A brief roundup this morning of some news of interest to gay-rights activists:
Recently I sent an email to my legislators through the MassEquality website, asking them to sign on to the hate-crimes bill that’s pending in Congress. Back when I was a young libertarian, I had my doubts about hate-crimes legislation. As I saw it, violence and bullying were uniformly bad, whether motivated by bias against one’s group affiliation or by plain old personal cruelty. Why did we need to single out some forms of victimization as more worthy of attention than others?
As I now see it, one reason we need the federal government to pay special attention to hate crimes is that the attitudes motivating the bullies may be shared by local law enforcement and juries. This was certainly the case during African-Americans’ fight for civil rights in the mid-20th century.
The office of Senator Ted Kennedy (D, Mass.) sent me back a form email expressing his support for the hate-crimes bill, which I’m reprinting below because it does such a good job of explaining the difference that this legislation would make:
Thank you for your recent letter about the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act. I understand your concerns and appreciate this opportunity to respond.
The United States is a nation founded on the ideals of tolerance and justice for all. We cannot accept violence motivated by bias and hate. According to the FBI, over 9,000 Americans a year are victims of hate crimes, and that number does not include the many hate crimes that go unreported. These crimes have a reach and impact far greater than the individual victim. They target whole communities, attacking the fundamental ideals our nation was founded on.
No member of society deserves to be a victim of a violent crime because of their race, religion, ethnic background, disability, gender, gender identity or sexual orientation. It is long past time for Congress to do more to prevent hate crimes and insist that they be fully prosecuted when they occur. That’s why I’m proud to join Republican Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon in sponsoring the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act.
This important legislation will strengthen the ability of federal, state, and local governments to investigate and prosecute hate crimes. It will authorize the Justice Department to assist in investigating and prosecuting hate crimes, when requested by local authorities. The bill will also provide grants to assist localities in meeting the extraordinary expenses involved in hate crimes cases, and in training law enforcement to combat prevent such crimes. Cities and states will be given the assistance and resources they need to protect all members of society.
The House of Representatives has already passed this needed legislation. It now moves to the Senate, and I look forward to working with my colleagues to approve it soon.
In other news, the California Supreme Court today will be hearing oral arguments in the lawsuit to overturn Proposition 8. Ken Starr, whom you may remember for his fascination with Bill Clinton’s ding-dong, is the lead counsel for the Yes on 8 folks. He will be arguing not only that the ban on gay marriage should stand, but that the court should invalidate the 18,000 same-sex marriages that were performed before the ballot referendum passed.
Starr’s brief in the case repeats all the old lies about how nontraditional families are harmful to children. You know what was harmful to our nontraditional family, Ken? Sexism, secrecy, job discrimination, and religious condemnation.
Sign the Human Rights Campaign’s petition telling anti-GLBT extremists to “End the Lies” here. Their wall of shame shows quotes from other prominent figures in politics, religion and the media who are spreading dangerous misinformation about sexual minorities. There’s also a link to suggest your own favorite offenders. I nominate Brian Camenker of MassResistance, who was kind enough to link to my video of the November 2008 Join the Impact rally. Thanks for the hits, Brian.
Author Archives: Jendi Reiter
DIAGRAM Essay Winner Matthew Glenwood: “John Henry’s Tracks”
Online multimedia journal DIAGRAM, edited by poet Ander Monson, is a uniquely satisfying blend of the surreal, the philosophical, and the darkly humorous. In addition to original poetry and prose, they feature offbeat and obscure images from specialized texts, hence the journal’s name. Ever wondered about the proper proportions of a love seat? Do you know everything you ought to know about the appurtenances of perpendicular drinking? Perhaps you need ideas for unusual leg positions. DIAGRAM has it all.
On a more serious note, Matthew Glenwood, the winner of their most recent Hybrid Essay Contest, offers the rhetorical masterpiece “John Henry’s Tracks”, a passionate piece of writing that draws connections between the famous folk song, plasma-selling, Hurricane Katrina, and the dehumanization of the poor. Sample:
John Henry was a mighty man,
Born with a ten-pound hammer in his hand.
—”John Henry”*
Some dirt-diggers in the Holy Land claimed to have found the bones of Jesus and his family. Jesus’ son, too. We’ll probably never know for sure if those were the holy bones or not. That kind of news could prove ungentle to dreamers. Like finding the remains of Amelia Earhart under her front porch steps, or the skeleton of a baby bird beneath its nest. We would hope for a wider arc to the hero’s journey than bones at the starting point. It could be called bad news if Jesus, the alleged foreman of Heaven, left bones behind. News that says nobody’s going very far.
But it wouldn’t be the whole truth. There is somewhere to go.
