After we announced our “No on Prop 8 Fundraiser” on Friday, Tony and I received a long and impassioned letter from someone on our newsletter mailing list, expressing what I can only describe as distress at our decision. By responding to this reader’s letter here, it is not my intention to embarrass him, or to call him out as a bigot or prejudiced person. His letter was sincere, and comes from his heart. And clearly, if you look around the United States and the rest of the world, he is far from alone in his viewpoint. I am someone who believes that good people can have honest disagreements about very fundamental things, and I think this is as good a time as any to explain my stand on marriage equality. Tony can speak more to the law, I just want to take a moment to talk about love.
A reader writes:
Sexual expressions of love are to be between a husband and wife, EXCLUSIVELY. Inside the marital bedroom between a husband and wife God opens the doorway to a room of eroticism, passion, intimacy, oneness, cohesiveness, release, satisfaction, and completeness that can occur in no other union, position, or place that two humans can share and receive. It is a state that is designed to fully connect husbands and wives in all four phase of the human experience as God intended: mental, emotional, physical and spiritual. You both, as well as, thousands of others want to try to change these truths, eternal laws, gifts, and principles and hold fast to them it is your right given to you by none other than God Himself. Yet, that does not change what He has set forth, commanded (to be followed explicitly), and fully expects His creation to adhere to for our protection, holiness, and pleasure! Call me a bigot or prejudiced if you so desire. I hope and pray you change your position and thinking and stance on this vital issue that can and will affect generations of people. Do I care about the homosexual populace? Yes! But that does not mean I excuse or give blessings to the practices they indulge in, as I no more excuse myself when I cross the line and break God’s precepts. Please work to make your site one that glorifies marital love as God designed it: between a husband (male) and a wife (female)..
See, I think the point of departure is a basic one, and I’m not sure it can really be reconciled. This reader and I simply learned about very, very different Gods.
I was raised in a Christian church with mainline Protestant Christian values. I attended every week with my mother and siblings, studied the Bible, and was Confirmed in my early teens. I’ve always been a studious, nerdy type, and even as a kid, I actually paid attention to the sermons. I don’t consider myself a practicing Christian anymore — my brain is too bent toward science to honestly give myself over to pure faith. But I would say that my foundational sense of ethics is strong, and based largely in what I learned in church as a child. And what I would describe as the key concepts I took away from my years in the pew are things like: love, compassion, fairness, brotherhood, tolerance, and justice. And that’s what I choose to hang onto from the experience of my churchgoing years.
But even though I’m not really a religious person, I’m not a non-religious person either. I’m a quest-for-knowledge-of-all-kinds person, trying to muddle through this life just like everybody else. And what I see is this: Our lives are so disconnected, complicated and lonely, it’s already hard enough to find someone, damn it. It’s hard enough to find the person you want to hold you through bad nights and to soothe your sorrows and to share your triumphs and joys. It’s hard enough to find someone you care about enough to say: You, yes, you. I love you so much I want you to be my family, forever.
The God I learned about, who cares about people and their happiness and who isn’t all obsessed with sin and rules, and mandates and setting people up for failure and misery — that God — of love, and compassion, and fairness, and brotherhood, tolerance, and justice? That God really, really couldn’t care less what gender the person you love is.
And neither do I.
It’s hard enough already.
