Pride and
Prejudice: Sexual Justice and Unitarian Universalism
Reverend Doctor Gaye W. Ortiz
Unitarian
Universalist Church of Augusta
June 2, 2013
What were you
doing a couple of weeks ago, on the evening of Friday May 17th? It
was a nice evening, we had some showers in the Augusta area, but really didn’t
get the storms that were forecast.
Well, that
evening in New York City, a 32-year old gay African-American man named Mark
Carson was
walking down a street when a man came up to him and his friends, yelled
"faggot" and "queer," and shot him in the head.
That evening I’d just returned from a wedding rehearsal - for a man and
woman who had no problem falling in love and dating, going out in public as a
couple, arranging their marriage and inviting family and friends, having a
minister help them through the rehearsal of their vows; no problem in expecting
to live happily ever after when the next day they would be pronounced husband
and wife.
But the horrific death of Mark Carson – who presumably was killed
because he dared to be himself – is not an isolated incident: it’s part of a
pattern of anti-GLBT violence in New York City and around this country. “As of [last weekend], New York City has been home to nine anti-LGBT
violent hate crimes this month, and 27 this year — almost double the rate of
last year, which saw a double-digit increase over the previous year.” (http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/26/americas-top-catholic-calls-for-renewed-wave-of-anti-lgbt-sentiment/)
An online news article in The Raw Story last Sunday had a striking headline: “America’s top Catholic
calls for renewed wave of anti-LGBT sentiment.” The
article credits Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops, with the writing of a bulletin insert delivered
to parishioners around the nation that warns that “the Supreme Court could be
preparing to affirm marriage equality.” The Cardinal urges an “outpouring of
anti-LGBT sentiment and sermons to push back against the potential change.” And
“while other stridently anti-LGBT groups like the Family Research Council and
the National Organization for Marriage are denouncing the violence in New York,
Cardinal Dolan’s move in the opposite direction is puzzling.
And as we await the decision of the Supreme Court on
Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act, keep in mind also that in 1996,
for a
case concerning protection offered to gays by antidiscrimination laws, Justice Antonin Scalia
wrote in
a dissenting opinion that opponents of equality are “entitled to be
hostile toward homosexual conduct” (Chris Edelson, “The Murder of Mark Carson,” http://www.counterpunch.org/ )
June is the
month of both Augusta Pride and the Unitarian Universalist Association’s
General Assembly. This morning I want to explore how our faith community can
live in to the call to stand up to homophobia and stand up for reproductive
justice. You might
think those are two very different issues and of course, they are – but they
come under one umbrella heading, sexual justice.
Sexual
Justice
It’s not the
best term – and language is important, we know that – but maybe we can tease
out what it is that makes it an appropriate term to use and why we need to
fight – yes, a very aggressive word – fight for equal rights and justice for
all.
We can fight using our first principle, in affirming the inherent
worth and dignity of every person. We can use it to stand firmly on the side of
love. And that means rejecting not just hurtful and sometimes deadly homophobic
attacks, but also rejecting ‘casual homophobia’, which is the use of derogatory
language that we hear in much of our everyday communication. It might be
unintended, but the use of terms like ‘faggot’ and ‘that’s so gay’ in everyday
language can continue to promote the alienation and injury that so many of our
LGBT sisters and brothers have endured. These are terms that are used freely in
our high schools, and so bringing our children into the conversation about
homophobia and opening their eyes to the power of language is something we all
should commit to doing.
Just have a look at the website NoHomophobes.com, set up by the
University of Alberta to actually track, in real time, the use each day of
these homophobic terms on Twitter. I went to the site when preparing my sermon: by the time I sat down to
look at it that day after lunch, the term ‘faggot’ had already been used in
tweets more than 14,000 times, and ‘so gay’ almost 5000 times; 2 hours later
‘faggot’ had been used over 2000 more times – ‘so gay’ about 150 times more. As
one observer to the site commented, “In isolation, one instance of ‘faggot’
might simply offend. In aggregate, the numbers are dizzying.”
Maybe we aren’t too surprised, and maybe we can look
back to see that the acceptance of gay life in the USA, especially in the
political arena, is a very recent thing. Just 40 years ago, homosexual acts
were illegal in every state but Illinois, lesbians and gays were banned from
serving in the federal government, and there were no openly gay politicians.