We can go sell our plasma for fifty American dollars a week.
The journey to the Biolife Plasma Center in Marquette, Michigan came easy for me. I just had to follow an abandoned train track for a few blocks. The track met the edge of the woods along the shore of Lake Superior; rabbit, chipmunk and deer crisscrossed it as beasties would any ready made trail, for there were no tracks left on that line. The rattle of my mountain bike startled ducks from the shallow waters of the ditch alongside. In winter, the flat, open space doubled as a cross country ski trail. You might say everything ran on that track except for rails.
The region, too poor to have a reason to run its trains, pulled up many of its train tracks, and commerce that way moved at the speed of wild grass. The poverty of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is probably why the plasma company came to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. That and the local college students, the reliably poor. As any farmer with a bad back could tell you, the easiest of tall crops to harvest is one that stoops to meet the hand of the harvester.
At the plasma center, technicians tap into the natural resource of your veins. The process takes, at most, a couple hours, and you’re paid for it. It’s easy money, and couldn’t come much easier; all you have to do is exist. The plasma company calls itself a “donation center”, but really it is a selling center. Poor people coming to sell the one possession they unquestionably own: the materials of their being. Take away those materials and the world would have no more poor.
Our folk songs say that John Henry could drive steel harder and faster than any man. The job of a steel driver was to pound holes in rock by hammering a long metal drill held and rotated by another man known as a shaker. Dynamite was then dropped into those holes—tunnels blasted into mountain stone. Steel driving was done for the mean benefit of the train companies laying track across the nation. In other versions of the song, steel driving was intermixed with pounding spike into the rail lines.
One day a salesman brought a new steam-driven drill to the line. John Henry, fearing for his job and for the jobs of his fellow rail workers, challenged the machine to a contest. John Henry declared to his captain:
Lord, a man aint nothin’ but a man
But before I let that steam-drill beat me down
I’m gonna die with a hammer in my hand
John Henry won. But after beating the machine, he suffered a heart attack and died. That’s to say, he could do no more work for the train company.
Like Jesus, no one can prove the John Henry of legend. Some stories say he was an ex-slave working for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway during the Reconstruction days of the South, following the Civil War. People disagree on where, and if, the events of the song took place. One man thinks the contest of hammers happened in Talcott, West Virgina. But everybody knows that you’ve got to bite the coins that come out of Talcott.
About twenty years ago, a man in my hometown got caught in one of the big machines of the mining company. A rock crusher, if I remember right. He was the father of a classmate. I ought to have attended the funeral, but didn’t. In those high school days I was discovering the books of the American Transcendentalists: Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau. “Transcendentalism” was a big word to me at the time. The idea of it is that you can ride your porch swing to the truth of all flowers. The notion sounds sound to me, still. But, being young, I felt as if I had inherited a mansion up in the blue air; as if everything wrong were, with an idea, suddenly right.
The daughter of the killed miner, my classmate, needed some consoling, but I was too shy, too awkward at social graces, to be one of the people to give it. I had no consoling to give. Her father was a good man of Finnish descent; he left behind a large family. The family had a new lesson to learn about the worst of all possible outcomes. As for me, I had my books which said spirit dances with matter.
Much of my life has passed since those books. Those Yankee writers of old are truer to me now than when I was young, and it’s likely that I need them more now. But an idea isn’t much true unless we are willing to wear its dirt. A frog of ugly sits at the center of true, and his appetite is Void.
Rather than the gift of a mansion in the sky, transcendence now seems to me a lifetime of lonely carpentry. Carpentry on a house nobody can see. And that house won’t shelter from the rain, but make us wetter. Those who ply this trade might not finish even the front steps before the cold evening comes on, before the closing whistle blows. Maybe no one completes the house called Idealism— built, as it is, on the foundation that is the suffering of the world. The hammer is usually abandoned with much work left to do; it hums only a little while with the vibrations of the last nail driven, until stillness takes it.
Had the good miner’s death happened today, I would’ve gone to the funeral. The fact about our portion of transcendence is that some of us get flattened in rock crushers. The fact is that there is blood on the machine.
And in the machine.
Sometimes the crashing waves of Lake Superior, powered by strong winds, sounded like a train through my apartment window. But, in the city of Marquette, the only real locomotion taking place was the centrifugal force of the Autoapheresis-C machine (made by the Baxter corporation) separating plasma from blood. The word “apheresis” is Greek for “take away”.
Read the rest here. Read another piece by this author in DIAGRAM 1.6.
The “Unwritten Constitution” and Biblical Interpretation
Debates over constitutional interpretation have much to teach us, I believe, about ways of reading the Bible. Perhaps more so than the average religious person, lawyers and judges are particularly conscious that they are choosing among different interpretive methods whenever they read and apply a text, and they’ve developed a sophisticated language to discuss this.
