This post is going to repeat a lot of verbiage from a post I made here nearly two years ago, but it’s about a recurring theme I see in our struggle. That theme raised its head and laughed at me this morning, while reading a post over at Box Turtle Bulletin. There, poster Rob Tisinai writes about an email he got from Maggie Gallagher…
I got a fundraising email from Maggie Gallagher the other day. It’s unbelievably long (as in, I can’t believe she expects people to read this whole thing). One sentence jumped out at me before I gave up on the piece.
Are two men pledged in a sexual union really a marriage?
Personally I’d answer, No.
Which would be the correct answer from Gallagher’s point of view. Tisinai goes on to rephrase the question in terms that acknowledge same-sex couples might actually be in love, and avers that this is something she knows she cannot admit because it undercuts her entire argument against same-sex marriage.
I don’t think her argument is about same-sex marriage. I don’t think any of them really give a good goddamn about marriage. What they’re adamant about is that homosexuals aren’t really human…that Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. It isn’t about marriage at all. What marriage represents to the homophobes is the final barrier to admitting that homosexuals are fully human and capable of experiencing all the higher emotions of love and devotion and commitment that heterosexuals do…that we are not, as Dr. Laura once famously put it, biological errors, or as you can hear thumped from pulpits all over the bible belt, demon possessed hell bound abominations in the eyes of god.
North Carolina activist Patrick Wooden has become a favorite of groups like the National Organization for Marriage, the Family Research Council and the American Family Association, and most recently joined Peter LaBarbera of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality at a rally denouncing the Southern Poverty Law Center. On a recent appearance on LaBarbera’s radio show, Wooden called homosexuality a “wicked, deviant, immoral, self-destructive, anti-human sexual behavior” and should make people “literally gag.” Wooden added that gay men have “to wear a diaper or a butt plug just to be able to contain their bowels” by their “40s or 50s” as a result of “what happens to the male anus.”
When you hear them yap, yap, yapping about the sanctity of marriage, what they’re saying is homosexuals are some sort of sub-human…things…that copulate with just about anything handy whether it’s a person or a horse or a cell phone. To lift what homosexuals do to the level of heterosexual love and commitment then, is a profane act of defilement. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Be it with each other or…cell phones.
Which is to say, we do not love. Love is something fully human individuals experience. The homosexual experiences no such thing. That is an article of belief more central to the faith of modern fundamentalists then the resurrection.
Back in April of 2010, I read this by then newly out Christian musician Jennifer Knapp back in an interview in Christianity Today…
Q: So why come out of the closet, so to speak?
Knapp: I’m in no way capable of leading a charge for some kind of activist movement. I’m just a normal human being who’s dealing with normal everyday life scenarios. As a Christian, I’m doing that as best as I can. The heartbreaking thing to me is that we’re all hopelessly deceived if we don’t think that there are people within our churches, within our communities, who want to hold on to the person they love, whatever sex that may be, and hold on to their faith. It’s a hard notion. It will be a struggle for those who are in a spot that they have to choose between one or the other. The struggle I’ve been through—and I don’t know if I will ever be fully out of it—is feeling like I have to justify my faith or the decisions that I’ve made to choose to love who I choose to love.
[Emphasis mine...] The problem after all isn’t sex, it’s love. But asking people to acknowledge that same-sex couples love is precisely the problem. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex… People sitting in the pews side-by-side with their gay neighbors aren’t asking them to choose between their love and their faith. When they look at same-sex couples they don’t see love at all…merely sex. They are “struggling with homosexuality”. The bedrock prejudice insists, absolutely insists, that is all there is to same-sex couples. Empty, barren, transient lust.
As NOM board member Orson Scott Card once said, gay couples are just playing dress-up…
“However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be, what they are doing is not marriage. Nor does society benefit in any way from treating it as if it were…”
“They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won’t be married. They’ll just be playing dress-up in their parents’ clothes…”
-Orson Scott Card, Homosexual “Marriage” and Civilization
However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be… There’s the problem. Look at it if you have the nerve. This isn’t about sex. That empty barren, perverted lust is not what makes them angry. What makes them angry is any suggestion that homosexuals do, in fact, experience love the same way heterosexuals do. And it makes them absolutely livid.
