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his has been a complicated time for
Gay rights and Gay Marriage. On the one hand, Washington and Maryland joined
the ranks of states that now legally accept it, bringing the number to six, plus
two Native American tribes. On the other hand, when the New Jersey legislature
passed a similar bill, Governor Chris Christie vetoed it.
And on another hand, President
Obama recently came out in support of it and a Circuit Court of Appeals struck
down as unconstitutional the “Defense of Marriage Act,” which had banned it. But
at almost the same time, North Carolina voted overwhelmingly to support an
amendment to their constitution which would effectively ban it.
When I try to make sense out of this,
I think of my mother who passed away a few years ago. I live in Massachusetts
and she lived in Oklahoma and when she grew frail, I could seldom get home to help
her. I felt awful about that, but she did have some wonderful friends who
looked after her, including two old gay guys who lived across the street and
who mowed her lawn, cleaned her gutters, and stopped in now and then to see how
she was doing. They were—as she put it—“rescuing the old ‘widder lady’ in
distress.”
When she finally passed away, I spent
a day walking the street telling her neighbors what had happened and saying good
bye to old friends. When I came to the home of the two men across from her, no
one was there and the insides looked empty, so I moved on to the next house
where I saw a man whose daughter I had dated as a teen. I asked him what had
happened to the guys next door and he said “well that’s an interesting story.”
Evidently new families had moved into the neighborhood who didn’t know the two
men and who were not like the older crowd, and they were upset that everyone had
allowed “queers” to live so close by. Young parents, inspired by teachings of
TV preachers and a nearby mega-church, were worried that these old men might become
a danger to their children. They began organizing and talking to friends, and
finally after several bitter encounters, the two moved away. I asked the
neighbor if they had ever actually done anything wrong and he said no.
Actually, he said, “they were pretty good fellas.” But “they were queer and
all, and they say that’s bad, so I guess it is.”
My own church denomination has struggled
over this. Its public face is very open. We’ve ordained gays and lesbians for
years and in 2005, our national “General Synod” voted to affirm Gay Marriage.
But at a local level, we’ve had thousands leave the church in protest. I lost a
member just this year over it. I casually mentioned to him one day that I had once
performed a wedding for two elderly women who met and fell in love while
playing bridge. And the next day he came into my office and said he was
leaving. He could stand divorce, drinking and obesity (all condemned in the
Bible), but he couldn’t bring himself to worship God in the same building as people
who accepted others whose gender orientation was condemned in the Bible.
At one level I don’t have a
horse in that race. I’m happily heterosexual and have no interest in changing. And,
though I’ve recently experienced a painful failed marriage, so far as I know
the prospect that my mother’s friends might someday apply for a wedding license
had nothing to do with it. But at another level I also can’t imagine the pain
of being driven from my home because of my gender orientation.
The Bible actually says very little
about homosexuality, and some of the references are frankly unclear, and Jesus
is totally silent on it. What he is not
silent on is the need to love all people. Bring in the poor, the hungry, the
outcast, the sick, the aliens, lonely and marginalized. He condemns wealth and
war and oppression, but not two old men who love each other and mow lawns for
neighboring widows.
I was present the year our
church passed the resolution affirming Gay Marriage, and it was tense. After rancorous
study and debates, the majority finally concluded was that no matter how much one
might argue the differentness of Gays
from straight people, they couldn’t quite be convinced of the wrongness of it. How could God create
human beings and then tell them not to love one another?
They took a leap of faith that
day, praying that their actions were discerning the will of a still-speaking God.
And I confess that I agreed with them.
I’ve been encouraged by the
words of a Baptist preacher friend from Dallas who once told me that when he
dies and stands before St. Peter at the pearly gates, and he hears a list of
his lifetime’s sins, he expects to hear a long list. But when all is said and
done, he said he would much rather be judged for being too open minded than too
closed. “If I’m going to make a mistake,” he said, “I suspect God would rather
it be a mistake of loving too many people into the kingdom than too few.”
And, you know, I think I agree
with that too.
