Rachel Held Evans calls on fellow evangelicals to “end the culture war on gays and lesbians.” Relatedly, a survey reported in Baptist Standard finds that by a ten-point margin, respondents would be less likely rather than more likely to visit or join a church if they knew it taught that homosexual behavior was sinful.
Plus, Sarah Bessey: “I’m an evangelical Christian. And I think same-sex marriage should be legal.” And Mark Osler, “The Christian case for gay marriage.” [CNN “Belief Blog”]
The sound you hear is Jay Carney breathing the world’s deepest sigh of relief.
For him, the squirming and hedging and sweating are over. The President is on record supporting same-sex marriage. There is an answer now to the question.
Yes, it’s Obama’s personal view, and yes, he’s said he supported same-sex marriage before, and then wandered afield. But when you’re in any other political office, you can take positions that might play out differently when you’re being asked about the question in the presidential arena. Ask Mitt Romney about health care. Or anything.
Of course I think Obama did the right thing morally. But for those of us who enjoy the chess of politics, I also think it was exquisite strategy. First, after the loss in North Carolina, Obama’s campaign had a convention to worry about. In that place and with that political context, any fudging on the bottom line would have been unacceptable to a lot of conventioneers at best, and could have led to some very ugly protests inside and/or outside the convention hall.
That’s taken care of now. The only possible protests left will come from the motley, disgruntled religious types, who aren’t part of Obama’s base, and don’t figure into a winning electoral strategy for him. Those protests, if they happen, now come under the heading of So What?
And that leads to the bigger point. This is fine politics because it boxes Romney in with the worst part of his party. Karl Rove poisoned the well on this issue, and now Obama is making Romney drink, and drink deeply.
Which Romney promptly did, and from a bigger cup than Obama could have hoped for. Romney said he is not only opposed to same-sex marriage, but to any legal recognition of same-sex couples that approaches marriage equality — just what the worst part of North Carolina gave a big thumbs-up to.
How can Romney now appeal to the 2/3 of Americans who can no longer abide the complete exclusion of same-sex couples and their families from the law? What he is stuck with are the politically tone-deaf, like the American Family Association and the Catholic League, who are so blinded by full marriage equality that they can’t see. . . um, straight. Their hysteria increases in direct proportion to the growing support for full marriage equality, and for the middle ground of civil unions. They are now 2/3 of the way to Spinal Tap’s famous eleven.
There are, of course, a lot of other issues, and an eternity until the election; lots of things are possible. But on this issue, Obama just made his life a whole lot easier, and Romney’s a lot more difficult. Obama has made it clear that he wants no part of the religious right’s intolerance on sexual orientation. That’s a political strategy, and it’s a defensible moral stance. But most of all, it’s got to be nice not to have to pretend you need the kind of votes that Bryan Fischer and the sadly devolved offspring of Billy Graham have to offer.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. Catholic voters seem to view Rick Santorum the same way they view the Catholic hierarchy in general – with indifference. Romney trounces Santorum among Catholic Republicans. Less than half of Catholic Republicans even knew Santorum shared their faith.
That’s probably because their faith teaches them such different things than Santorum’s. The Catholic Church’s leadership is more interested in its crusade against sexuality than in its members. But Catholics are willing to forgive their leaders such peccadilloes. Sexual frustration doesn’t come without some consequences, and American Catholics are nothing if not patient with their hobbled priests and bishops.
The church is not a democracy, as it repeats endlessly. And that is an important point to keep in mind. The church leadership can take even the most extreme stands, and not have to worry much about consequences. It is easy for Catholics to ignore church teachings, and live their lives according to a more reasoned, personal morality, and the dictates of conscience. Church teachings are ultimately advisory.
But civil laws are not. When Catholics back away from Santorum, it is because they seem to understand the separation of church and state in a far more sophisticated way than Santorum and their church leaders do. The government really can ban abortion and contraception, and crack down on same-sex relationships and many other things. The only checks on government power are found in the constitution, and if a candidate is promising to change even that, political ambition can exceed the authority of any church in the modern world.