It’s often argued that gay couples cannot rise to the level of marriage because they don’t produce children, and marriage is mostly about family life. But this argument is a sham. And it mirrors another sham argument often heard in conservative religious communities, that being homosexual is not a sin, only engaging in homosexual acts is. If only the homosexuals just didn’t have sex, they could be welcomed into the kingdom of Heaven too…just like the rest of us. But heterosexual couples, medically incapable of having sex, are as welcome to marriage as they are the Kingdom and nobody in either group is saying that same-sex couples can marry as long as they don’t have sex.
The heterosexual couple who stick together even if they are denied a sex life are seen as vindicating the power of love. That is why sterility among heterosexuals is no barrier to marriage. But same-sex couples somehow defile the institute of marriage with their very presence, whether they bring children into it (via adoption) or not, whether they can have sex or not. And that is because homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.
It’s not about children. It’s not about family life. It’s not even about heterosexuality. What homosexuals steal from people like Orson Scott Card is the idea that only heterosexuals love. All arguments to the contrary, what this fight is about, Exactly, is love, and who can be allowed to love and be loved, and who cannot. Marriage is love’s sanctuary, a sacred place where lovers can find shelter, protection, support. Letting homosexuals, who are incapable of love, into it defiles that sanctuary, turning it from a sacred place into a brothel.
However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be… In 1983, Sharon Kowalski suffered severe brain injuries in a motorcycle accident leaving her unable to care for herself. Her lover, Karen Thompson, with whom she had exchanged wedding bands and shared a house, had to fight a long and bitter legal battle with Kowalski’s parents, who refused to allow Thompson any contact at all with their daughter. When Sharon, with difficulty, typed her wishes to go back home with Karen on a keyboard provided by a doctor, her parents took the keyboard away. At one point, Donald Kowalski, Sharon’s father, asked a reporter in exasperated frustration “What does that woman want with my daughter…she’s in diapers!” For almost nine years Thompson fought it out in court with Kowalski’s parents, refusing to let the woman she loved be condemned to life in a nursing home where she would be kept isolated from the world outside and denied any therapy that would have allowed her to communicate her wishes to be taken back home to Karen. When she finally won, Donald Kowalski called her an animal.
What does that woman want with my daughter… A same-sex couple who cannot have sex would be, if unrepentant nonetheless, ineligible for the Kingdom, let alone marriage. It’s not about the Act, if not engaging in the Act makes no difference. Their crime is that they love, and love is not permitted to homosexuals.
We cannot be human beings, we must be animals.
Pastor Ken Hutcherson Compares Marriage Equality to Horse-Fucking
Antioch Bible Church pastor Ken Hutcherson didn’t sit in the same room as two gay people to debate marriage equality. But he did call into the Seattle Channel studio where gay people were present for a debate on same-sex marriage.
And of course, Pastor Hutcherson went there: “If this law is passed, what is going to happen? Now ask your guests in the studio. Do they believe that if they change the definition of marriage being between one man and one woman, what is going to stop two men one woman, two women one man, one man against a horse, one many with a boy, one man with anything?“
We must be animals. Not sinners in need of salvation, but animals. Why? So we can be their scapegoats. The right wing politician who goes hiking the Appalachian trail with his mistress while his wife and children wonder where the hell he went. The religious right preacher who gets caught visiting prostitutes. The conservative moralizer who gets caught gambling. The problem isn’t that we are moral cheats, the problem is acceptance of homosexuality. Homosexuality is destroying the family and society, not our own failures of moral character. Probably it is also responsible for earthquakes and hurricanes.
Jennifer Knapp didn’t choose love over faith, but love over fame because there was no other way. Karen Thompson fought for nine years to free her beloved because their was no other way. The gay civil rights struggle is not a fight over scripture. It has nothing to do with faith. It is not about sex. It is a fight over the right, the essential human need, to love and be loved. Because love can overcome any obstacle, endure any hardship, hold on to any hope no matter how distant and faint. Because love can move mountains. Because the one thing you never want the scapegoat to do is move mountains.
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Bruce– you said it exactly. I couldn’t add a word to it, but I may steal a few. :)
Comment by Ben In Oakland — January 28, 2012 @ 3:21 pm
This is what I sent to every newspaper in the state at the height of the prop. 8 hysteria. It echoses what you said.
