The Road to Equal Rites

The Rev. Mark Ward, Minister
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

February 1, 2009

READINGS

From Why Marriage Matters by Evan Wolfson

At its core, the freedom-to-marry movement is about the same thing every civil rights struggle has been about: taking seriously our country’s promise to be a nation its citizens can make better, its promise to be a place where people don’t have to give up their differences or hide them in order to be treated equally. . . .

Thirty years from now – when gay people have won the freedom to marry and our society looks back and wonders what the big deal was – our children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews will want to know where we stood and what we did at a pivotal moment. Did we make a difference? Did we stand up for what is right? Or, invoking tradition or our personal religious beliefs, motivated by prejudice or anxiety, hesitant and resistant to change that seemed discomforting, or indifferent to the consequences of our silence and acquiescence, did we turn our backs and deny our fellow human beings liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness?

The choice belongs to – just as the commitment depends on – each of us.

From an email that the singer Melissa Etheridge wrote to supporters just before last Christmas after a conversation she had with Rick Warren, the minister who delivered the invocation at the inauguration of President Barak Obama:

Brothers and sisters, the choice is ours now. We have the world’s attention. We have the capability to create change, awesome change in this world. But before we change minds we must change hearts. Sure, there are plenty of hateful people who will always hold onto their bigotry like a child to a blanket. But there are also good people out there, Christian and otherwise, that are beginning to listen. They don’t hate us, they fear change. Maybe in our anger, as we consider marches and boycotts, perhaps we can consider stretching out our hands. Maybe instead of marching on (Rick Warren’s) church, we can show up en masse and volunteer for one of the many organizations affiliated with his church that work for HIV/AIDS causes all around the world. Maybe if they get to know us, they won’t fear us. I know, call me a dreamer, but I feel a new era is upon us.

I will be attending the inauguration with my family, and with hope in my heart. I know we are headed in the direction of marriage equality and equal protection for all families.

Peace on earth, goodwill toward all men and women . . . and everyone in between.

SERMON

This Wednesday will mark the fifth anniversary of a decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court that suddenly opened the possibility that lesbian and gay couples could realistically hope that some day covenants of commitment they make between each other that might be honored, recognized and solemnized as marriage in this country.

That ruling came in response to a question from the Massachusetts Senate in the fall of 2003. Legislators asked if a bill they were debating that would grant same-sex couples the same rights and benefits as marriage but would call them civil unions would satisfy the court’s ruling three months earlier that gays and lesbians had the right to marry. Vermont had adopted such a law three years before.

The court said no. Such a bill, it said, “would have the effect of maintaining and fostering a stigma of exclusion that the Constitution prohibits . . . assigning same sex couples to second-class status.”

The ruling cleared the way for the first legal, same-sex marriages in the United States beginning May 17, 2004. It was an amazing day.  Pat Gozemba and Karen Kahn, who married in September 2005, recall in their book, Courting Equality, much of what happened.

There were lines going out the door at city halls around the state. At Arlington Street Church, that historic Unitarian Universalist church bordering Boston Garden, among the first couples to be married were Arlington Street’s minister Kim Crawford Harvie and her partner and Rabbi Howard Berman and his partner, and for the rest of the day, every 20 minutes until nine in the evening, the two ministers spent their time marrying others. Some came just as couples; others were trailing children and pets; some were dressed to the nines and ready to party, and others just quietly affirmed vows they had lived together for decades. Hundreds that day and now thousands have taken vows that in the eyes of the state as well as their own hearts knitted them together as life partners.

And yet, all those people know that as firm as that bond is in their lives, it remains tenuous in most of the country. Twelve years ago, after the Hawaii Supreme Court issued a ruling favoring same-sex marriage, a ruling later neutralized by a state constitutional amendment, Congress adopted the Defense of Marriage Act. That act allows states not to acknowledge same-sex marriages from other states and banned the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages.