I say “ambition” because some constitutional changes are simply beyond the reason of the American people – such as a ban on contraception. Even Santorum seems to realize that political reality.
But Americans in general, and American Catholics in particular, demonstrate a moral generosity that exceeds that of their leaders on issues like same-sex marriage and even a secular right to abortion. And lay Catholics seem to recognize that other Americans don’t always have that same compassion and respect for the opinions of others. That is why they cannot back Santorum. He takes the bishops too seriously, and is appealing to people whose views are aligned with the worst, not the best of their church’s morality.
The rejection of Santorum by Catholics is the mark of the vitality of American Catholics. They demonstrate the cardinal (you should pardon the pun) virtue of a democracy, respectful dissent. By prohibiting that dissent among its leaders, the Vatican ultimately inspires, and even encourages individual moral reasoning and sometimes resistance among its members.
Santorum’s Vatican-approved anti-sexual crusade has little appeal among his fellow worshippers, but there will always be some zealots somewhere fervent to light a torch. What are a few doctrinal differences among voters?
Santorum’s only headache — and ours — -is that he’s not running a church, he’s running a campaign.
New York Archbishop Dolan’s recent rant about marriage shows just how bankrupt the other side’s case is.
Thomas Peters (“American Papist”) thinks that the Catholics who support same-sex marriage are just a bunch of phonies, and this makes the Public Religion Research Poll bogus. I’ll leave the question of who counts as a Catholic to the Catholics, but can’t help pointing out that insulting fellow believers for insufficient dogmatism seldom works out well. Plus, just as a demographic matter, if (as Peters suggests) the only real Catholics are the ones in the pews every week, the number of American Catholics is wildly inflated by pollsters, social scientists, and the church, itself.
But Peters doesn’t stop at provoking his fellow Catholics. He goes on to argue that only (only!) 43% of these faux-Catholics support same-sex marriage, and that the higher figure of 74% includes those who support civil unions. Peters says it’s important to draw a distinction:
In other words, the only way LGBT-funded pollsters can get Catholics (again, lumped in with inactive and less active Catholics) to “support” same-sex marriage is to create a false choice between full same-sex marriage on the one hand, and “no legal protection/recognition” on the other.
As soon as you introduce the reality that there are other ways of accommodating homosexual relationships into civil law without redefining marriage, support for same-sex marriage among Catholics drops off again. And yet we still see the headlines, “Catholics support same-sex marriage.”
How could I disagree with him about this false choice? I’m all about the compromise.
The problem for Peters, though, is that one of the few people on earth who is undoubtedly a real Catholic thinks that false choice is the only one. In 2003, Pope John Paul II approved of a document titled, “CONSIDERATIONS REGARDING PROPOSALS TO GIVE LEGAL RECOGNITION TO UNIONS BETWEEN HOMOSEXUAL PERSONS.” Bottom line? “The Church teaches that respect for homosexual persons cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behaviour or to legal recognition of homosexual unions.” This explicitly includes civil unions which you’d think, by their very definition, might fall outside the jurisdiction of Catholic religious doctrine. But it’s right there in black and brown and sepia. These “considerations” were issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and bear the name of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who in recent years has moved up in the organization.
I get a bit hot under the collar when people like Peters invoke civil recognition of same-sex unions, and imply they would support that compromise when, in fact, they won’t (Since Peters claims he’s a Real Catholic, I assume he would follow the teachings of the Vatican on this matter). That has always been the shell game NOM plays, ceaselessly claiming they want same-sex couples to be happy, just not married, and then remaining blithe about the lack of any legal recognition for same-sex couples; they go blank in the eyes at any mention of support for civil unions.
