Pride and Prejudice: The Queer Experience Today
Comments By The Rev. Susan Manker-Seale
June 19, 2005
Last week I drove up to Flagstaff with Kat for the Northern Arizona University parent/student orientation. While Kat signed up for classes in the advisement office, I sat in the foyer of that same building, hoping that when she was done we might walk across the plaza to see her dorm. Next to me was a woman from Gila Bend, whose daughter was also registering. We started up a conversation in Spanish because her English wasn’t very good, even though my Spanish is rusty. It wasn’t very long before the topic turned to religious matters and the saving of the world.
I didn’t tell her I was a minister. I didn’t want to stop the conversation, at least at first. She told me she was Jehovah’s Witness, and that the purpose of life is written in the Bible, that Jesus was coming to rule the world and that we would all be speaking Hebrew since that was the original language. I did my best to share a broader view of a god that was loving to all in a world that held many paths, but it was like talking to a wall. Soon, I steered her back to the campus where we were and topics more mundane.
I usually shy away from those kinds of conversations. I feel uncomfortable giving people the impression that I am open to conversion. I think responding to someone when they bring those subjects up is, in their eyes, suggesting that one is open to conversion. But I wanted to practice my Spanish and she was friendly and we had parenting in common, so, I risked it, and in the end, was reminded again of how frightening and powerful fundamentalist thinking is. So blind to the world, so uncaring of those who are not in the fold of their particular religious outlook! It is a way of life that teaches there is only one path, and the believer is the one on the right path, and god is on their side with those on the outside labeled as misguided at best, evil at worst. In my heart, at this moment, I feel that if there is evil in the world, it resides in Fundamentalism.
I saw an article in the Arizona Daily Star (4-10-05) in early April that focused on Len Munsil, the president of The Center for Arizona Progress which is described as “a conservative public policy group.” His goal is to change the laws of our state so that we all “live by a Christian code.” He has helped create a network of conservative Christians who are lobbying lawmakers and have led to the current initiative to ban gay marriage. When I first read the headline for the article, I felt sick in my stomach. When I read it again yesterday, I felt sick in my stomach. It reads: “Len Munsil Wants to Convert You.” I feel attacked. I AM attacked by those who want to impose their restrictive moral values on my life and those of my family and friends.
It reminds me some of that old movie “Night of the Living Dead.” You have all these people who wear smiles and believe they are doing good for the world even as they perpetuate hate, work to take away freedoms, and fearfully proclaim that it is others who are hurting the world, not them. I think of the poem by Alice Walker that is in our hymnal (564):
Love is not concerned
with whom you pray
or where you slept
the night you ran away
from home.
Love is concerned
that the beating of your heart
should kill no one.
If love is the most divine metaphor for god, why can’t people practice it? Because people confuse love with sex, and our religious heritage has left us suspicious of our sexuality, sex being one of the most powerful forces in life, next to love. And since religion over the eons has also been about power, the control of our sexuality goes hand in hand with the goal of many religions to control life itself. Those who don’t conform are condemned. Today, witness modern condemnation as Arizona nears the deadline of July 6 for filing the Gay Marriage initiative!
“Love is concerned that the beating of your heart should kill no one.” Sometimes I repeat it as a litany, and change “kill” to “hurt:” “Love is concerned that the beating of your heart should [hurt] no one.” I know that life itself involves hurting others in all the ways injustice is perpetuated beyond our knowing, and all the inadvertent hurts we pile up over the years. But love is about not hurting and not killing others. If in our lives we can strive over and over to live with love and with compassion and with care, we are living lives divine. We are making the world better one step at a time, one heart at a time.
Some people are trying hard to prove that homosexual love is based on genetics. There was an article recently that described research that seemed to prove that gays and lesbians react differently than heterosexuals to the pheromones of the opposite sex. I lost that article, but I also feel that our responsibility to society goes beyond proving that homosexuals “can’t help it.” If we are to take such a position, where do bisexuals fit in? And what about the love of transgenders? To what degree must we get involved with scientific justification for our gender orientation?
On a deep and very meaningful level, love is love, no matter where it lands. If you love someone, you love them, regardless of gender. And the ways that you express that love, sexually or otherwise, are divine if the beating of your hearts hurt no one.
We are a Welcoming Congregation here. We went through a year and a half of workshops and services exploring our feelings and experiences around homosexuality, bi-sexuality and transgender identification in an effort to undo the teachings of society and religion that we have inherited and the prejudices that live unthinkingly within each of us. Then we voted unanimously minus one to be openly welcoming. Since then, (was that five years ago?) we have grown in numbers of members and friends so that we really need to do it again. We have the curriculum, The Welcoming Congregation II, so let’s do it! The place to start in any educational process is with ourselves. But even as we enlighten ourselves, so do we also need to act to protect the meager rights gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders have now, and to promote full freedom with rights of life and health within our society. We must work to promote full freedom of every person to love and live the life divine.
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson