 by other religious people as being totally misguided and maybe not a true follower of God.
For example, in a recent review of Dave Myers’ and my new book, What God Has Joined Together? A Christian Case for Gay Marriage, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, wrote: “Their book offers positive proof that what drives proponents of same-sex marriage is a psychological worldview that is directly at odds with the worldview of the Bible.”[.
We’ve been here before
Over the ages, religious faiths have experienced such arguments again and again when it comes to questions of social change. One example is how the Bible was used to justify slavery. It’s an example analogous to what is happening today when some people are using the Bible to discriminate against gay and lesbian people, who are asking nothing more than to be treated with the dignity due all human beings.
During the 19th century, clergy, professors, and others who supported slavery argued that they alone such verses quoted by those who used the Bible to justify slavery in the U.S. in the 19th century, and they found far greater numbers of verses about slavery than the handful of biblical passages that are used to deny equal rights to gay and lesbian people today – the verses that have come to be known as the “clobber verses.”
So the question becomes, How do we, as people of faith, use our faith to promote inclusiveness and the rights of all persons, regardless of sexual orientation? How can we be supportive of LGBT efforts to gain marriage rights, assurance of nondiscrimination in housing and jobs, legislation to have sexual orientation included among categories listed in hate crime legislation, and so on—and homosexual persons as sisters and brothers created in the image of God.., and humility.
Justice
Justice is an important religious principle that must be taken very seriously in discussions of marriage equality for LGBT people. Yet, sadly, some people who profess to love and serve God fail to see that justice is a religious value and a family value.
An owner of a business was invited to lead a workshop on Christian business ethics as far as the businessman was concerned, this woman’s partner was not her next of kin and therefore she did not deserve a family medical leave.
Not only did this successful business executive fail to show simple human kindness, but he had no sense of the injustice of his denial of this woman’s request. She had given her time, energy, and dedication in service to that company to the same extent or more as did her hypothetical heterosexual counterpart who would have been granted medical leave for an ill spouse.
Marriage equality is a justice issue and thus it is a religious issue and should be of concern to people of faith. It has to do with freedom to choose one’s own life partner, a freedom that most of us would consider quite basic. Of course, it hasn’t always been that way even among heterosexual persons in our own country, one of the most writes:
Lesbians and gay men seek legal marriage for some of the same reasons ex-slaves did so after the Civil War, to show that they have access to basic civil rights. The exclusion of same-sex partners from free choice in marriage stigmatizes their relationship, and reinforces a caste supremacy of heterosexuality over homosexuality just as laws banning marriages across the color line exhibited and reinforced white supremacy. (Public Vows, p. 216)
This is why it is a justice issue. But it’s far more than symbolic of equality. It has to do with the practical matters of everyday life, the more than a thousand federal statutory provisions that confer protections, privileges, rights, and benefits which are determined by marital status. As Dave Myers and I wrote in our book, What God Has Joined Together: The Christian Case for Gay Marriage: [6]
What do you think: Should life partners Jim and Tim or Meg and Peg, like their married next door neighbors, Bill and Jill, be able to
- file joint tax returns?
- leave an inheritance to one another tax free?
- make life-and-death decisions if the other is incapacitated?
- be included on one or the other’s health insurance plan?
- be granted family leave or bereavement leave in the case of the other’s illness or death?
- have co-parental rights so that both partners are considered parents of their children in all situations?
- have hospital visitation rights/
- receive spousal discounts from auto clubs or other organizations offering family rates?
- have a legal system for equitably dissolving their relationship should it end?
Note that this is not an issue of “special rights,” but of equal rights conveyed by marriage. Unlike cohabitation, domestic partnerships, and even civil unions (each of which are separate from and unequal to marriage) same-sex marriage entails the same rights for all married couples,” regardless of sexual orientation. (pp. 118-119)
It’s a matter of basic fairness.
What then does God require of us? To do justice.
Compassion
To do justice. And to love mercy, loving-kindness, compassion. Justice and mercy go hand in hand. These are religious issues, and people of faith must face them today.
Some people resent such calls for justice and compassion. They’d like to feel comfortable and not bothered by having injustices pointed out to them.
Speaking out for justice and compassion
I’m reminded of a story my son Steve told me years ago when his first son (and my a tug.
One day, as Steve was speedily shoving Bryan’s shoes on, he was startled to hear a tiny voice pipe up: “Stop it! It hurts!” Steve told me he smiled as he told his wife, Karen, about the incident. He said to her, “You know, it was easier before he learned to talk.”
Maybe it was easier, too, for many people before gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people and other minority groups found their voices and began speaking out, challenging the dominant culture. In an article condemning social acceptance of same-sex marriage, Charles Colson wrote, “Homosexuality was once called ‘the love that dare not speak its name.’ Nowadays, it won’t kept quiet” (Breakpoint, online,July 29, 2003).
But the message of all groups who have experienced discrimination is the same as Baby Bryan’s “Stop it! It hurts!” It hurts to be joked about. It hurts to be considered a stereotype. It hurts to be ignored. It hurts to be told you’re unacceptable. It hurts to be lied about. It hurts to be denied access to economic rewards and power. It hurts to be denied basic rights.
It hurts to be told God condemns you and doesn’t want you to serve in ordained ministry, no matter how devoted to God you are. It hurts to be mocked and ridiculed and laughed about. It hurts not to be taken seriously. It hurts to have to live in fear of losing your job or losing a friend or being rejected by your family or even losing your life. It hurts to know you might be beaten up or even killed because of who you are and whom you love. STOP IT! IT HURTS!
It is hearing that message with our hearts as well as our heads that can stir up compassion among us as people of faith.
True compassion equals empathy
True compassion is synonymous with true empathy, which comes from the Greek words for “feeling with” – in other words, imaging ourselves and our own feelings if we were in the situation of someone else, so that we can truly love our neighbor as ourselves and do unto others as we would have them do unto us. There is a sense of solidarity – that what is happening to that other person is also happening to me.
In his book, A Spirituality Named Compassion (ch. 1), Matthew Fox has written, “Compassion is not altruism, but self-love and other-love at one.”[7]
He also emphasizes that pity and compassion are not the same. “Pity connotes condescension,” Fox says, “and this condescension, in turn, implies separateness—[the idea that] ‘I feel sorry for you because you are so different from me.’”
There is also the implied sense of regarding the other as inferior. He quotes the late Gestalt therapist Frederick Perls as warning that “most of what passes muster as pity is actual disguised gloating.” Fox quotes another author’s observation that sometimes there is an underlying element of “sadistic glee in the afflictions of others.’”
(An example of that was the shameful reaction of numerous religious people at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic that first showed up among gay men in the 1980s. Some religious people seemed to take pride in claiming that this was proof positive of God’s disapproval of homosexuality and God’s punishment of homosexual people.)
Fox says the “surest way of discerning whether one has pity towards or compassion with another is to answer this question: Do you celebrate with this same person or these same people?” (p. 3)
Clearly, many religious people, who claim to operate on a “hate the sin but love the sinner” philosophy and insist they love homosexual persons, nevertheless would never dream of celebrating the joy of these two persons as they speak their wedding vows to each other. persuaded that in time “love will find a way,” too, for those men and women who want to seal their commitment in marriage to their same-sex partner. But in the meantime, many people will use religion to ridicule the idea and imply that it is absurd to think of such love between two women or two men. Or that it is a religious duty to deny