I don’t know whether this was always the case, but the adherents of “plain meaning” and “original intent” in the legal sphere frequently share the same conservative politics as Biblical literalists, while political progressives are more likely to see both legal and sacred texts as dynamic, ambiguous, and responsive to changing needs. In both cases, I suspect the deciding factor is whether we see our ancestors as more likely to be right than ourselves. Is the moral awareness of humankind progressing, or declining–and can we be trusted to know the difference?
As for my own personal view, it’s complicated. Some things are better than they were 200 or 2,000 years ago (democracy, the rights of women and minorities, freedom of religion, modern medicine), some are worse (pollution, nuclear weapons, 24-hour adult video channels); thus it has always been. But since we’re the ones who have to live with the consequences–not our ancestors, and not the authorities who interpret them for us–I think we should get the final vote on what a text means.
In the latest issue of Harvard Magazine, BusinessWeek editor Paul M. Barrett reviews legal superstar Laurence H. Tribe’s new book, The Invisible Constitution. The framework he outlines below may help clarify similar debates over the Bible (emphasis added):
Tribe argues persuasively that the most conservative jurists on the closely divided Supreme Court—chiefly Antonin Scalia, LL.B. ’60, and Clarence Thomas—get it wrong when it comes to deciphering our foundational legal document. The originalists, as they are known, contend that judges can look only to the literal words of the Constitution and the “original” understanding of those words held by the men who wrote and ratified them. That’s why the conservatives find it laughable that anyone could ground in the Constitution a woman’s right to choose to seek an abortion. The Constitution doesn’t mention abortion. The Founding Fathers would never have countenanced the act. Case closed.
Not so fast, Tribe says. Jurists of all stripes derive their interpretive principles from sources outside the text of the Constitution, and many of these principles cannot even be traced directly to the document’s words. My favorite example of this seemingly self-evident but often-obfuscated observation is the basis of originalism itself. The Constitution nowhere instructs its inheritors to interpret its opaque terminology (“equal protection,” “due process,” “cruel and unusual punishments”) according to the original understanding of its drafters. The Constitution doesn’t offer guidance on whether to read those terms as static or evolving. There’s an argument to be made that the Founders’ intent deserves special deference, or maybe even something approaching exclusive deference. But such ideas are drawn from someone’s version of what Tribe calls the invisible Constitution: the unwritten premises and intuitions and experiences that have accumulated over more than two centuries of law and politics in America.
Tribe’s liberal version of the invisible Constitution is no secret, and he does not elaborate much on the substance of his views in this book. He believes that judges—whether they lean left or right—inevitably champion the values they perceive as underlying or animating the ambiguous admonitions and protections outlined in the Constitution. In articulating those values, judges give meaning to a phrase like “equal protection.” For him those words, applied to questions of racial relations, can be used not only to strike down intentional segregation but also to uphold race-conscious policies (“affirmative action”) that seek to remedy the lingering injustices of slavery and Jim Crow. For Justice Scalia, equal protection suggests that race can never be taken into account in any way in forming public policies. That’s a legitimate argument. Tribe’s point here is only that it can’t be settled by simplistic appeals to literalism or the parlor game of WWJMD (What Would James Madison Do?).
To use a favorite phrase of postmodernists, any text always already contains “unwritten premises and intuitions and experiences” without which we would be unable to relate it to the rest of the world. Naturally, those unwritten addenda can be elaborated implausibly or in bad faith, and as Barrett says, they can be turned to liberal or conservative ends. But if we don’t admit that they exist, we’re claiming an illusory objectivity for our preferred viewpoint.
I’m planning a post soon about whether the Bible itself gives us any guidance about preferred interpretive methods. For now, I’ll leave you with these provocative questions (and if you’re very good, one of these days I’ll turn comments back on): Does the Bible ever tell us to believe something because it’s “in the Bible”? What other reasons for belief are urged upon us? Does the Bible know it’s the Bible?
Liberal Autonomy or Christian Liberty
How we read the Bible depends on our understanding of authority. Therefore, it is a political problem. How we read the Bible also depends on our theory of perception and knowledge. Therefore, it is a psychological problem. Authority and perception are both issues of trust. Therefore, how we read the Bible is an ethical problem.
Can we trust our own perceptions? What else is there to trust?
On the one hand, what I call “myself” is the product of culture, upbringing, and ongoing relationships, which influence me even as I in turn push back against them and change them. The autonomous self of classical liberal philosophy is something of a fiction. (Of course, as Trinitarian Christians, we should not be discomfited to discover the relational nature of personhood. Interdependence does not negate distinctness.)