In this, at least, Indiana’s legislature is being honest. They are getting ready to go on the record as prohibiting any same-sex couple in their state from having any legal recognition, marital or otherwise. While state statute already defines marriage as between one man and one woman, this constitutional amendment would make it clear to any uppity judges out there that Indianans won’t tolerate wobbliness.
It’s rarer than it used to be to see such open hostility to same-sex couples. Even politicians who think their constituents want them to be anti-gay are more careful these days, and couch their rhetoric in fashionable tolerance-manque. But Indiana and the Vatican remind us what steel-toed intolerance — the kind that ran rampant in this country for most of the last century — looks like.
Alabama and Florida have new Governors who are actively catering to the Christians in their states. Alabama’s Robert Bentley explicitly appealed to his fellow “brothers and sisters” in Christ, unaware that this could be taken badly by anyone who is not in the family. He was subsequently informed that Alabama does, in fact, have a smattering of non Southern Baptists, and did his best to apologize for any hurt feelings.
Governor Rick Scott in Florida is using his government position to further Christianity in the more traditional way – behind the scenes. His new Secretary of the Department of Children and Families is David Wilkins, who also serves as Finance Chairman for Florida Baptist Children’s Homes, which describes itself as an “organization dedicated to providing Christ-centered services to children and families. . .” That’s hardly surprising for a Baptist organization. Wilkins test will come when he has to deal with citizens who are not seeking Christ-centered services.
This certainly doesn’t bode well for same-sex couples in Florida. Gov. Scott has said that adoption should be limited to married couples, using the traditional formulation to exclude homosexuals without saying so. This goes against a state appellate court ruling, which overturned Florida’s unique-in-the-nation rule prohibiting adoption (but not foster parenting) by anyone who is homosexual, and against simple arithmetic, with the number of children needing adoption, on one side of the equation, and the number of married couples willing to adopt, on the other.
These new governors will be pushing the limits of the distinction between Christians and “Christianists,” the term Andrew Sullivan coined to describe Christians who go beyond believing in and acting on their faith, and attempt to impose it on believers and nonbelievers alike through civil law.
They may want to exercise some caution. The First Amendment to the Constitution protects religion from state coercion, but it does something else as well: it protects religions from one another. That’s not necessarily a constitutional matter, but it’s at least as important. You don’t have to search very hard to come up with examples of religions that hold government power in various nations and leverage their power to disadvantage people of other religions.
But that’s nothing compared to the leverage religious believers have over different sects of their own religion. Just because Shiites and Sunnis are both Islamic doesn’t mean they have the same view of religion, or of the state. In fact, divisions within religions may be more intractable and emotionally held than broader religious differences. Henry VIII didn’t fight Rome in order to start a Jewish sect; he felt he was every bit as much a Christian as the corrupt boys on the continent, possibly more so.
Religion can be a special case of epistemic closure. Belief is so personal and interior that it’s easy to lose perspective, or fail to appreciate that others believe very, very different things at their very core, not only about obvious politicized issues, but about God’s grace, itself, and God’s own identity.
And that’s not just true across religions, but within individual sects. Governor Bentley’s Southern Baptist brothers and sisters belong to one of many dozens of Baptist denominations that aren’t always in complete harmony. There are enough Presbyterian denominations that Wikipedia has to alphabetize them.
And individual believers are even more varied. It’s easy to forget that Al Sharpton is a Baptist minister, and that Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Warren Beatty are all Baptists as well. Catholics are fairly unique in having a single, institutional voice to guide them – one which is widely ignored by actual, practicing Catholics in so many particulars, high among them gay marriage.
The First Amendment is a reminder that a government which can not command religious belief has to be cautious of religious reasoning, itself, which inevitably leads to so many different, but firmly held conclusions. Gov. Bentley’s religious belief is clearly not something he holds lightly, but even in Alabama, it shouldn’t be surprising that in the civil arena, its assertion by the state’s leading political figure is viewed in political terms. Gov. Scott can certainly rely on a large cohort of religious believers who oppose any legal recognition of same-sex couples, but he is not the Minister of Florida, he is its governor.
