Gay Marriage to Become Law of the Land
6/21/2010 12:49:07 PM

On June 16, 2010, closing arguments were made in the landmark court case in San Francisco concerning gay marriage. Voters in California in Proposition 8 had overturned the California Supreme Court's decision to allow for gay marriage. This case, to be called the "Perry case" after the lead plantiff, seeks to nullify the results of the proposition. The text of the closing arguments have been made available at the website of the American Foundation for Equal Rights.

Reading over this transcript it becomes clear that the arguments in favor of gay marriage are so overwhelming, and the arguments of those opposed are so irrational, that eventually as a result of this trial and Supreme Court reviews gay marriage will become the law of the land. The closing argument of Ted B. Olson, a conservative attorney who argued the case for the election of George W. Bush, argues on the basis of rulings and principles already established by the Supreme Court.

It is interesting that there turns out to be a difference in the arguments used by opponents of gay marriage between what they said in their political campaign for Proposition 8 and in the legal arguments before the court. In court they argued that gay marriage threatens the "deinstitutionalization" of marriage, that it undermines the institution of marriage, that hetereosexuals will no longer seek to get married and procreation will no longer be the reason for marriage. Olson says:

It is revealing, it seems to me, that the deinstitutional message is quite different from the thrust of the proponents' Yes on 8 election campaign. That, in the words they put into the hands of all California voters, focused heavily on: Protect our children from somehow learning that gay marriage is okay. Protect our children from learning that gay marriage is okay.

Olson emphasized that the political message was based on the idea that gays and their relationships are not okay, are not normal like other people. But when they come into court these opponents of gay marriage know that that argument cannot work. Olson says, "For obvious reasons, the 'gays are not okay' message was largely abandoned during the trial in favor of the prcreation and deinstitutionalization themes." But when the judge, Vaughn R. Walker, asked for proof of the deinstitutionalization thesis they responded that they actually did not know, they did not know what the result of gay marriage would be.

In other words, generalized rhetoric against gays works in politics, but not in the courts which require rational arguments. Very interesting.

Read the whole transcript to see how strong the argument for gay marriage is and why gay and lesbian persons should not be deprived of this most significant social institution.


See This Blog

Major Media Unfairly Presents Anti-Abortion Rhetoric
6/3/2009 4:31:26 PM

Watching news reports it strikes me that the media must rethink how it reports the abortion debate. Reporters too often simply repeat the anti-abortion frame in how they talk and write. On the PBS News Hour a young reporter speaks with no expression on his face, appearing to be entirely neutral and objective, but refers to an "abortion doctor" being shot, not even mentioning the name of the person, Dr. George Tiller, and then says he is one of three doctors willing to perform late term abortions with no reference to who the women are who are coming for such abortions and the conditions of the fetus. The listener is left with "abortion doctor" engaged in what must be questionable procedures since so few do them. I have seen this over and over as I have watched the debate and read other articles over many years now.

Although majorities in polls oppose making all abortions illegal, anti-abortion advocates claim recent polls are going their way. Why would that be? Well, one reason is that media reporters repeat the rhetoric of the anti-abortionists. The mainstream media is not fair in how it reports, it tries to "present both sides" but does not really do so, it presents the side of the anti-abortionists. One reason this happens is that the "liberal" reporter (reporters are mostly liberal) wants to make sure he or she is being "fair" to the other side. So the other side gets its message out, but the reporter's own views are not allowed. This tilts the whole context toward the side of the anti-abortion crowd.

So I have a word for the major media: please think seriously about this. The way you report abortion has now helped create the context leading again to the murder of a compassionate physician trying to do what he believes was moral and ethical work. It is possible that Dr. George Tiller was a courageous, compassionate physician dedicated to helping women in desperate circumstances. But when in any of the major media has such a view been presented, or even to suggest that there may be some people (including myself) who strongly believe that is true? I haven't seen it. To present him as an "abortion doctor" represents very sloppy and very unfair reporting.


See This Blog

You Can Get Killed in a Public Church
6/2/2009 4:13:44 PM

My church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, likes to speak of itself these days as a "public church". But that can be a dangerous place to be. One man went to his public church, Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas, this past Pentecost Sunday and got shot and killed. He was a Christian, a man of faith, one who was carrying out his vocation in the world, a compassionate man, one who would even do an abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy for a woman who knew that her baby had no brain in its head, who would do that abortion even though he knew that he would be vilified and mercilessly attacked for his use of his knowledge and skill on behalf of such a woman.