On the other hand, all my ideas and perceptions come to me through the unique filter of who I am at this moment. My perspective is not flawless, but it is inescapable.
And should I try to escape it? To enlarge it, yes, to hear and imagine the experiences of others and recognize them as my siblings in Christ, but there is a difference between climbing higher on the mountain to get a better view, and pretending I have no vantage point at all. Finitude, and its attendant diversity, seems to be God’s will for His creatures, as James K.A. Smith suggests in The Fall of Interpretation. In my experience, people who claim absolute objectivity for their interpretations (“The Bible Says…”) are avoiding self-awareness about the personal factors that make one argument seem more plausible or desirable than another.
I’ve been wondering whether the Bible itself has anything to say about how we should interpret it. Human nature, we learn pretty early in the story, is fallen. Human judgment isn’t always accurate. Adam and Eve were extraordinarily close to God, but were still deceived about the fundamentals of His relationship to His creation: namely, that our share in the divine nature is a gift to be received, not a prize to be seized.
Original sin distinguishes the Christian picture of human nature from the liberal one. Privileging personal experience over text and tradition, a liberal might say “The truth is inside you.” I wouldn’t go that far. As a good postmodernist, I would say “You are inside you.” The right to stay grounded in our own experience should not be conditioned on the impossible burden of always “getting it right”. That’s another form of legalism.
At the other end of the spectrum are Protestants whose awareness of original sin is so strong that they believe in “total depravity”. According to this theory, we are incapable of desiring or correctly perceiving God, absent miraculous intervention. Christians from this tradition worry that the postmodern turn toward multiple perspectives will weaken our obedience to God’s revealed Word. Left to our own devices, we would do the wrong thing, so we must follow the rule book.
Does Scripture require this level of self-mistrust? This question was on my mind last week when I read this gospel passage during morning prayer:
12When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
13The Pharisees challenged him, “Here you are, appearing as your own witness; your testimony is not valid.”
14Jesus answered, “Even if I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is valid, for I know where I came from and where I am going. But you have no idea where I come from or where I am going. 15You judge by human standards; I pass judgment on no one. 16But if I do judge, my decisions are right, because I am not alone. I stand with the Father, who sent me. 17In your own Law it is written that the testimony of two men is valid. 18I am one who testifies for myself; my other witness is the Father, who sent me.”
19Then they asked him, “Where is your father?”
“You do not know me or my Father,” Jesus replied. “If you knew me, you would know my Father also.” 20He spoke these words while teaching in the temple area near the place where the offerings were put. Yet no one seized him, because his time had not yet come. (John 8:12-20)
Now, we are all part of Christ’s Body. Does that mean that we have the same authority as our Head to speak about our connection to God, without human religious authorities as backup witnesses? I’m not sure. One thing I do get from this passage is that Jesus recognized how demands for proof and consensus can be deployed by those in power for idolatrous ends. The majority view is just “the way things are”; accusations of bias conveniently flow downward to the individual, or the minority, who challenges the majority’s exclusive claim to speak for God. Interpretation, for Jesus, is a political question before it is a theoretical one, and his politics are radically egalitarian.
Perhaps Jesus’ authority is too unique to tell us the scope of our own powers. What about other New Testament characters? Personal testimony is often the foundation of their credibility, as in the opening of the first Epistle of John:
1That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. 2The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. 3We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. 4We write this to make our joy complete. (1 John 1:1-4)
I don’t know whether the New Testament writers thought of themselves as “writing Scripture”, but even if they did, the religious authorities of their day would not have accepted that claim. Paul, John, Peter and the others were in a similar position to modern-day Christians who say that the Holy Spirit is leading them to revise certain traditions or interpretations. Some of us are surely wrong. But being right is not the be-all and end-all of the Christian life. If we could ever be completely certain we were right, we wouldn’t need God’s forgiving grace; we would be our own savior.
There was a lot of other material about Christ circulating at the same time as the writings we now call the New Testament. Over time, early Christian communities “road-tested” them and found that some were more helpful and consistent with the core gospel message. Even so, different versions of the canon were used by different Christian communities for several centuries after Jesus’ death. This is not an argument for relativism, but it suggests that Scripture is more like an electron cloud than a billiard ball. Before there was “the Bible”, there were Christians. Finite, fallible people…like you and me.
Michael Broder: “The Remembered One”
Poet and classics scholar Michael Broder presented his work at a panel discussion on “Poetic Responses to AIDS” at AWP Chicago last week. He has kindly given me permission to reprint one of those poems below.
