Religion

I grew up in a liberal Episcopal household, and though I’m not a terribly active practicer now, religion (of all faiths and denominations) can be an interesting (and at times, infuriating) topic.

Congratulations Dan Savage and Amy Jenniges!

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About a month ago, Dan Savage wrote a column for The Stranger explaining just how he, a gay man, was able to get a legal marriage license in the city of Seattle. It was pretty simple, actually.

He applied for, and was granted, a license to marry his lesbian friend.

The clerk called over her manager, a nice older white man, who explained that Amy and Sonia couldn’t have a marriage license. So I asked if Amy and I could have one–even though I’m gay and live with my boyfriend, and Amy’s a lesbian and lives with her girlfriend. We emphasized to the clerk and her manager that Amy and I don’t live together, we don’t love each other, we don’t plan to have kids together, and we’re going to go on living and sleeping with our same-sex partners after we get married. So could we still get a marriage license?

“Sure,” the license-department manager said, “If you’ve got \$54, you can have a marriage license.”

…Amy can’t marry Sonia, I can’t marry Terry–why? Because the sanctity of marriage must be protected from the queers! But Amy and I can get a marriage license–and into a sham marriage, if we care to, a joke marriage, one that I promise you won’t produce children. And we can do this with the state’s blessing–why? Because one of us is a man and one of us is a woman. Who cares that one of us is a gay man and one of us is a lesbian? So marriage is to be protected from the homos–unless the homos marry each other.

Is it putting too fine a point on it to say that this is a pretty fucked-up situation?

Dan and Amy got their license, and last week, they got married.

Savage and Jennigs got a marriage license, got married by a minister of the Universal Life Church and plan to file their license with King County, making the marriage legal.

Afterwards the [couple] plan an immediate divorce.

“We are going to try and stay married for about 55 hours and 10 minutes. We are going to just best Britney Spears,” he laughed.

So, congratulations Dan and Amy!

The situation provoked a very interesting discussion on Metafilter which I’ve just spent much of the evening reading through. Lots of well-reasoned, well thought out, intelligent, and passionate arguments in favor of allowing anyone to marry the people they love regardless of which way their genitalia point, and only a couple of people trying to make reasonable arguments against gay marriage (and not doing a very good job, in my opinion). I believe this was one of my favorite posts:

There’s a large set of psychological reactions we have to an associate’s mate. Take the earlier example of a male corporate executive’s partner of twenty five years dying, and the guy having to suffer in silence. It’s not about the time off. It really is about condolences, the understanding, the empathy. You can’t use semantics to erase this; this is a fight for empathy. Gay people are insisting that other humans respect their capacity for deep, abiding love — and those other humans are protesting, because “they’d never marry such a person”.

We cannot have an honest debate without admitting openly that it’s not just about legal rights and that it’s not merely about what a church feels. You can’t legislate condolences — but you can remove the legal rubric that says it’s OK to ignore the love of another.

[…]

If you really want to talk religion, The Creator of the Universe saw fit to breathe the binding fire of love into all mankind — He did not restrict it as a special gift to straights, any more than he did for whites (which would make whites more special) or English speakers (which would make English speakers more special) or the rich. You are familiar with the phrase that God is Love. You need to take a good long hard look at the fact that every time you reject gay marriage, you are denying a love so powerful it is willing to be martyred. That’s far more God-rejecting than anything two people in Love could ever do.

But I don’t really want to talk religion here. Look. I know my viewpoint doesn’t fall into the nice, neat categories of “keep your religion out of my life” vs. “that’s unholy”. But we really need to be honest here — this is a fight for the tiny respects, not just the grandiose ones. It’s a fight for humanization, and it’s one that naturally fought by every single second class citizen throughout history.

iTunes: “Hello I Am Your Heart” by Hickman, Sara from the album Rubáiyát: Elektra’s 40th Anniversary (1990, 2:44).

That’s one kinky rabbit

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Okay, so there isn’t really a lot of connection between the resurrection of Jesus Christ and a magical rabbit that distributes eggs to children…but couldn’t this church have come up with a better way of getting their message across than whipping the Easter Bunny during a church pageant?

A church that put on an Easter show said it was trying to teach about Jesus Christ.

But the people who saw the show say they were upset by performers who broke eggs and pretended to whip the Easter bunny.

People who attended Saturday’s performance of an Easter celebration at a memorial stadium in Glassport, Allegheny County, quoted performers as saying “There is no Easter bunny.”

If I could draw, I’d have all sorts of fun with that combination of elements…I’m thinking something involving furries in S&M gear in front of an altar.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go scour my brain to get rid of that image.

The Heirophant’s Proselytizer Questionnaire

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Ellenoir pointed out a fascinating page that I’d not seen before: The Heirophant’s Proselytizer Questionnaire, one person’s response to being constantly harassed by missionaries of one faith or another trying to “save” or “convert” him.