The result today is a crazy quilt pattern of practices surrounding same-sex marriage. In addition to Massachusetts, only Connecticut, as of last October, unreservedly legalizes same-sex marriages. Vermont, New Hampshire and New Jersey authorize civil unions that give to same-sex couples the same rights as heterosexual couples. Maine, Maryland, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and the District of Columbia authorize same-sex unions with varying degrees of rights. Thirty states confine marriage to a man and a woman in their constitutions, and 41, including North Carolina, impose that restriction by statute.

Thus, stand things legislatively today. And yet, as we know from the Civil Rights movement a generation ago, the status of legislation is a lagging indicator of change in this country. With a few brave exceptions, lawmakers tend to be wary of getting out ahead of their constituencies on potentially explosive social issues. Rather than leading social change, legislation usually ratifies a change already largely accepted in society at large.

Three years ago when I addressed this subject I pointed to an observation made by the author Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Tipping Point.” He noted that social change often takes hold like a virus that, once established, spreads quickly. The key to an issue or concern taking hold, he said, the “the stickiness factor.” There must be something about the issue that works on us, that troubles our dreams and befuddles our thoughts, that takes hold of us and won’t let us go.

I argued then, and I still maintain, that same-sex marriage has such “stickiness.” Years gone by when gay and lesbian people hid away, fearing to speak their deepest truth, the gay community in the minds of many heterosexuals was other, out there, weird. Over the last several decades as lesbians, gays, bisexuals took the risk of coming out to those they knew a sea change took place: they were no longer other. They were sisters, brothers, parents, co-workers, friends.

Oh, it’s true: coming out didn’t always equal acceptance. And discrimination of all sorts against gays and lesbians remains far too common. The truth is that many of us still struggle to understand and to find understanding. But in the larger culture acceptance continues to grow. And beyond the debates there is a point of common ground: something that everyone, gay or straight, knows, something of which each of us has an intimate understanding, something so central to our lives that we cannot live without it, and that’s love. Love.

However you may identify your gender, you know love. Whoever it is that trips your trigger, you know love: that primal tug that sets your blood racing, that makes another person precious in your eyes. Love, the stickiest thing there is.

Once we let go of our fears, our prejudices, our silly squeamishness and listen to the testimony of one person’s love for another, all the rest fades into insignificance. Ultimately, this is what the fight for same-sex marriage is about: that love should be honored and supported, that when two people – whoever they are, whatever their gender – declare their love and their commitment to each other we should celebrate that fact.

Civil marriage endures as an institution because we as a nation recognize making such commitments is good for the individuals it unites and good for society. And there is no reasonable ground not to extend that right to lesbian or gay couples. Civil marriage is and ought to be a civil right.

Now, I could argue that the discussion of the subject ought to end right there. But, of course, it doesn’t. Despite our nation’s historic commitment to the separation of church and state, this is one area where religion and government remain closely intertwined. While it is possible to married by a judge or some similar civil authority, most weddings are officiated by ministers like me in occasions that amount to a curious blend of religious ritual and civil ceremony. We lead the couples through their vows and bless the proceeding, but it is only when we affix our signatures to the wedding license that the couple presents that the marriage becomes legally binding.

It is an odd state of affairs, when you come to think about it, granting clergy the power of a government clerk simply by virtue of their ordination by some religious body. But there it is.

Three years ago I told you that I was no longer willing to act as an agent of an unjust state, so as a way of protesting laws that prevent same-sex couples from obtaining civil marriages I would no longer sign the licenses of couples that I marry. I have kept that pledge and intend to stick by it until North Carolina law is changed to give same-sex couples equal rights. I still officiate at weddings, but I direct those who seek civil licenses to the county magistrate.

And I should tell you that while at first couples who approached me about being married were surprised by my decision, these days fewer and fewer are. I have even become aware of a growing movement in this country to separate civil marriage from religious ceremonies, something that strikes me as a sensible idea.

But for now the debate around same-sex marriage inevitably draws questions of theology and religious sensibility. Yet, here, too, I see an evolving understanding.

When same-sex marriage first arose as a hot-button issue, religious conservatives responded immediately with what they claimed were proof texts from the Bible forbidding the practice and condemning homosexuality. But, the more closely scholars examine those texts, the clearer it becomes that each of them – codes of behavior from Leviticus or story elements from Genesis or Exodus – have been wrenched out of context simply to serve some people’s fearful agendas.