To begin with, I am no one in particular. I’m just a happy, middle class, middle aged, middle-of-the-road gay man who hopes my marriage will survive the election. It seems to me that missing in all of the arguments about Prop. 8 are both a clear view of gay people, and a simple understanding about what marriage means to us. I would like to provide that perspective, in the form of a…
LETTER TO CALIFORNIA VOTERS CONCERNING MY MARRIAGE
Two months ago, I married the man I love and share my life with to the acclaim and pleasure of our families and friends. Paul and I have known each other for seven years, and have been married in all but name for the past six. Both of us are contributing, tax-paying, law-abiding, and productive members of our community. We live active, healthy, and positive lives. We are well thought of by family, friends, and colleagues, and live in peace with our neighbors. Despite all this, some people think that the fact that we are both men is the only thing of importance, and that this invalidates our love, our commitment, and especially, our claim to equality before the law. Some will even go so far as to claim we’re a threat to family, children, and faith.
We’re not a threat to anyone or anything. Nor is our marriage. We’re just Ben and Paul. And we want to stay married.
Let me tell you a little more about us. Gay people and straight people, taken as a whole, are pretty much alike. This includes matters like romance, family, marriage, and religion. And why shouldn’t we be alike? We’re your relatives and friends, your colleagues and neighbors. We’re you.
Our love is as deep and abiding and committed as any couple you can name. We married because we love each other, and share our lives and fortunes together– just like you. We were excited about our wedding, our rings, and sharing our joy with our loved ones– just like you. We have promised to be there for each other in sickness and in health, for better and for worse, and to be a married couple for the rest of our lives– just like you.
Because of the strength of these promises and our life together, our marriage contributes to society in exactly the same way that yours does. We don’t have children, but there are at least 70,000 children with gay and lesbian parents in California alone. If strong marriages build strong families, and marriage and family are the foundations of society, don’t our marriages, families, and children matter as much as yours? Why would you tell gay people to take their building blocks and stay home?
Our wedding and our promises mean as much to us, and to our friends and families, as yours do to you. Perhaps more. You see, you probably have never had to question whether you could marry the person you love best in all the world. It’s your right, after all. But it isn’t ours. Prop. 8 supporters claim that we gay people, via domestic partner laws, already have all of the rights afforded you by marriage. Maybe, except this one: the rightness, the validity, the very existence of your marriage will NEVER, EVER be debated, much less voted upon, by complete strangers. But you can vote on our rights and our marriages. Just as you can vote on the continued existence of those domestic partner laws, or on any statutory protection of our lives and families. Just as you can vote on laws that say that separate but equal is good enough.
Just like Prop. 8.
What if you had to ask 16 million people for permission to marry your beloved? How would you feel if the love and commitment you bear your beloved is, at best, diminished and devalued as unimportant? Or at worst, denigrated as sick, sinful, and dangerous, and such a threat to family and society that a constitutional amendment must be passed to protect them? Would you like it if someone had the power to make your marriage disappear? Would you like listening to the most vicious, outrageous lies being told about you by complete strangers? How would you feel if you were told that separate-but-equal was good enough for you?
We Americans tried that before, and it doesn’t work.
Are we not human enough, not citizens enough, to grant us the right to marry? Paul and I want for us, our friends, and our families exactly what you get from our government: the same dignity, the same respect, and the same equality before the law that you demand for yourselves. That’s all of it. Our lives and our families are every bit as valuable as yours. You don’t have to approve of or accept gay people, or to be a part of our lives; we have plenty of people who do. We are not attacking your marriages, your families, your faith, or your civil rights, or preventing them from being legally protected. Can you say the same about yourselves?
We want to take nothing from you. We want only the same rights and protections that you have. Nothing more.
And nothing less.
Comment by Ben In Oakland — January 28, 2012 @ 3:26 pm
I have said the same basic truth for years. If they think about us as fellow humans, then that makes us equals. If we’re equals, then it follows that the law must apply to us equally – no more, no less. To avoid that, they must not consider us as equals in the human race. We’ve all heard all the constantly rehashed bullshit highlighting what “gay” is all about. How “they” know so much about being gay is beyond me. Their dogma and dedication to bullshit will never allow them to accept us as equal to them on a human scale. That would mean an almost total trashing of their twisted view of God and life and people. Ain’t gonna happen.
Comment by Gianni — January 28, 2012 @ 5:44 pm
Bruce and Ben – wonderful statements by both of you.
Love is indeed the issue. Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) wrote in a document on homosexuality which was promulgated by John Paul II: “Homosexual activity is not a complementary union, able to transmit life; and so it thwarts the call to a life of that form of self-giving which the Gospel says is the essence of Christian living. This does not mean that homosexual persons are not often generous and giving of themselves; but when they engage in homosexual activity they confirm within themselves a disordered sexual inclination which is essentially self-indulgent.”
