LOVE, MARRIAGE, PRIVILEGE, AND PREJUDICE
A Sermon By The Rev. Susan Manker-Seale
February 13, 2005
Let us love one another, because love is from God.
No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us.
-- I John 4:7, 12
This is Freedom to Marry week. Since Massachusetts granted equal civil marriage rights last May, more than 4000 same-gender couples have wed. Yesterday, the Religious Coalition for Freedom to Marry honored the Unitarian Universalist Association with its Peace and Justice Award for “outstanding leadership in helping gay and lesbian couples attain and preserve their civil right to marry.” (uua.org)
Some of those couples were undoubtedly on the Gay cruise my brother took two weeks ago. It was billed as the largest gay cruise in history, with the population being about ten percent lesbian and the rest gay, not counting the staff. He told me it was the most wonderful, freeing, open, loving, joyful experience, and he was already planning to go again someday. One of the nights there was a performer dressed like Dame Edna who asked the many people gathered in the auditorium to stand if they were a couple. At least two-thirds of the people stood. Then, she asked those who had been together less than five years to sit down. Then less than ten years, then less than fifteen years. Many were still standing and she went around and asked people how long they had been together. Lots of responses were in the thirties. One couple said forty-one, and the crowd gave them a standing ovation. Then another couple said forty-six and the crowd roared. What a celebration! What a show of love!
Would that we could have such open, loving, joyful experiences in every part of our society, not just isolated in safe-environments such as all-gay cruises! Oppression is so much a part of society, and government, and religion, that safe-houses, safe-ships, have to be created, safe places where people won’t have to worry about being attacked for loving another human being.
Our society is under attack by radical Christian fundamentalists who threaten… what? With merely a few words, and federal money at stake, PBS is cowed into keeping an episode of “Postcards From Buster” off the air because the new education secretary, Margaret Spellings, said it was inappropriate for young children. Why? Because this program, which was funded to highlight diversity in over forty episodes, had chosen to show a same-gender household in Vermont. The cartoon character, Buster, had visited children who were Hmong, Mormon, Muslim, and evangelical Christian, but children with two moms was just too much!
PBS’s chief operating officer cited the “trust factor with parents and children of this country” as being key to their decision. What, the trust factor to engage in acts of oppression? To keep the status quo stable? To be a factor in the “stereotyping by omission” that occurs when some types of families are kept out of the media? Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor of education at Lesley University in Cambridge pointed out that “attitudes or ideas of stereotype and bias develop in kids’ minds in part from images they see in books and media. There’s a kind of stereotyping by omission that occurs,” she warns us. “We form our categories about families by images we’ve seen. It is important for children to see their own lives and subcultures reflected to feel they are a part of society.” ( Salamon, NY Times, 2/5/05)
But part of society doesn’t want them. Part of society wants to ignore, if not perpetuate, the verbal gay-bashing that goes on on a daily basis in our schools and communities, not to mention the physical manifestation of such abuse which, for some reason beyond their comprehension, also occurs regularly. Part of society wants to keep same-gender couples and their children from having basic family rights.
Part of society right here in Arizona, by the name of Rep. Warde Nichols and the Center for Arizona Policy, is working diligently to get a measure on the 2006 ballot to define marriage as solely between a man and a woman. His measure would also make civil unions illegal, and bar state and local governments from giving domestic partner benefits such as we have here in Tucson. (AZ Daily Star, 1/14/05)
On the national level, the “so-called” Federal Marriage Amendment to the United States Constitution that was introduced to the House in 2003 by Christian Fundamentalist leaders already has over ninety co-sponsors. It reads,
Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any state nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups. (From www.soulforce.org)
Now some of you are more aware than others of the lack of civil rights same-gender couples endure. Even I forget sometimes, in talking with friends and colleagues and parishioners about health care options or inheritance or hospital visitation, that these rights I take for granted as a married person in relationship to my husband and children don’t extend, by law, to those who are unmarried and can’t be. My friends and parishioners, some of whom are here today, cannot be covered under their partner’s health insurance, resulting in significant financial burdens for them. They can’t inherit automatically if a partner dies without a will. They can’t assume their partner’s pension. They can’t be protected against domestic violence. They can’t automatically make medical decisions for their partners or take sick leave to care for them. What about social security survivor benefits? Or visitation of their partner’s children? Or visiting a partner in the hospital or prison? These are not guaranteed as they are for married couples. There are over 1049 civil rights accorded married people that are denied same-gender couples!