The Remembered One
The good die young, but sometimes
they come back, dripping with something
we can’t name or identify,
an acrid perfume, or they reach for us
like a taproot, draining
our sweet wells of oblivion
until we lie drenched in a common sweat,
our bed sheet their burial shroud, their moldering crust.
I dreamt of Marcos last night.
I thought he came to be buried,
to be done with; but no, that caramel devil,
leaving his tangerine swim trunks wet on the floor,
toweling his gorgon hair as he sits in my lap,
numbing me with the poppies
of his opiate grin and reasserting his claim:
Why should you get the house,
the husband, the PhD, while I chew on dirt
and feed succeeding generations
of night crawlers?
I can crawl the night too, you know, the night is crawling
with me, with mine, with ours—
us—
while you pretend to walk, awake, alive.
Come with me, why don’t you, make once and for all
the descent you practiced so ably for so many years.
I know a place with many darkened corners
where you can crawl on hands and knees
like in the old days—
What’s that you called it? “the old ich-du…”
We are beautiful there, and legion.
We will keep you busy for centuries.
And think what precious memories he will have,
here above—
This is the song you have waited so long to sing, isn’t it?
****
Michael Broder holds an MFA from New York University and is completing a PhD in Classics from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His poems have appeared in Bloom, Court Green, and Painted Bride Quarterly, among other journals and anthologies. His essay on Sappho is included in My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them, edited by Michael Montlack and due out from the University of Wisconsin Press this spring. His book manuscript, This Life Now, is awaiting a publisher. Visit www.mbroder.com for links to online publication. Michael can be contacted at mbroder@mbroder.com .
Poem: “Zeal”
I want the truth or
quiet, you can’t have both
in daylight, in company,
from the baby-blanket sky we turn into rooms
you can’t have if you’re human meaning
no desire without its rind of talk, I want
that orange uncut
better than to sit here with knives
spinning the sun in a bowl,
I want the truth like a fat lady
wants cake, sticking her sweet fingers in her mouth
in fecal shame,
I want quiet like letting the beaver
alone who nibbles on the neighbor’s lettuces
because in her world she is right,
pines hushing in the dark and insects gold
dust in the last beams, how could any
great hand that shaped the clover
fall harder on us
poor toads, I want to turn it
all off, the lingual grid gone black
and only hands left, right
in the sag and salty hair of us,
dear fatigue, lift me at last I want
to forgive whoever
asks me and maybe others.
published in Fulcrum #6 (2008)
Keith Olbermann Receives HRC Straight Ally Award
MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann received an Ally for Equality Award at the Greater New York Human Rights Campaign’s gala dinner two weeks ago. Olbermann, you may recall, made waves for his heartfelt denunciation of Prop 8. Below is a video of his speech, in which he talks about the experiences that awakened him, as a straight white man, to perceive prejudice against other groups and fight discrimination in all its forms.
I especially appreciated this insight, which Olbermann shares at around 9:30 minutes into the 13-minute video:
…We live at a time when everybody—especially, it seems, the purveyors of hatred and prejudice against religions, or races, or sexual orientations, or height, or hair color—everybody actually believes that they are also the victims of some kind of prejudice: the horrors of affirmative action, the destruction of the religious sanctity of marriage, or of course bias in the media. Yet very few of these folks ever make the great mental leap—if you are a victim of prejudice, the specifics of the prejudice become almost irrelevant. It is the hate that counts. If you have been on the receiving end, if you are even for the briefest of moments merely mistaken for a member of a victimized group…if you really are just brushed by this plague of hate, you have been given a gift. It’s brief, it’s cheap, it’s everlasting. You have, as the old saw goes, walked the mile in the other person’s shoes. If you are a victim of prejudice, you should now hate prejudice.
Olbermann understands the wrongness of the zero-sum thinking that calls same-sex partnerships a threat to heterosexual marriage. Shoring up our status at the expense of any group–sinful or not!–is exactly the opposite of what Jesus told us to do. Rather, our experience of suffering should make us more attuned to the humanity of someone else who is now suffering in the same way. This, I think, is one lesson we can draw from the parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18:21-35.
In our complex, diverse society, it’s not uncommon for the same person to be disadvantaged by some characteristics while actually accruing privilege from others, or to be privileged in some contexts in their life but disadvantaged in others, even for the same trait. A conservative Christian may experience secular-liberal prejudice in her job as a university teacher, and sexism when she tries to buy a car, but when she casts her vote at the ballot box for Prop 8, she is still standing with the interests of the power structure–wielding the church-backed power of the majority to disenfranchise a stigmatized minority. One grievance drives out another.