According to an article by Alex Ross in the
New
Yorker, if in 1969 you looked in the best-selling book
Everything You
Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask you would find the
assurance from author David Reuben that
“if a homosexual who wants to renounce
homosexuality finds a psychiatrist who knows how to cure homosexuality, he has
every chance of becoming a happy, well-adjusted heterosexual.” (
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/11/12/121112fa_fact_ross),
But we don’t have to go all the way back to 1969 – just this
week Apple
iTunes Store and Google Play made available an app called "Setting
Captives Free" - a 60-day
course telling gay people they are not "born this way" and offers to help find "freedom from the
bondage of homosexuality" (http://www.allout.org). After 24 hours
and 37,000 requests (mobilized by the equality organization All Out) Apple
removed the app from iTunes.
“Major health organizations like American Psychiatric Association and
Pan-American Health Organization, as well as many governments, have denounced
all gay 'cure' practices as dangerous and discriminatory.” There's overwhelming
evidence – including from people who are members of our congregation - that
these so-called treatments can cause terrible harm to anyone forced to try to
change who they are or who they love.
Thirty years ago, as the AIDS
panic was spreading across the world and thousands of gay men were dying, Larry
Speakes, the Reagan administration spokesman at a press conference, was asked
what the president’s response was to the announcement by the Center for Disease
Control that AIDS was now an epidemic. His reply was, “What’s AIDS?” When told it was known as the
‘gay plague’ and that one in three people contracting the disease was dying
from it, Speakes joked, “I don’t have it, do you?”
Because of the tragedy of
the AIDS epidemic, the idea of same-sex marriage gained traction. The exclusion
of gay partners from hospital visits, healthcare decisions and funeral
arrangements, as seen in the movie Philadelphia
starring Tom Hanks, added to the trend toward monogamous relationships and led
to a movement for marriage equality. The religious right has fought this idea
every step of the way, and it still has a lot of influence on political issues,
and we also remember the controversy over Chick Fil-A funding of anti-gay
groups just last year. But with Election Day last year, a shift began to take
place in the political will of the American electorate.
As of this month, according to the Marriage Equality
website, “50% of Americans
live in 22 states (or counties or cities) that recognize various forms of
legal relationships, but 30 states ban all forms of marriage except
one-man-one-woman couples” (http://www.marriageequality.org/current-status-map
). If we want to work for equal rights, then
all this is encouraging. It could be that the times, they are a changin’…
Reproductive Justice
I always say that I am alive at the best time ever, straddling two
centuries with tremendous change and enormously important things being
discovered; a time when attitudes and beliefs are being challenged by new
knowledge and thinking; and of course a time when we had the Beatles! And when
people look back at the 20th century from the vantage point of, say, 500 years
on, they might remember the 1900s for three big things:
It’s worth listening to what she had to say in the midst of the 2012
election season, when we saw the ‘war on women’ waged by right-wing politicians
and broadcasters. Robinson’s argument goes like this:
Until…
hormonal fertility control came along, anatomy really was destiny —
and all of the world’s societies were organized around that central fact. Women
were born to bear children; the vast majority of women who’ve ever lived
on this planet were tied to home, dependent on men, and subject to all kinds
of religious and cultural restrictions designed to guarantee that they bore
the right kids to the right man at the right time…
Men,
in return, thrived… They got full economic and social control over our bodies,
our labor, our affections, and our futures.
They got to make the rules,
name the gods we would worship, and dictate the terms we would live under.
In most cultures, they had the right to sex on demand within the marriage,
and also to break their marriage vows with impunity —
a luxury that
would get women banished or killed. As long as pregnancy remained the defining
fact of our lives, men got to run the whole show. The world was their party,
and they had a fabulous time.
Thousands
of generations of men and women have lived under some
variant of
this order, going back to where our memory of time ends. Look at it this way,
and you get a striking perspective
on just how world-changing it was when,
within the span of just a few short decades in the middle of the 20th century,
all of that suddenly ended. For the first time in human history,
new technologies
made fertility a conscious choice for an ever-growing number of the
planet’s females. And that, in turn, changed everything else.