So this is not just a religious issue, as has been bandied about so much. It is also, and more profoundly, a civil rights issue and the proposed amendment to the constitution is an attempt to deny an already oppressed group in our society the basic civil rights enjoyed by those mixed-gender couples who are allowed to marry under the law. If passed, this amendment would nullify domestic partner laws all over the nation as well as affect unmarried couples such as the elderly who keep from marrying in order to keep their pensions. As the national interfaith group called Soulforce writes, “It would mark the first time in history that the U. S. Constitution would be amended to codify discrimination, rather than extend rights to people.” (www.soulforce.org)
The religious ritual of marriage is not what is being challenged. Each religion chooses who can marry under their rites, including discriminating against couples who are not of the same faith or of their faith. We Unitarian Universalists have been performing ceremonies of union for same-gender couples for decades as well as picking up those interfaith weddings rejected by our more conservative clergy colleagues. We define marriage differently, depending upon our different religious traditions. Civil marriage, though, is what carries the privileges of our society and the legal protections thereof.
As Soulforce puts it, “For all religious views to be protected and respected, it is critical that laws not be made with a particular religious viewpoint in mind, but that all people are treated equally and fairly in the eyes of the government. This includes laws about the rights of civil marriage….The government has no business deciding which marriages between consenting adults are “ideal” or “sacred.”
There is a great article entitled “Relationships: Blessed and Blessing,” by James Nelson, on the justice website of the United Church of Christ. He is a Professor Emeritus of Christian Ethics at United Theological Seminary. His address is a good resource for anyone who might find themselves arguing with a friend or relative about the definition of marriage in the Christian tradition. I highly recommend your reading it (at www.ucc.org/justice/pdfs/mdgr.pdf). One of the helpful things he does is confront some of those arguments Christian Fundamentalists make. For example, (paraphrased):
The other day I got out my bible and started jotting down passages that spoke of love and marital relationships. The bible has been used to condemn homosexual relationships, which is no revelation, and it is just as bad concerning heterosexual relationships. If one were to uphold the bible as the final word, women would have to veil their heads and marry their deceased husband’s brother and never speak in church, etc. But, if you do want to use a passage in the bible as a guide to toss out to conservative Christian relatives or friends, I recommend parts of I Corinthians 13:7–12, beginning with “…love bears all things…Love never ends…; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect… For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” And chapter 14:1, “Make love your aim.” And chapter 16:14, “Let all that you do be done in love.”
I join James Nelson in advocating for “a single-standard relational ethic, and that single standard is love.” It is the core of the Christian faith for those who see clearly the life Jesus was said to have led and the message he felt was most important, as expressed by his followers and as it has come down to us over two thousand years. It is important to know this, because the attacks on same-gender marriage are coming from that same religious tradition, only on the fundamentalist end rather than our own liberal side.
Our own liberal side is the side of love. I found a new song yesterday on the UUA website, written in tribute to our President Bill Sinkford, entitled “Standing on the Side of Love,” by Jason Shelton. There was a link to listen to it, from which I somehow, miraculously, figured out how to download to my computer, then burn a CD for you to listen to as well. And since I had just discovered it yesterday, there was no time to plan anything out, nor to clarify what it meant by “used with permission.” I typed out the words from listening to the song, and because I don’t know the extent of that permission as given on the website, I want those words back after we sing. You can go yourselves to the website, or buy his album The Fire of Commitment.
Please join me in singing “Standing on the Side of Love” on this start of Freedom to Marry Week. Let us sing for a new day when love will be the measure of all our lives and oppression will no longer be tolerated for any human being.
(Sing “Standing on the Side of Love,” by Jason Shelton, from The Fire of Commitment album, copyrighted 2004 – see www.uua.org)
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson