Andrew Sullivan and others have argued that same sex marriage is actually a conservative value and is something that ought to be supported by anyone who truly seeks to increase societal stability and values. As we all know, of course, the Christofascists and their allies in other fundamentalist religions care nothing about societal stability but seek only to inflict their typically fear and hate based religious dogma on all often so that they can avoid confrontation with issues and individuals who threaten their ignorance embracing, serious thought avoiding house of cards world views. As I have said before, I believe that gays particularly terrify the Christofascists because if the Bible passages the haters so love to quote are wrong about us, then they have confront the issue of what else in the Bible is not true. It becomes a domino effect as their whole artificial world collapses and, heaven forbid, they have to make decisions and moral judgments on their own. A piece in Huffington Post written by a conservative Jewish writer who attended a nephew's same sex marriage ceremony shows how by being ourselves and living our lives openly we can open minds and breakdown barriers. Here are some excerpts:
Setting out for our nephew's wedding, my wife and I weren't quite sure what to expect. Since the two grooms had met at the memorably named Cincinnati Queer Guerilla Bar, our excitement contained an undeniable undercurrent of uneasiness.
Gay marriage is once again a high-profile public issue. . . . . Yet entwined though it may be in legislation and lawsuits, gay marriage, like its heterosexual counterpart, is primarily a personal issue. The union of our nephew, Benjamin, and his beloved, Jacob, in a Reform Jewish ceremony in Cincinnati satisfied only religious law, not Ohio's. But on a personal level, the ceremony and the whole weekend showcased precisely the kind of values all of us who believe in stable, monogamous relationships should want to defend.
Which, I admit, isn't how I always felt. As a religiously serious Jew, I'm well aware of the explicit biblical condemnation of homosexual sex acts. Still, loyalty to Leviticus wasn't the only reason for my initial opposition to gay marriage. Like many others, I believed that marriage in a legal and religious context was inextricably linked to procreation.
Well, sort of. Not only don't we ban infertile couples from marrying or cast out those who don't want to have children, we have also as a society accepted surrogate birth, single parenthood and a host of other technological and social arrangements that have nothing to do with "togetherness" by the biological father and mother. When you think about it, what remains illegal for homosexuals is not parenthood, but the obligations and protections for them and their children that accompany a legally binding commitment.
That, and the ability to have the state recognize a commitment to the whole panoply of family values we as a society claim to uphold. The celebration of those values by Benjamin and Jacob is what shone though the entire weekend.
That love, and the desire to build a family around it, is what motivated Ben, 29, and Jacob, 25, to get formally married rather than live together as do so many of their gay and straight peers. And they deliberately did so in a religious ceremony in the city where they both had roots.
It's nice to believe that traditional nuclear families like the one my wife and I were raised in and in which we raised our kids are the best possible arrangement. But whether you pull out your Bible, pop on your TV or peer around the dining room table, it's impossible to escape the reality that any kind of family arrangement can be terrific or toxic. (Cain and Abel, anyone?) Gay or straight, religious or secular, some people are mensches and some are not.
It turns out my wife and I didn't go to a "gay wedding"; we went to a wedding. It was filled with "voices of joy and gladness," in the traditional Jewish phrase, "the voice of the groom and the voice of..." well, the other groom. We hope that Ben and Jacob's union will soon be legally recognized, but what we want most is what we wish for all newlyweds among friends and family. We hope they continue to reflect the values of their upbringing yet surpass in every way their parents' generation. By doing so, they'll make all of us, including their kids, very proud.
Love, commitment and honoring another human being - why do the Christianist fear this so much other than the fact that it challenges their misplaced trust and allegiance to Neolithic age writings that have been blindly handed down all too often with no questions asked. As science and knowledge progress further the knuckle draggers are going to be increasingly confronted with the fact that their "sincerely held religious beliefs" simply are not true. Expect more hate and nastiness from the godly set as that happens.
No comments:
Post a Comment