It's dangerous going out in public when there are people who don't care about facts and circumstances, people like Bill O'Reilly of Fox News who named Dr. George Tiller again and again as a baby killer, using hostile and outrageous language to create an audience so he can make millions of dollars as a media figure. People like O'Reilly don't care that a woman might be carrying a baby without a brain, don't care that without an abortion that woman may never again be able to birth another child.

It's dangerous out in that public world when even religious leaders talk in the same ways as Bill O'Reilly, even bishops and priests of the Catholic Church, spewing venom about anyone who doesn't accept their false view of science. I have come to strongly resent the fact that as a person of faith myself I believe life is a sacred gift of God, but these bishops have the nerve and disrespect to say that if I don't agree with their notion of when life begins I have no respect for life. That is really outrageous.

I personally call upon all such bishops and priests to apologize for the damage they have done and are doing to the moral climate of the nation. It is one thing to disagree, it is another to encourage the calling of names, the demonizing of other people of faith, the attacks on women in the agonizing position of facing an unwanted pregnancy. There is no faith and compassion in such rhetoric, there is only the worst form of self-righteous smugness that is a terrible witness for a church otherwise called to speak of a loving and merciful God.

Dr. George Tiller got killed for his compassion, for doing his job, a Lutheran man. Someone whose mind was filled with hatred walked into a public church and shot him. No matter what the particular motives of he who did this killing, it is those who have been preaching hate and hostility over these many past years who created the moral context for this act to take place in public. It is time those others of us in the church to tell them to stop it. Stop it now in the name of God.

(I have sent this item to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.)


See This Blog

Sex in God's Family
3/8/2009 7:45:40 PM

Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) was a clergyman in Victorian England at the center of the many discussions occurring at the time about sex. Michel Foucault talked about this time in his book History of Sexuality which rejects the still-popular repression hypothesis of Freud. Foucault says the Catholic confessional taught people how to talk about sex. That is, since sin was related to sex in Christian doctrine since Augustine, to confess sins was to be required to put inner thoughts and fantasies about sex into words said to the priest. After centuries of doing this Europeans became pretty good at talking about sex, including in England.

Then Freud comes along later, puts people on the couch and asks them to tell him their deepest thoughts, and the Europeans tell him what the church has taught the culture to talk about in such situations, sex. So then Freud writes his "scientific" account of what lies at the center of the human personality and what is it, sex, of course. This comes into the modern world as the truth, so to really be a human being what is a modern person to do, what is the very nature of human liberation from the repression and suppression of the church, well, it is doing sex, of course. Here is the reason Hollywood has for a long time and still displays sexual release as ultimate fulfillment and sends people off with wildly unrealistic promises of what the physical act can actually deliver.

Halvor Moxnes in an article on Victorian sex doesn't go into the Hollywood stuff, but he does think that Foucault didn't spell out very clearly how this process of talking about sex worked. So he reads up on one of the Victorian clergyman who did a lot of writing about sex, and who engaged in a lot of sex with his wife Fanny, Charles Kingsley. It turns out that the Moxness article on this reveals a lot about where the contemporary fixation on sex and masculinity of the present religious right comes from, as so much of the religious heritage of this country. It comes from old debates about these matters in England.

Kingsley's writings were an effort to justify, it seems, his rather active sex life not for procreation only but also for the pleasure of sex itself which he places within the "love-match" of a married man and woman. This aspect of Kingsley's writings have been affirmed by liberal Christianity in this country which accepts the idea of the goodness of sex for pleasure. But the Catholic Church and religious right in this country have rejected this part of Kingley's thinking, prefering to teach that sex is good only when done for procreation.

What is particularly interesting in the Moxnes article is that Kingsley felt it necessary to atribute sexuality to relations with God, with a focus on the sexual meaning of God as Father and Christ as Husband of the church. And here he focuses on the manliness of the divine figures and their power, which associates power over others with the sexual experience, including also a kind of worldly power. This becomes a kind of political philosophy. The manly God relates to the manly English man who is superior to all others, providing a theological-sexual rationale for the dominance of the English empire over others. It is this sort of thinking that certainly can be associated with the kind of religious right talk we hear today from the television evangelists, who are almost exclusively from the South, an area influenced by religion with an English history.

Moxnes goes into much more about this which can be read in his article. The sexual nature of relations within the family of God has a long history, of course. I have never seen it discussed with such clear implications with current conservative religion.




See This Blog