What I want to talk about is gay rights, a topic that’s been on a my mind a lot lately. There are few things worse than conservative white Christians whose most appalling story of civil obstructionism is having to stand in a long line at the DMV, who then go home and honestly question whether or not all adult members of the our race should have the basic human right to recognize their unions?
The utter hypocrisy Christians of this stripe1 display is astounding. They choose a single verse out of Romans and stand on it like a theological Rock of Gibraltar, shouting down their self-righteous proclamations of judgement and condemnation at people who affect them but naught, yet ignore other verses from the books the Paul (who, it turns out, is THE single most revisionist apostle in Christian canon) as not relevant. They fire back with the trite and unconvincing cry of you’re not looking at the context!“, but do they ever mention “context” for the parts of the Bible where God isn’t being a misogynistic, petty, unjust, capriciously malevolent bully?
The fact that if you’re a Christian, God apparently leaves it up to you to interpret wholly ambiguous scriptures at your whim notwithstanding, in what universe should we be picking and choosing just the parts we like from Bronze-age moral codes? Christians of this sort are usually very quick to point out that they “don’t hate gay people”, yet without any sense of irony will spew the worst kind of religious hatred: measured, patronizing pseudo-religious cruelty predicated on the idea that since their holy book declares – without any moral process or reasoning or logic whatsoever – that being gay is a sin, those people who do not harm them or their families in any way should be denied the basic human right to recognize their marriages. What, then, would hate look like? If preventing these people from having their civil rights recognized isn’t hate – or at the very least bullying – what would hate look like to you? And don’t say “Westboro Baptist” or their ilk because they are so far outside the mainstream, themselves so reviled and ignored that they’re almost laughable. Nobody takes them seriously.
No, hatred today comes cloaked in pious, sanctimonious speech about tradition and values, in the absurd claims of victimization and “weakening” of the institution of marriage, as though somehow what somebody else does in their bedroom affects what happens to your union. It claims that toothless and completely-unrecognized-by-the-states “civil unions2” should be good enough for The Gays. It comes robed in ridiculous claims that marriage is now, and has always been, an exclusively religious institution, and therefore People We Don’t Agree With should – MUST – be kept out. And yet the hard fact is that Christians did not create, nor do they own, the concept of marriage. Civilizations throughout history have institutionalized the unions of people who wanted to spend their lives together, regardless of their religion. Marriage as an agreement or even a contract between two people predates Biblical history by millennia.3. And even if we grant that your personal definition of marriage contains some necessary religious component, simple religious convention provides no moral argument in favor of preventing other people from participating and changing your practice. No group “owns” any particular cultural or civil practice or is entitled to exclusive development rights to it. In a free and democratic society, cultural and civil practices are part of the commons and are no one group’s – religious or otherwise – intellectual property. The demand to “preserve” this meaning freezes these practices in religious bubbles. And as one of my favorite YouTube videos of the last year pointed out, the church has a long history of denying different people rights – and resisting change so vigorously it had to be forced down their throats at gunpoint.
The church is traditionally against the rights of women. They are traditionally against the rights of blacks4. They are traditionally against the rights of blacks and white to intermarry. They are traditionally, and currently, against the right of scientists to perform stem-cell research that could lead to groundbreaking therapeutic modalities for paralysis or blindness or deafness. They are traditionally against teaching science, and they are now – currently – against state recognition of same-sex couples. Do not misunderstand – “the church” is not a single unified bloc steepling their fingers and wishing evil upon everyone, as our pastor friend from the above video demonstrates. But in every fight against civil rights in the last century, in every debate about whether blacks were even human, much less entitled to marry white people, which group has consistently led the charge in support of repression and the status quo? The religious right, that’s who.
Look, there’s no debating that the holy book of the majority should dictate all the secular laws for everyone else. That’s just common sense until your side isn’t winning. Except, oh wait, it isn’t. How dare you try to force your bronze-age morality on other people through force of law. How dare you attempt to enshrine in the common code of society that two people who love each other shouldn’t be entitled to get married based on their sexual orientation.
Your marriage, you children, your way of life – these thing are not in danger. What you will lose is your freedom to discriminate, your ability to prevent other people from enjoying the rights that you yourself take for granted. What is truly in danger is the young teenaged boy who worries about getting beaten up in the hallways. It’s the lesbian couple who want desperately to adopt a child and have slurs and hatred slung at them from the streets and in the news. It’s the gay man prevented from visiting his dying longtime partner in the hospital because he isn’t recognized as family.
Realize that that’s what you stand for. That’s what you are fighting to keep entrenched in the system. You are on the wrong side of history.
Exit, stage left.
Sparks
1. Not to be confused with “all Christians”.
2. Do the research. See how “civil unions” stack up to the rights marriage affords you, and in what US states they’re even recognized.
3. Sources: “Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible“, and the “Internet History Sourcebooks” provided by Fordham University.
4. In an EXTREME stroke of irony, 70% of black people polled voted “Yes” on California’s Proposition 8, thereby demonstrating that past injustice being visited upon you is no guarantee of realizing when you’re doing the same thing to other people.