And homosexual citizens are among his constituents. Religions have the power to deny membership to anyone they wish, but states are different. Christianist governors (and other powerful religious politicians) can’t ignore or exclude lesbians and gay men from the society; they can only use power to rig their rights. And as the non-religious reasons for doing so collapse under ordinary scrutiny, the religious motivations are exposed not only to secular review, but examination by other competing religions and religious thinkers as well.
Those religious debates have both enlightened and inflamed centuries of human progress. But they have not combined well with secular government. The First Amendment has stood as an excellent guardrail between our nation and a noxious religious nihilism. Its wisdom is still evident.
One of the reasons antigay opinion has been eroding in this country is that the (primarily) religious opponents of equality have become so melodramatic and quixotic in their rhetoric, driven by what looks like a maniacal sense of persecution that reasonable observers can’t possibly take seriously. The distance between observable reality and the comic overcharacterization of that reality is leaving decent people who might not otherwise have made up their mind giving us the benefit of the doubt. Lesbians and gay men may not all be models of rectitude and moderation, but at least we have some respectable arguments to make that seem to reflect a recognizable real world.
A good example of the self-dramatized hyperbole comes from Tony Perkins. He has been peddling this line recently, about the danger of the Prop. 8 ruling: “If this case stands, we’ll have gone, in one generation, from 1962, when the Bible was banned in public schools to religious beliefs being banned in America.” I heard him make this case at TheCall in Sacramento last weekend, and he is now selling it on religious broadcasts as well.
His grievance is with Judge Walker’s 77th Finding of Fact, which Perkins correctly quotes: “Religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful or inferior to heterosexual relationships harm gays and lesbians.” Perkins doesn’t add that the finding is accompanied (as any proper trial court finding of fact would have to be) by citations to the record at trial – 18 of them – supporting the conclusion. Perkins does complain that Judge Walker ignored all the facts presented by his side, but his real argument is with the lawyers and witnesses who defended Prop. 8, who didn’t exactly offer up a buffet of evidence for the judge to pick from.
Fact #77 doesn’t stand alone (there are 79 other findings of fact, every one also supported by numerous citations to the evidence at trial), nor would its absence make any difference in the conclusions of law the judge reaches. Perkins cherry-picks that one fact only because it is the one that can be massaged to fit into his persecution.
Even if you believed that civil marriage equality would somehow affect religious believers (because some of them might see the conflict more clearly between what their religion professes and what the civil law accepts), or would even undermine some religions (to the extent that opposing homosexuality is part of the infrastructure of their morality), it is hard to see how this would lead to “religious beliefs being banned in America.” The same first amendment that prohibits the teaching of particular religions in public schools (without “banning” Bibles, by the way — yet more of the melodrama) also protects religious believers in the exercise of their religion, however much those beliefs differ with civic policy. Just because Perkins would not be able to prohibit same-sex marriage laws does not mean he is not allowed to believe, preach, or even ban within his congregation same-sex marriage or divorce or abortion or eating meat on Fridays.
It is, I’m sure, a disappointment for these religious believers to hear that their beliefs about the sinfulness of homosexuality are viewed differently by others. But how insular would your worldview have to be to be surprised by that? Certainly, they believe they are loving us by trying to steer us to an inner heterosexuality (or celibacy) that will better serve our long-term spiritual needs. But is it such a shock to learn that non-believers could find that presumptuous and condescending, and even a little bit injurious?
Harm alone doesn’t amount to a constitutional violation, and people who think they’re helping me are as free to hurt me in this way as I suppose I hurt them by saying that I think they hold wrong and harmful positions. The only reason they’re losing support is because they have so successfully blinded themselves to the idea that differences of opinion – even, and maybe especially religious opinion – is OK. That’s just a fact.