In my experience, spiritually hungry people who can’t bring themselves to consider Christianity are not stymied by rationalist worries about miracles, evolution, or reason versus revelation. That may have been an older generation’s main concern, but not now. Now they’re upset because Christians seem to be the enemies of compassion and human rights. Someone has to step outside the vicious cycle of entitlement and prejudice. If it’s not us, what kind of gospel are we preaching?
Rescuing the “Argument from Nature”?
Eve Tushnet, a lesbian-oriented Catholic who accepts Church teaching on celibacy, has posted an interesting rebuttal to an article about gay Catholic theologian James Alison in a recent issue of Commonweal. The article is only available to subscribers, but it appears to reiterate Alison’s frequent argument that new scientific and psychological evidence requires a reassessment of the prohibition on same-sex intimacy. Homosexuality, once seen as some people’s willful rejection of our universally heterosexual nature, more and more appears to be a naturally occurring biological variation. As Alison wrote in this essay from 2007 (emphasis mine):
…[W]e are witnessing the fleshing out in a particular local Church of the mechanisms which the Catholic faith has given us to maintain unity, work through our being scandalized by change, and enabled to learn what is true over a time of discernment. The overarching priority is not to allow scandal at change to block us from receiving the grace which Our Lord seeks to give us through the sacraments. And then to make sure that this grace, and the new life it produces in us is available in ecclesial form so that others can be invited in as well.
I think this has come about because Church authority has become aware that the advent of “matters gay” in recent years may not primarily center on sexual ethics at all. Rather it concerns an emerging anthropological truth about a regular, normal and non-pathological variant within the human condition. In other words, it is not that the Church’s teaching about sexual ethics is being challenged by insufficiently heroic people, but that the field of application of that teaching is being redefined by emerging reality. And of course it is proper to the Catholic faith, where Creation and Salvation are never to be completely separated, that it takes very seriously “what is” as informing “what should be” rather than trying to force “what is” to fit into an understanding of “what should be” derived from other sources.
The first time a soccer player picked up a ball and ran with it, we were clearly talking about a disobedient soccer player, since it is intrinsic to soccer that only the goalie under tightly regulated circumstances can handle the ball. But over time it did become possible to talk about the game of rugby as something where the overall purposes of sports playing, shared with soccer, are faithfully maintained within a different set of practises. My point is that for the referee to blow the whistle on a ball-handler in a soccer game is very proper. And for as long as it is clear that there is only soccer, he is right. However, as it becomes clear that there may also be a game called rugby, he must learn to be very careful indeed, since attempting to referee a rugby match as though it were soccer being played by perverse rule breakers would degenerate into insanity.
To which Eve responds, with some justification, that a lot of things occur in nature that aren’t ideal or ethically defensible (rape, killing, addiction). In a follow-up post, she adds:
…”[N]ature” isn’t obvious. Cultures define what is natural, and those definitions need not match up at all well with your own morality, whether or not you’re an orthodox Catholic. So when you rely on “nature” arguments, you need to be fierce, be careful, and be anything other than complacent; and–my old hobbyhorse–maybe you’d be better off just leaving the “natural” category alone, and making your arguments on other grounds.
I happen to agree, but I don’t think we can leave it at that. We have to contend with the “argument from nature” because St. Paul uses it in Romans 1:26-27. This is the most extended reference to same-sex intimacy in the Bible (not counting ambiguous relationships like David and Jonathan), and arguably the only one that seems to condemn homosexual acts as a general category, rather than specific abusive situations like the rape of captured enemy leaders in Leviticus. The quote below starts at Rom 1:22 because the idol-worshipping context is important:
22Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. 24Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. 26Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. 27In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. (NIV)
St. Paul is working with a definition of “natural” that is more sophisticated than “something occurring in nature”. As Eve says, the latter definition is so slippery and overbroad that it easily puts a divine imprimatur on our personal desires or the culture’s existing power relations. So it’s not enough to say that homosexual desires are inborn or even that they’re found in other species. But neither is that an irrelevant bit of data. We can’t get away from the fact that in this passage, St. Paul is making empirical claims about the created order and the consequences of ignoring it, claims that are open to disproof.
One component of idolatry, as this passage shows, is a misunderstanding of creatures’ true nature. The Gentiles here mistook animals and humans for God. They were unable to see through the specific instance of God’s creation to the infinite creator they had in common. St. Paul therefore finds it unsurprising that people prone to category confusion would also depart from mainstream heterosexual relations.
Now, is St. Paul here proving, or merely assuming, that heterosexuality is natural for all people? I think that the last sentence of 1:27 makes this an assumption open to disproof, by St. Paul’s own standards.