With those words, cardinal and pope state that gay and lesbian people who are in a same sex relationship cannot really love but are by their activity selfish and self-indulgent. There are two things they are doing here. First, the pope and cardinal deny the reality of any loving relationship on the part of gay people that involves sexual behavior. Secondly, they reduce the relationships of gay people to sexual behavior.
In this same document, Ratzinger/John Paul II decry violence against gay people but add that the “homosexual condition” is disordered, and when the claim is made that this condition is not disordered and “homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other disordered notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.”
This last statement is an extraordinarily violent statement in itself. Not only do they say homosexuality is disordered, they say that it is to be expected that any objection to this statement, and any legalization of same sex behavior can be expected to lead to violence against gay people. Thus those who disagree with the cardinal and pope, and who work to have same sex activity legalized, are responsible for the violence perpetrated against them. They are thus blaming gay people, rather than their victimizers, for their victimization. Pope and cardinal are also excusing themselves from any responsibility in the situation. It is not they who are at fault. It is those self-indulgent homosexuals. This may explain in part why they are so silent when lesbians and gay men and transgender people also are attacked and killed and commit suicide to escape from the harassment.
Thus cardinal and pope express no understanding at all of the love that lesbian and gay couples can have for each other (their relationships in their minds are simply self-indulgent); and yet they express understanding of why people may react violently toward lesbian and gay people (because gay people want to be free to love without being sent to prison).
I don’t know how else to describe this teaching of these Roman Catholic Church leaders other than to call it evil. These men were/are highly intelligent and learned in many things. But they have continued to ignore the lives of gay people and have continued to ignore the findings of the last 70 years of psychological and sociological studies, and they continue to deny that gay couples can really love and even have asserted that same sex couples do psychological violence to the children they nurture and raise. One could understand their ignorance a few decades ago. But one cannot understand nor can one excuse such blindness in this day and age.
Comment by John Patrick — January 28, 2012 @ 6:03 pm
Wow. Excellent article. It is very thought-provoking. However, there is something else fueling the anti-marriage equality forces. They fight tooth and nail against our rights not just because they want to deny our humanity but they also wish to preserve Patriarchal Privilege. Same-sex marriage destroys the idea of the man as the head of the family and the woman as subservient. If two men or two women can make a go of it without traditional gender roles, then women will start questioning the authority of men. Men will no longer be considered inherently superior to women if two members of the same sex can succeed in life partnerships. I think this is something else driving the forces of inequality that is just as powerful as what this article so elequently lays out.
Comment by Nick K. — January 29, 2012 @ 8:16 am
Sharon Kowalski and Karen Thompson are still together by the way :)
Comment by Steve — January 29, 2012 @ 3:36 pm
The sands of time are sinking. The truth will be revealed. Jesus said “I am the way, the truth, the life, no man comes to the Father except through me.
Speaking God’s word and being a Christian is not bigotry. God help this nation and many to come to HIS TRUTH and saving knowledge through Christ Jesus. Everyone of us was born with a transgressor orientation and we all need Him. For the sake of each soul who reads this blog I pray for all of you. AMEN
Comment by Pat S. — January 29, 2012 @ 6:42 pm
Go fuck yourself Pat. You and your fellow child-murdering bigots say and do the most hateful things imaginable, then hide behind your religion as if that changes the harm you’ve done. And than you cry and start screaming persecution because we refuse to be fooled by your sophistry. You are nothing but hateful little worms trying to make yourselves feel better because one day we stood up and said we don’t need your permission to live and love.
Comment by RainbowPhoenix — January 29, 2012 @ 6:52 pm
Well Rainbow do you think what you just said was being tolerant or loving or even true? No it wasn’t.
and all the more reason I will pray for you as well. This is exactly why this nation needs to repent as we have taken a step backwards in more ways then one and the we have transgressed by not loving the Lord our God with all our heart soul mind and strength and our neighbor as ourself.
Comment by Pat S. — January 29, 2012 @ 7:04 pm
Pat, grow up you entilted brat. You know full well that what I said is true. Referring to your hatred as “love” does not make it so, just as pouring sugar on a pile of shit won’t turn it into chocolate. Then, just as you bigots always do, you start crying and screaming because someone dared to look past your sophistry. I don’t need your prayers. If it keeps me away from bigots child-murdering bigots like you and the vengeful god you worship, Hell can’t possibly be so bad. I have no need for anyone who would condemn me to an eternity of torture for something beyond my control and I have no tolerance for anyone who hates me simply for existing. Now you’re going to do what every bully I dealt with in school did and starting whining and crying because I refused to let you mistreat people.
