?
A civilized society ought to recognize that there is a big difference between homosexuality thus understood, and perverse and irresponsible sexual practices such as incest and bestiality. Thus, it is only appropriate to respond by treating homosexual persons humanely and allowing them to live their lives with dignity and respect. And whatever we as Christians might conclude about the morality of homosexuality before God, we also have to realize that with respect to society a gay person's open acknowledgement of his or her homosexuality is, in a very real sense, an act of personal integrity.
The writer of that piece also wrote the following on her blog, about "normalizing gay relationships."
I don't know about how "normal" gay relationships are "supposed" to be. But frankly, when I picture a gay couple living together in a committed relationship, I do think their life is probably not much different from any other marriage. Sitting at the breakfast table reading the newspaper over coffee. Taking turns walking the dog. Griping when the other person hogs the computer. Asking about the long distance call that showed up on the phone bill. Gelling on the couch together watching the eleven o'clock news, until someone finally gets up and mumbles something about having to wake up early the next day.
I'm afraid I really don't know how to answer for such normalcy. But I do think it would be helpful if, in the church, we acknowledged that this is probably how things really are. That way we could at least avoid discrediting ourselves when people discover the vast difference between the sterotypes we set up about gay relationships and the ones they encounter in the real world.
As another blogger points out, focusing on what same-sex marriage might look like instead of unilaterally defining it as "right" or "wrong," or reducing it to a "simple physical act" while "slighting the depth and variety" of same-sex relationships, might lead to looking instead at how it might be a moral good for the individuals and society at large. And that model need not be limited to marriage or to a the moral tenets of Christianity. Buddhist sexual ethics, which focuses on using sexuality in "non-harming" ways, can and does provide space for same-sex activity and relationships within its moral context
But, meanwhile, that previously mentioned discrediting is already underway in states where gay couples can either marry legally or obtain legal status nearly identical to marriage, and in neighborhoods we return to with our marriage licenses or civil union certificates and return to the business of the routine mentioned above. It's the same kind of discrediting that gradually occurred after the end of segregation, when black and whites lived and worked next to one another long enough to recognize the same mundane routines and common concerns in one another's lives.
That discrediting takes place in neighborhoods where we live day-to-day next to each other and discover it's possible for someone to be a good neighbor and gay; to be good parents and gay; to be good spouses and gay. And it happens when our neighbors witness what happens to our families without the benefits and security legal marriage can provide. It happens when have to compare that reality with the reality of the gay & lesbian families who are their neighbors, and they compare the morality of the gay & lesbian families on their streets against the people who would deny their neighbors the rights and protections that every other family on the street enjoy.
That discrediting will occur not because they've been indoctrinated to believe that "Gay is Okay" or "Gay is Good," but because they will know that it's possible to be a good person and gay. They will have known good people — good neighbors, good parents, good spouses, good citizens, etc. — who also happen to be gay.