Enforcing the boundary: Anglicans and Homosexuality
Anglicans faced a new crisis on Monday after the U.S. branch of the church elected a liberal female leader who said she believed homosexuality was no sin and homosexuals were created by God.One English bishop warned that Anglicanism was in danger of splitting into "two religions" after the election in the United States of Katherine Jefferts Schori to lead the 2.3-million-strong U.S. episcopal church.
This is really an old and stale drama, and I barely care about it. Back when I was a Christian, I attended an Episcopal church, and the parish itself was a great place. But conventional Christianity, with some exceptions, is mostly about the panopticon God, now essentially irrelevant to my spiritual concerns.
One would think that positions on war, human rights, economic and environmental justice, ethical government -- the kinds of issues that would seem to resonate with the mythic Jesus -- would be more prominent than the sexual proclivities of a relatively small percentage of individuals. Instead, it is almost a fetish with Christianity to micromanage sexual behavior. When one Christian sect dares to suggest that perhaps energies are better spent focusing on other problems, we have a theological crisis.
Whether you think homosexuality is moral or not is beside the point. Its effects on any society are minor. It is a total nonissue when its destructive potential (if there is any at all) is compared with, oh, say, the Enron scandal or the war in Iraq.
I'm almost sure I'm preaching to the choir here. But I think it needs to be said again. [/end rant]
Labels: politics
posted by slomo at 5:37 PM
3 Comments:
Whether you think homosexuality is moral or not is beside the point...except if you happen to be a homosexual.
The problem is, people who think homosexuality is immoral will never be swayed by arguments. If anything changes their mind, it's knowing a gay person, and even still that doesn't guarantee a complete change in opinion. But I think even rational people who (for what ever reason) have a problem with homosexuality can be swayed by the argument that, whether or not homosexuality is a moral problem, the locus of its effects is very personal. Under no circumstances is it a public issue.
Many gay rights people get emotional when attacked personally. That's reasonable and hardly surprising, but when developing political strategy one cannot afford to be personally offended. The message should be the fact that gay issues are completely, totally, a distraction in the realm of public discourse.
I had an uncomfortable feeling, when the Massachusetts courts allowed gay marriage, that it was going to create a backlash. And it has. In 2004 it created a strong incentive for the "Nazcar dad" and those in thrall to the Dominionists to get out and vote against not only gay interests but their own as well. I'm not criticizing gay marriage here, but rather its untimely introduction into American politics. On the one hand this may seem cowardly (and perhaps it is) but it comes from realistic assessment of the political and social landscape. The United States is not Europe. It's not even Canada.
For the record, I'm gay, so this is not a completely academic issue for me.
Actually, I just came across this article:
Margaret Somerville plans to pick up her honorary degree today at Ryerson University, in Toronto, whether protests materialize or not. [...] [H]er opposition to gay marriage led several student groups and many faculty members to urge that she be disinvited to receive the honor. Somerville is a medical ethicist, holding appointments at McGill’s medical and law schools, and most of her work has nothing to do with gay marriage, but she did testify against it before a Parliamentary committee. [...] In a phone interview from her Montreal office Saturday, Somerville said that her opposition to gay marriage comes out of her work on reproductive technologies. She said she started working on that issue when she was approached by children and adults who were created by artificial means — and that many of them are troubled by the process by which they were brought into the world, and their lack of information about one or more of their biological parents. Somerville said that she worried that gay marriage would lead to challenges to laws she supports that ban cloning and the selling of eggs. She stressed that she backs full civil unions for gay couples and laws that would bar any discrimination against gay people except on the right to marry.
This is an example of a person who has reasonable objections to gay marriage, whether or not I ultimately agree with them. Left-leaning individuals need to chill when the identity politics button gets pushed and take the long view. We aren't going to agree on everything, especially if we stand for freedom-of-ideology.
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