The fact is that the Bible has nothing to say about same-sex marriage. But it has a great deal to say about love, many different forms of love among many different kinds of people in many different circumstances, from the poetically passionate testimony from the Song of Solomon that “many waters cannot quench love, . . . for love is as strong as death” to Paul’s admonition that love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things,” and that without love “I am a noisy gong, or a clanging cymbal.”

Indeed, when we look closely at the Bible it can offer some surprising insights. I am grateful to Rabbi Rob Cabelli from our neighbor, Congregation Beth Israel, for an interesting point he made in a discussion about religion and gender at the Reuter Center convened by the Mountain Area Interfaith Forum, a group that I and several others from this church participate in.

His point centered on a passage in the very first chapter of Genesis. It is the passage that describes the creation of humankind, and it reads, “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,’” and later, “and God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

There are several curious things about this passage. First, what are we to make of that plural pronoun, “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image’”? Rabbi Cabelli pointed out that in Hebrew all nouns have gender – male or female – but in this case the word for God is a plural noun. The phrase literally translates as “our” image.

This is generally understood as meaning to suggest not that there was more than one being present, but that God is a multiplicity, embodying both male and female. That helps explain the subsequent passage that “in the image of God . . . male and female he created them.” God’s image embraces all dimensions of gender.

This invites us to reflect on how the very notion of gender is far more complex than we give it credit for. Our language speaks of men and women as if gender were a matter of polar opposites, when in fact what we are learning from biology is that it is a broad range. We are born with hormones and plumbing that place us somewhere on the continuum of male to female, but then there are myriad ways in which humans are drawn to identify and express that gender. And for some the gender they present to the world is not the gender that they feel.

There was a time when any variation from the norm was uniformly regarded as a “confusion” that needed to be corrected. Yet, the more we learn about gender the more we come to realize that there are many gradations along the way that can have integrity of their own. We are still learning more about what this means, but what has become clear is that, however we may express our gender, there is a welter of ways of being in loving relationship with another person.

I concern myself with this work, and I invite you into it as well, not only because it addresses a need for justice, but also because it arises from our own basic religious principles. We believe that every person has inherent worth and dignity simply as who they are – in Melissa Etheridge’s words, “all men and women . . . and everyone in between.” And a central consequence of that belief is that each of us is capable of deciding for ourselves who it is we will love.

And I believe that love is the highest and best expression of our humanity, what puts us in touch with the holy, that which is greatest and deepest in our lives. I take it as a principle that as long as I am serving love, I have not lost my course.

As to the cause of marriage equality, I am sad to say that I feel we still have quite a slog ahead of us. All those state laws and constitutional amendments will take time to overturn, and along the way people in states like ours will have to be vigilant to keep worse mischief out of the statutes and state constitution.

But I still have hope. I look to instances like the one in 2007 where Jerry Sanders, mayor of conservative San Diego, California, former police chief, announced tearfully that he would drop his former opposition to gay marriage and sign a resolution supporting it after his daughter and a staff member came out to him as lesbians. “I couldn’t look them in the face and tell them their very lives, their relationships had less meaning than the life I have with my wife, Veronica,” he said.

Our new president, Barak Obama, once endorsed same-sex marriage while running for state senate, but scaled that back to support for civil unions in his run for the presidency. He may have invited Rick Warren, gay marriage opponent, to give the invocation at his inauguration, but he also invited Gene Robinson, the gay Episcopal bishop who joined his partner in civil union last year, to give the prayer you heard an excerpt from earlier at another event. I still have hope that he can be turned.

Three years ago I pointed to Malcolm Gladwell’s observation that the tipping point for social change doesn’t require massive shifts in opinion.  It requires only that a few people in different niches and subcultures work their social connections, gather and distribute information, and touch the chords of sympathy in others. And, most important, they believe that change is possible.

I am with Melissa Etheridge on this: we needn’t demonize those who oppose us. We need merely put our hearts into making the connections that grow new understanding. It is not simple work, and it is not accomplished quickly. But it truly is the work of love.

May it be your work as well.