Midnight of Christmas Eve saw me someplace you would not normally find a person of my religious persuasion: St. Paul's Catholic Church in Eugene. It had been, prior to that, five years since I had set foot in a Roman church. I'm happy to report that the holy water did not burn me as I dipped my fingers into the bowl by the entrance, nor did I burst into flames as I genuflected before the Crucifix.
So why was I there? Well, my neighbor wanted to attend Midnight Mass, but she's not allowed to drive at night. I ended up going with her, having nothing but a bottle of rum to occupy my night otherwise.
The intervening years between my last two attendances at Mass lent me a perspective I had not had before. I understood, in a slightly new way, the "moral values" issues that have stolen the political spotlight in America
This essay has its birth in a striking contrast I observed while at Mass. The bishop and vicar were dressed in gold-embroidered white robes, much the same as a priest of the middle ages might have worn were he assigned to a well-to-do cathedral; even the cut of the robes was reminiscent of my days at the Renaissance Faire. The cantor, however, was a woman, and she wore a modern pantsuit in a dark violet; her hair was unbound and shining blond and fell only to her shoulders.
The men of the clergy, you see, could have been pulled straight from the Holy Roman Empire, while the women have changed with the times.
As I listened to the vicar's well-intentioned homily, I pondered as to why this might be. I finally decided that it was God's fault.
For the last several years, I have reverenced twin deities in my worship, one female and one male. I have spent this time working to acknowledge both the yin and the yang within myself and trying to reform my worldview to be devoid of sexism. I have concluded that however great and beautiful the major religions of the world are, that sexism will be a problem among them so long as deity is only male.
Therein lies the problem. In Christianity, God in unchanging. As He was yesterday, so He is today and will be tomorrow. With a male god as their natural role model, it is not surprising that Christian men have tried to emulate His unchanging nature. Women, however, have no such archetype among the heavens. Even what female saints exist in Catholicism are often lauded for their attempts to emulate the masculine and just as often meet gruesome ends. I judge it healthy that such figures are not held up as shining examples of femininity.
It was short logical leap from there to understanding why fear of change and misogyny are so bound up with one another in this age. I cannot speak for all religions in this essay, but in contemplating my knowledge of Christianity, I had a small epiphany. Abortion is a well-hashed out subject. It is clear that "pro-lifers" are more concerned with limiting a woman's reproductive powers than with any real concern for human life. But could anti-gay sentiments have similar misogynistic roots?
I recalled something a literature professor had told me in college. She said that the real threat homosexuality posed to the status-quo is that it divorced gender from sex. Common wisdom on the issue is that homophobes are not certain enough of their heterosexuality, and that the mere presence of homosexuality threatens their definition of their own sexuality.
I'm beginning to see things a bit differently. Male homosexuality introduces the idea of the male submissive, a role that had previously been reserved for women. It divorces, as my professor said, gender from sex. Lesbianism likewise thrusts upon us the archetype of the dominant female. Patriarchal misogyny is based around the idea of the male dominant and the female submissive. The more we, as a culture, can divorce the dominant/submissive category from the male/female one, the less acceptable discrimination against women will be.
This is why gay rights is a feminist issue. That is why, for someone like myself whose goddess stands on equal footing with their god, it is a religious issue.
That is why anything other than completely equal rights for the LGTBQ community is completely unacceptable under the 1st Amendment.
In nomine matris