St. Paul is making a pragmatic argument for what is natural, unlike modern conservatives whose arguments often depend on subjective, essentialist metaphors about what is “truly” masculine or feminine. He reads backward from consequences to explain which human behaviors are properly aligned with reality and our own best interest, and which are not. He could simply have said “Idol worship is wrong because God (or Scripture) forbids it” and left it at that, just as contemporary opponents of gay rights have treated certain texts as self-justifying and demanding blind obedience. But instead, he encourages readers to test his theology against common-sense observation. We can see for ourselves that idol-worship is bad because it leads to disorderly behavior, one example of which is the same-sex intercourse practiced by pagans, and we know that that is bad because the men “received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion”, which perhaps refers to sexually transmitted diseases.
In this view, what is “natural” for us is what is conducive to human flourishing, according to our nature. This is a smaller category than “anything humans naturally happen to do”, the concept that Eve was rejecting. The confusion about “natural” may stem from the fact that both Jews and Greeks in St. Paul’s time had a teleological understanding of creation, whereas our society is accustomed to see Nature as the realm of blind, amoral, material forces.
Now, if there were discovered, or rather recognized to have always existed, a configuration of same-sex intimate relationships that did not naturally have any negative consequences for the individuals involved or anyone around them, i.e. that produced exactly the same spiritual fruits as heterosexual marriage, when the warping effect of social stigma was removed–what effect would that have on St. Paul’s argument?
I believe it does no violence to Scripture to limit St. Paul’s example to its facts. This passage is not primarily about homosexuality, but about idol worship, with certain pagan sexual practices being cited as a (random?) example of its unhealthy effects. Same-sex intercourse may well have been “unnatural” (in the sense of “not God’s intention for them”) for the people St. Paul was describing, either because they were seeking a decadent thrill outside their normal inclination, or being promiscuous, or engaging in temple prostitution and pagan fertility rites that denied the true God. His argument does not depend on its being unnatural for all people everywhere, at all times, in every type of relationship. And as I have tried to show above, he would not have deemed it inappropriate to cite sociological evidence in a Scriptural argument, or to consider the real-world effects of a theological position as a guide to its truth or falsehood.
Back from AWP and the World Is Ending
I’m back from the AWP literary conference in Chicago with my suitcases full of books, and my email inbox full of work that will be keeping me busy for some time. In days to come, I hope to share photos and anecdotes of our many memorable moments at the conference, plus brief reviews of some poetry books and journals. I will say this: you haven’t lived till you’ve seen a sign language interpreter trying to keep up with Dorothy Allison’s “Frog Fucking”, a performance piece which includes some toe-tingling action with two women and a strap-on, as well as a scene where she and an equally drunk gay friend compete to see how many buttered carrots they can shove up their asses. (I hope my accountant isn’t reading this…there goes my business-expense tax deduction.)
Allison’s piece was arousing, unsettling, comic, angry, melancholy, even spiritual. She was generous with her honesty about the entire range of emotions and roles we can play with our partners, showing how sex can help us integrate the parts of ourselves we might have considered unacceptable. The comic side of sex is a great equalizer, teaching us humility; the complete exposure of our kinks and quirks in a trusting relationship can clear away shame and self-deception.
All this is to say that I am not a prude, but the following item in the Springwise business trends e-newsletter still had the power to shock me:
The web has spawned new ways to track just about everything under the sun—from our finances to the foods we eat—so why not our sex lives too? Indeed, Bedpost is an online application now in private beta that helps consumers do just that.
Bedpost is an entirely personal application, password-protected from the prying eyes of others, and stresses that it offers absolutely no social networking features. Rather, it is a way for consumers to keep track of the sexual encounters they’ve had by logging in and entering some key details after each one. Users begin by creating a profile for the partner involved in their most recent encounter and then clicking on the calendar to indicate when the encounter happened. Then, they enter not just the time it happened, but also how long the encounter lasted, some descriptive tags and a star-based rating of the experience. The site then records all that information and presents it in a map of activity for the month on the user’s dashboard. For a historical view, Bedpost tracks summary statistics including frequency, average rating, and totals for the month and year so far. “Solo sex” tracking is also available.
I’m sorry, but using a spreadsheet to keep track of your masturbation episodes has to be the ultimate in pathetic geekiness.
I suppose some form of “Bedpost” has always been with us: Don Giovanni had Leporello and his “catalogue”; the playboys of our parents’ generation had their little black books. But the efficient coldness of tracking and rating your one-night stands on a computer, as if they were just another form of business contact data, seems to be taking us one step further toward sexual dis-integration of mind, body and spirit.
Speaking with the Authority of Love
I try to do a lot of things without God’s help, and it doesn’t go very well. No surprise there. (With God’s help, sometimes it still doesn’t go well, but I feel better about it.) The project that means the most to me these days is speaking out about equality for GLBT people–in my fiction, on this blog, in the church, and in difficult conversations with Christian friends who have a non-inclusive interpretation of Scripture.