Comment by RainbowPhoenix — January 29, 2012 @ 8:21 pm
Well Pat,
I will pray for you. Prayer never hurt anyone. But true prayer is sincere and is a wish that the person for whom the prayer is uttered be blessed with what is good for them whatever that may be. True prayer does not restrict the prayer to the pray-er’s idea of what is really good for the recipient. So often prayer is an attempt to impose one’s ideas of good on another person. And none of us is wise enough to know what truly is in another person’s best interest.
I do believe that if there is a God who began things and set them in motion, that God is ineffable; and any attempt to limit God’s “words” to our own ideas or interpretation of texts written thousands of years ago is folly.
In closing, I share with you some poignant words from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (this poet was a favorite of John Paul II):
“I think I could turn and live with animals…
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God…
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands
of years ago…”
Comment by John Patrick — January 29, 2012 @ 8:36 pm
That’s it exactly, Bruce: to them we aren’t fully human. We are something awful, something both tragic and frightening to behold, emotionally crippled people, with a crucial piece missing.
Which I think is why the fight for same sex marriage gets to a lot of straight people in a way that nothing else quite does: full civil same sex marriage rights imply that we, missing the crucial human ability to love, are the same as they are. That’s too close for comfort for many straight people.
I think Nick K. is also right: there’s a big need to defend male supremacy on the part of many straight men and some straight women in the marriage equality fight.
And many straight people seem to be really tied to strongly different gender roles, especially some straight women. The two male or two female figures on top of the wedding cake threaten their idea of “how things should be” in a way that must be uncomfortably foundation-shaking for them.
Comment by Donny D. — January 29, 2012 @ 9:07 pm
Cardinal Ratzinger and Karol Wojtyla are/were undoubtably self-loathing, miserable, homosexually oriented men themselves as is virtually the entire roman church hierarchy. I hypothesize that their anti-gay, misogynistic pronouncements and policies are a subliminal effort to atone for themselves both as “intrinsically disordered” men as well as their actual behaviors, and to hold on to their male privileges and ecclesiastical power. They can never come out of the closet because they would lose all of the perks and security they have worked and collaborated so hard for. Of course they have dressed this all up in centuries of inherited theology (from other homosexual roman clergy) which rationalizes their behavior, but that is really what I think is going on.
Comment by Paul Douglas — January 30, 2012 @ 4:06 am
>”Prayer never hurt anyone”
Except for the hundreds of children and also adults murdered by faith-”healing”
Comment by Steve — January 30, 2012 @ 9:26 am
Steve,
You’re right about that manipulative use of prayer. Prayer can be used as a weapon.
I was thinking of the kind of prayer that people use when they say “I’ll pray for you.” Which reminds me of something that was the rage back in the Seventies. Some prayer meeting leaders claimed that many people had one leg shorter than the other and they prayed for the lengthening of one of the legs. Of course, if you move your hip a bit, the “shorter” leg seems to become longer. It was all a sham, but it got some people to believe.
Comment by John Patrick — January 30, 2012 @ 10:20 am
I always wonder if people like Patrick Wooden actually believe the nonsense they puke out or if they’re just using the ‘big outrageous lies’ technique perfected by Dr. Goebbels to demonize people. And if he is incredibly stupid and gullible enough to believe it, where did he read or hear about it? what is his source? besides just pulling it out of his ass (pun intended).
Comment by Gary (NJ) — January 30, 2012 @ 3:04 pm
Great post. It’s also important to look at the other prime motivator of false prophets in the anti-gay lobby and that’s MONEY! Where else can one rake in 6-figure annual salaries just by demonizing other Americans? These anti-gay elites are going to do and say whatever it takes to keep that $$$ flowing in.
Comment by Michael — January 30, 2012 @ 10:31 pm
Hi everyone, I am a Christian. I fully support your fight for equality, and I believe God does too. I am so sorry for the hurt so-called Christians are causing you. I am thankful that because I already had gay friends, I pulled back from that path of hatred when I was still a teenager. Please know that lots of people are SINCERELY praying for you, for your happiness and legal equality.
Comment by serena — January 31, 2012 @ 1:41 pm