Note: I started writing this in the Novato Library yesterday. I wasn't really sure where it was going when I started, but I knew that there was something to it. Around 8:30, I figured out where it was headed... and then the library closed at 9:00. I knew I'd lose it if I packed up and drove home, but I had no choice, and sure enough, when I got home, it was gone. I tried writing more at home to no avail, so I closed my computer, put it under my bed, and decided to sleep on it. No dice. Now, the problem is that, sometimes, when all your chips are in, you just have to take what the cards give you. So I think there are some good ideas in here, to be sure, but I'm not too happy with the last third or the way it resolves itself. But I'm posting it anyways. I invested too much time to leave it on my hard drive somewhere. So I'm sorry, but hopefully whoever (if anyone) reads this stuff will get something out of it...Another note: Cutting and pasting from word into the Blogger form lost all of my italicizing and took out all my paragraph breaks. I didn't bother re-italicizing, and who knows if I put the paragraph breaks back in the right places. Sometimes you just can't win. I'm writing this from a library. It's been a long time since I've been to a non-collegiate library, and I have to say, it's refreshing. I've always felt a bit oppressed in college libraries, because everyone that's there is the same age, and they are all there studying, and it makes college kids seem even more like automatons than they already are. But being in a community library, I see old folks, moms with their kids, teenagers with nothing better to do, etc. It's an actual slice of life. Plus, community libraries actually care about presentation, because they actually care about getting people to enjoy reading, whereas college libraries are just about research. For example, next to where I'm sitting right now is a rotating rack of "Teen Paperbacks." I forgot all about Teen Paperbacks! I can see
The Giver,
Of Mice and Men, and
The Two Towers. When I was a teen, books like those are what made me love to read. Like I said, refreshing.
Anyways, it's taken me a few days to get another blog up after breaking the seal the other night, and that's partially because of I've been busy but also because I really don't want to blog just to be blogging. I like to write about things that are meaningful to me, and I don't want to compromise that.
I guess what I'm saying is that I've actually had something worth thinking about on my mind lately.
Politics and religion have been coming up a lot, and since you aren't really supposed to talk about them and I've had to, I figure it’s only fair that I write about them. When I was at home over the weekend for a belated Father's Day dinner, I had a conversation in which my religious, strictly not-gay father invoked religion in a discussion of gay marriage. Then, when I got back to Berkeley, I had dinner with an a-religious gay friend who invoked his homosexuality in a discussion of religion.
Now, because I have gay friends that are religious and religious friends that support gay marriage, I feel like I've heard a lot of thoughtful arguments about this topic in just about every direction.
And I genuinely don't know what exactly I think about it.
For full disclosure, I have to note that I'm generally a politically apathetic person, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that my exposure to politics, both growing up in a Conservative Christian home and living in Berkeley, has largely been about antagonizing and/or demonizing the other side of the aisle. That just isn't productive, in my opinion. I'm sure it'll be hard to remain apathetic when I get older, but for now, my official policy is to build relationships on a personal level and do what I can to help people out.
That was a long disclaimer, but the point of it was to say that this issue isn't interesting to me on a political level; it is, however, interesting in the way that it embodies some of the struggles that I think the country is dealing with that I think have a lot to do with politics and religion, but aren’t necessarily about them.
Anyways...
When I was talking to my dad about gay marriage, he said that he had no problem with gays getting civil unions, but that he just didn't think that marriage, by definition, was a union between two men or two women. Now, I really don't have a problem with that argument, and my gay friend, when I related the story to him, said that he didn't either. But my dad followed up with something interesting:
"I just wish they didn't always have to drive wedges between people."
That was something I didn't expect. When I asked for clarification, he explained that legalizing gay marriage was obviously going to alienate a certain group of people - namely, religious Americans (be they Christian, Muslim, or whatever, he specified). This was certainly not the group of people that I expected to hear described as "alienated" during a gay marriage conversation.