Sometimes, in this process, friendships are strained, support networks break apart, and my very commitment to God is questioned by my fellow members of the Body of Christ. That’s the hardest part. Without God’s grace, I am standing only on my own righteousness, that little melting ice floe in the stormy sea of judgment. Loneliness and fear tempt me to seek others’ reassurance that my beliefs are correct: in essence, asking other people to stand between me and God in the way that only Jesus should.
When I pray the Psalms every morning, it strikes me how many of them invoke God’s protection against slander, humiliation, and misunderstanding by those close to us. Still, somewhere, deep down, I have trouble believing that I have any right to pray these prayers when those I perceive to be my adversaries are fellow Christians–and not only that, but Christians who have been steeped in Scriptural learning to a degree that intimidates this recent convert.
But what is learning, without the heart? A Biblical hermeneutic that exalts the “pure” text, in opposition to input from science, history, experience, and our innate sense of compassion and fairness, is (in my opinion) cutting off the Body of Christ at the neck, and rejecting the Incarnation.
In the latest issue of our parish newsletter, our rector at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Northampton, the Rev. Catherine Munz, shared some thoughts about the source of our authority to evangelize, excerpted below. I found her words quite helpful as I struggle to believe that God’s forgiving love will cover me when I step outside the approval of human authority figures. Cat writes about the challenges of sharing the gospel when Christians have a reputation for prejudice and abuse of power:
On inauguration day I was blessed to receive a ticket for the festivities at the Academy of Music [a Northampton theater where the ceremony was shown on a movie screen]….When our new president mentioned in his speech that America was for Christians, and Muslims, and Jews, there was no response. When he added “and non-believers” the crowd cheered and applauded. I know, I know, this is Northampton. In a way I was sad–because I treasure my faith, in another way I was glad–because I treasure the rights of non-believers, and yet in a way, I had hope–the vineyard is ripe.
When Jesus spoke with authority, it was to right wrongs, uphold justice, speak healing, and tell of God’s great love. In our baptismal covenant we are asked on behalf of a child or our own selves if we will continue in the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship…”will we proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?” We answered “I will with God’s help.” The authority has passed through the apostles of ancient times and to us–apostles of now.
There is a certain faction of people who call themselves Christians, and yet routinely fail to see the Good News of Christ. The same faction who denies justice and love and forgiveness, have helped to place Christians on the untouchable list of spiritually hungry people. Such an opportunity we have, more than opportunity, we are charged as Christians to make Love known. I think we have all met people who were non-believers who came to believe because someone demonstrated God’s love. I guess that really made them pre-believers….
Whatever you do or say remember that you were given authority to speak by virtue of your baptism. Speak of hope, justice, dignity, and the love of God.
Cat’s message raises another set of questions for me, questions that often get leaped over in the rush to trade warring interpretations of Biblical texts. It’s critically important, I think, to ask: Who has the authority to speak for and about gay people’s lives? How did we (heterosexual Christians belonging to established denominations) acquire the power to be considered authorities, and what structures of inequality maintain that power?
When Jesus had power, he “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave”. The greater our worldly advantage, the greater our obligation to enter humbly into the experience of outsiders, and afford them the presumption that their understanding of what homosexuality “is” is probably more accurate than ours. Most of the time, I don’t see that happening. In order to maintain that same-sex intimacy is sinful, non-affirming Christians perpetuate hateful myths and exaggerations (e.g. all gays are promiscuous and unhealthy); conflate homosexuality with sexual behaviors that are properly forbidden because they involve exploitation and betrayal (adultery, bestiality); and insist, despite all the evidence, that homosexuality can always be “cured”. Anything rather than see the other as the other sees herself.
Newsflash, people: As the coffee mug says, “wherever you go, there you are.” You can’t get away from yourself. Your knowledge of God comes through the filter of your own perceptions and thoughts. If you’re not the authority on your own experience, including your experiences of intimacy and love, then you also can’t trust your awareness of God. And indeed, this is the most terrible abuse that happens when the souls of gay people are divided from their bodies: indoctrination with the false belief that they’re not competent to know God for themselves. And of course, once you’ve convinced me that God is not there for me “just as I am”, I’m back to asking some convenient religious authority figure to tell me whether God loves me. No one, repeat no one, has the right to dole out or withhold that grace. We’re Protestants; I thought we knew that.
If the church focused more on awakening and training everyone’s capacity for spiritual discernment, and less on defending lists of prohibited activities, we might see more seekers and pre-believers coming to know the love of Jesus.