The Heirophant’s Proselytizer Questionnaire is a series of offensively phrased questions that explain my problems with and objections to the various Christian churches. I originally wrote it in 1997 as a tool that I handed out to the too-numerous proselytes who were crowding at my door, explaining that I would consider entering into a dialogue with them if and only if they could answer each and every question to my satisfaction. …Though I have received numerous responses to the Questionnaire since I wrote it, none has satisfied me enough to tempt me back to Christianity.

The questionnaire itself is a list of 153 questions for the proselytizer to answer before discussion can continue. The author admits in the FAQ that the questions are written in a very aggressive, possibly offensive style…

…It’s meant to be really offensive. If you look at the reasons why I composed it in the first place, you’ll see that my primary motivation was, quite simply, to get proselytes to fuck off when they wouldn’t do so any other way. By setting a condition for them to fulfill before I’d engage in a dialogue with them and by making the condition more trouble than it was worth to most of them, I wound up able to sleep later in the mornings than I’d been able to when I had a constant stream of preachers on my doorstep. Ensuring that the phrasing of the Questionnaire was confrontational and offensive was an integral part of the process of getting people who had essentially nothing to say to me to leave me alone.

As someone brought up in the Episcopal church who still bases many of my core beliefs in the Christian faith (though I’ve certainly had my fair share of questions, concerns, and doubts over the years), I thought the idea was wonderful — and have no problem at all admitting that I would be very hard pressed to answer many (if not most) of the questions posed.

On a personal level, I stand very much in the same camp as the author (along with Ellenoir, too, from what she said in her post): believe anything you want, just don’t try to force your beliefs on me, convince me that you’re “right” and I’m “wrong”, or attempt to frighten me into joining your religion through threats of hellfire and damnation.

This document is not meant as a personal challenge to you or to your beliefs. As far as I’m concerned, you can worship Jesus or be a Buddhist or a Muslim or have sex with Tinky Winky and call that a religion: It’s all the same to me. Really. The HPQ was meant to state my own reasons why I’m not a Christian; it’s not meant to imply that you shouldn’t be one. (There’s a big difference between the two, and many Christians would do well to learn it.) Be a member of whatever religion you want; just leave me alone and don’t push it on me. I’m not knocking on your door asking you to be a Wiccan or a Buddhist or a Satanist or an atheist or a Muslim or anything else that you’re not; all that I ask is that you extend me the same courtesy.

iTunes: “Blasphemous Rumours” by Depeche Mode from the album Blasphemous Rumours (1984, 6:23).

Always look on the bright side of life…

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Have I ever mentioned how much I love Monty Python?

Spurred by the recent success of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”, the Python boys have decided to celebrate the 25th anniversary of one of their films by re-releasing it to the theaters.

Which film?

“The Life of Brian”, of course!

The Biblical satire will be re-released in Los Angeles, New York and other US cities to mark its 25th anniversary.

Adverts will challenge Mel Gibson’s blockbuster with the lines “Mel or Monty?”, “The Passion or the Python?”

Distributor Rainbow said it hoped the film would “serve as an antidote to all the hysteria about Mel’s movie”.

If it hits Seattle, I’m so there.

(via Kirsten)

iTunes: “Ich Bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe Eingestellt (“Falling in Love Again”)” by Burroughs, William S. from the album Dead City Radio (1990, 2:28).

Forecast: cloudy, 67% chance of God

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Hey, all you atheists out there — looks like you’ve only got about a 33% chance of being right. According to Dr. Stephen Unwin, there is a 67% chance that God exists.

Dr Stephen Unwin has used a 200-year-old formula to calculate the probability of the existence of an omnipotent being. Bayes’ Theory is usually used to work out the likelihood of events, such as nuclear power failure, by balancing the various factors that could affect a situation.

The Manchester University graduate, who now works as a risk assessor in Ohio, said the theory starts from the assumption that God has a 50/50 chance of existing, and then factors in the evidence both for and against the notion of a higher being.

(via Neil Gaiman)

‘Under God’ in the Supreme Court

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Following up on the “…under God…” controversy from 2002 and last year, tomorrow the case will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court — with Dr. Michael A. Newdow representing himself in the case.

Newdow convinced a divided three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2002 that the 50-year-old addition to the pledge amounts to government establishment of religion, which is prohibited by the First Amendment. But he will face overwhelming opposition at the Supreme Court.

After the appeals court ruling, the Senate voted 99-0 and the House of Representatives voted 416-3 to reaffirm their support for “under God.” Other high-power individuals and groups have lined up to oppose Newdow.

As I’ve said in the past, I think 9th Circuit Court was correct the first time, and that the constitutionally-mandated separation of Church and State should mandate the removal of “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. However, as our current administration seems to consistently disregard that very separation of Church and State, to the point of claiming religious inspiration for Bush’s actions, somehow I’m not terribly optimistic about the likely outcome of this trial.

If we’re lucky, the Supreme Court will use the custody dispute between Dr. Newdow and the mother of his daughter to allow them to dismiss the case out of hand, and the constitutionality of the Pledge will stay in its current somewhat nebulous state. I’d rather have that as an end result than face a Supreme Court ruling affirming the religious language in the Pledge.