I'm a contrarian, so I needed something to say in argument. And what I told my dad (and this wasn't a particularly difficult point to come up with), was that I think he has a difficult time separating himself from his own perspective. I explained that while he seemed to think (rightly or wrongly, I really can't say with any authority) that the major argument for gay marriage was equal legal rights, in my experience, a lot of gays simply don’t want to feel like there is something that is by and large unattainable because of their lifestyle choice. And I think the distinction that is central to this argument is that whether marriage was exclusively one man and one woman by definition or not, and whether it had originally been a religious institution or not, it was now a legal institution. And as a result, when individuals feel like they do not have a right to that institution, they feel like that is a wedge. And that was hard for my parents to understand.
I think the existence of these “wedges” begs two questions: must they exist? And who decides where they end up? Both of these questions have a lot to do with some of the underlying struggles that the country faces right now.
So let’s talk about the first question. Clearly, we are talking about different population groups, as there is a difference in terms of sexual preference. What is decidedly less clear is whether or not that difference constitutes a wedge. For supporters of gay marriage, it should not: a union of two people is a union of two people, be they men, women, or both. For others, especially religious conservatives, it should. Compounding the discrepancy is the fact that individuals at both end tend to be very passionate. When my mom overheard my dad and I arguing, her submission was this: "Sometimes, when you make a choice, you have to live with the consequences. And there are absolutes in this world, and our country needs to realize that." I agree with that statement in principal, but the problem is that this debate isn’t about the reasonability of “consequences,” or whether or not there are absolutes, but rather about when and where, legally, we should determine consequences - because we have the power to do so. We, as a nation, get to draw the lines and insert the wedges, and that is a difficult and dangerous task. The religious right considers this issue to be of utmost importance – and they use a term here that captures things really well – when they talk about “Moral Relativism.”
I think Moral Relativism has become a sort of buzzword for the current political divide in this country because, up until probably the 1950’s, we were concerned with being a moral country and by and large were really only exposed to one dominant moral code (which was, let’s be honest, a Christian one). But the 1960’s were a turbulent time, and moving on forward into the present, we have been made aware more and more of deviants from the once-traditional moral standards of the country. I tend to think that’s a symptom of the proliferation of information, which started at roughly the same time.
This proliferation of information has made it increasingly difficult to answer the second question I raised earlier, that of who decides where wedges end up. I’m trying to suggest that, due to TV, the internet, the New Media, Myspace, Facebook, YouTube, etc., it is nigh-impossible to ignore the differences that exist between people. And when people see differences, people draw lines. In the 1950’s, I doubt that homosexuality was any less prevalent than it is today – but it was certainly less known (Michael Foucault has the classic line here, but I can’t remember it exactly, so I’m not going to try and quote it). And that has a hell of a lot of significance. In the past, if our answer as a country was that a wedge should exist, it wasn’t very difficult to figure out where to put it. That’s no longer the case.
I have to go on record here as saying that I don’t think there are a whole lot of new problems in this world. Parents think that kids are more lecherous; Christians think the country’s morality has faded; the list goes on and on. But I don’t think kids are any more libidinous now than they used to be. If anything, it was just repressed more – and I’m not sure that repression makes it “less of a problem.” But something that is new is the multitude of ways that we are made aware of these problems. I think it’s going to turn out to be just another cultural growing pain – like those exhibited in the 1960’s – but we seem, from these eyes, to be doing a terrible job of adjusting.
Yesterday, James Dobson, the prominent evangelical leader of Focus on the Family, criticized Barack Obama for distorting religion in response to (at least as it was reported) Obama questioning “which” or “whose” Christianity would be enforced legally even if we all agreed that US law should be based on Christianity. Obama gave the example of “Al Sharpton’s Christianity” vs. “James Dobson’s Christianity,” but there are many examples that could be given. I think this encapsulates the issues I’ve been trying to discuss. Even within Christianity, moral relativism exists. Furthermore, it’s impossible to be ignorant of the spectrum: we all immediately understand the connotations that Al Sharpton and James Dobson have in regards to “their Christianity.” And that makes it even more difficult to sort through the relativism dilemma.
Our country has seemed to constantly be in a state of upheaval for the years that I’ve been old enough to be aware of it, and I really think the two issues discussed underlie many of the political and cultural struggles we face today. I don’t know how to resolve them. But I know that we must try. I’m politically apathetic because of the antagonism that I’ve experienced in the political arena, and I’ve certainly felt the same antagonism in my religious experience. And in both cases, I really think we’re missing the point.