Marriage by the Book, part 2

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Something I pointed out last August seems to be making the rounds again, and now I’m a bit curious as to the original source. It’s a collection of proposed laws for governing marriage, based on Biblical quotations (in response to the many people basing their anti-gay-marriage stance on select Biblical verses, instead of just admitting to homophobia and bigotry).

Here’s what I know of this piece of writing, working backwards.

Today — March 21st, 2004 — Boing Boing posted about it, linking to The Common Good Network, who posted their version on February 4th, 2004.

The Common Good Network gave attribution to The Boston Phoenix, who published a more Massacheussets-specific version of the text between Nov. 28th and Dec. 4th, 2003 under the byline of Mary-Ann Greanier.

However, searching through my archives, I linked to and quoted nearly the identical text on August 26th, 2003, after discovering it through the Ex-Gay Watch via a link from Anil Dash, and linked to the original version (to my knowledge) on Public Nuisance from August 18th, 2003.

While I’m sure that Alex Frantz of Public Nuisance is flattered that his creation is still making the rounds, shouldn’t credit be given where credit is due?

Congratulations Rev. Dammann!

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In a quick update to a story from two posts back…Rev. Dammann has been acquitted!

A lesbian Methodist pastor will be allowed to continue her ministry after she was acquitted Saturday in a church trial over her sexual orientation.

A jury of 13 pastors ruled in favor of the Rev. Karen Dammann, 47, who disclosed three years ago that she was in a homosexual relationship.

Rock on.

Rev. Karen Dammann

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I just found out about this from a headline yesterday, and hadn’t had a chance to look up any of the information until just now, but Bothell, WA has become the centerpoint of what could be a precedent-setting event within the Methodist church, as Rev. Karen Damman is in the midst of a church trial that could end up stripping her of her ordination — because she is a practicing homosexual.

The two reports I’ve found in the Seattle PI are more optimistic than I initially expected, though. While, of course, there’s no guarantee that she won’t be stripped of her ministry, some good points have been raised in the course of the trial.

From Methodists begin trial of gay minister:

In the Old Testament, the four places where homosexuality is addressed must be considered in the context of ancient Israeli civilization, said Kah-Jin Jeffrey Kuan, an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church and associate professor at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif.

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the book of Genesis is about the condemnation of violence and wickedness, not homosexuality, he said. Other instances call homosexuality an “abomination,” a term Kuan said does not carry the weight many attach to it now.

“An abomination is ultimately a practice that is religiously, socially and culturally unacceptable in Israelite society,” he said.

Under cross-examination, Kuan conceded that other scholars interpret the same material differently.

The New Testament scholar said of four instances where the issue of homosexuality appears, all written by the Apostle Paul or his direct followers, only one merits consideration. The others lack a scholarly basis for examination, said Mary Tolbert, who also teaches at the Pacific School of Religion.

Condemnations of things such as divorce are much stronger and are made by both Jesus and Paul, she said. The Methodist Church allows its ministers to divorce.

“It seems to me if you’re going to say one verse in Romans is enough to remove a person, and their calling and all this other stuff is overlooked, then with all due respect, it seems to me you’re acting hypocritically,” said Tolbert, who later asked jurors not to replicate the crucifixion of Jesus by finding Dammann guilty.

And from Scholar challenges church case against gay minister:

A leading scholar on United Methodist law challenged the central point of that church’s entire case against a lesbian minister on trial here yesterday.

“In my considered opinion and judgment, the United Methodist Church has never declared the practice of homosexuality to be incompatible with Christian teaching,” said Jack Tuell, a retired bishop viewed by many as a top authority on the church’s rulebook, the Book of Discipline.

Tuell made the explosive charge during the second day of testimony in the church trial of the Rev. Karen Dammann, a United Methodist minister who has publicly acknowledged that she is in a relationship with another woman.

The trial could end today and, if found guilty, Dammann may be stripped of her ordination.

Counsel for the church said the statement was a powerful challenge to their case, but called the testimony just “one man’s opinion.”

“His opinion is not law. He’s not God. The General Council (the church’s legislative body) has not interpreted any of this the way Jack Tuell interpreted it today,” said the Rev. James Finkbeiner in an interview. He is arguing the case for the church.

I’ll be keeping an eye out to see where this one ends up.

iTunes: “Crablouse, The (It’s There to Stay)” by Lords of Acid from the album Crablouse, The (1994, 5:08).

Just curious

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I sometimes wonder how people would react to a Biblical film cast entirely with actors from that area of the world. I’d love to see the reaction…or, rather, the reactions across different areas of the globe. No matter how good the film was, I’m quite curious as to how (speaking very generically here) middle America and the Bible Belt would react to a Jesus that was swarthy, with dark, short, curly hair — who looked like Jesus probably really looked like, in other words.

In other words, like the people that our government is doing its best to make sure we’re scared to death of.

iTunes: “Natural” by Arrested Development from the album 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life of… (1992, 4:30).