With
that one essential choice came the possibility, for the first time,
to make a
vast range of other choices for ourselves that were simply never within reach
before for so many women. Contraception was the single necessary key that
opened the door to the whole new universe of activities that had always been
zealously monopolized by the men — education, the trades, the arts, government,
travel, spiritual and cultural leadership,
and even (eventually) war
making.
And,
over time, it has had the effect of bringing a louder and prouder female voice
into the running of the world’s affairs at every level… the effect of bending
our understanding of what sex is about, and when and with whom we
can have it -- a wrinkle that created new frontiers for gay folk as well.
And Sara Robinson argues that contraception may well prove to be “the
one breakthrough most responsible for the survival of the human race, and the
future viability of the planet.”
But, a global majority of men has not welcomed this new universe, the
end of the male monopoly! They are increasingly “confused, enraged, and
terrified by it…and they’re doing their damndest to put a stop to it all, right
now, and make it go away.”
The core of the worldwide rash of patriarchal fundamentalist religion,
Robinson says, is desperate to get women back under firm control. Its range of
tactics vary, from extremes like the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
shooting a teenage girl who dared to speak out about the benefits of education
for girls, to the Roman Catholic bishops getting into a row with the nuns on a
bus, and the media uproar over the Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke.
Robinson reminds us that because women have embraced their liberation
for the past few decades, “it feels like we’ve had this right, and this
technology of contraception, forever. We take it so completely for granted that
we simply cannot imagine that it could ever go away. It leads to a sweet
complacency: birth control is something that’s always been there for us, and
we’re rather stunned that anybody could possibly find it controversial enough
to pick a fight over.”
But take the longer view, Robinson urges us: “We’re only 50 years into a
revolution that may ultimately take two or three centuries to completely work
its way through the world’s many cultures and religions.”
Our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will, in all likelihood, still
be working out the details of these new gender agreements a century from now;
and it may be a century after that before their grandkids can truly start
taking any of this for granted. Robinson continues:
Male
privilege has been with us for — how long? Ten thousand years?
A hundred
thousand? Mass access to reliable contraception, in the mere blink of
an eye in historical terms, toppled the core rationale that justified that entire
system. And now, every aspect of human society is frantically racing to catch
up with that stunning fact. Everything will have to change in response to
this — families, business, religion, politics, economics…everything.
Robinson warns that [Patriarchy] “will be marshaling its vast resources
to get every last one of Pandora’s frolicking contraception-fueled demons back
into the box. And we need to accept and prepare for the likelihood that
much of the history of this 21st century, when it’s finally written,
will be the story of our children’s ongoing struggles against the organized
powers that intend to seize back the means of our liberation, and turn back the
clock to the way things used to be.”
The fight for contraception is not
only not over,” Robinson concludes — “it hasn’t even really started yet.”
The War on Women
So maybe the timely choice of Reproductive Justice as a Congregational
Study/Action Issue for the next four years, as voted on at last year’s
Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly, is pretty understandable.
Because we have a proud 50-year history of reproductive rights advocacy, and
because we declare a commitment to social justice that is fundamental to our
theology and to our UU identity. Reproductive justice is about empowering women
“to realize their rights and to take control of their own destinies” (Rev. Harry
Knox, Religious Coalition for Reproductive Justice message)
So, Unitarian Universalists can confront the “chilling political debate
on reproductive rights with calls for reproductive justice and respect for the
fullness of every person’s reproductive and sexual life. The 2012 election and
‘war on women’ are not as much a political argument over information and
misinformation as a conflict of values about life, sexuality, and religious
freedom. We must be prepared to respond to this conflict as progressive people
of faith” (UUA Curriculum Brief).
According to a report by the Guttmacher Institute, legislatures across
the country are busy trying to “restrict sex education, availability of
medication, and abortion access for women.” Almost half of these 694 provisions
are related to abortion, and all of the ones banning abortion prior to
viability are in direct violation of US Supreme Court decisions. But if that is
not stopping them, states are also not bothered – in this period of economic
fragility - by the expense of legal battles once these proposals become law and
are challenged:
The effect of these laws, should they stand, are much more severe for
rural and low-income women, and women of color, becoming, in effect, a neo-Jim
Crow type of segregation in reproductive health care. Women who have money and
resources will always have access to abortion, but restrictions make it much
harder for women who are poor. Gloria Feldt, former president of the Planned
Parenthood Federation of America, reminds us that “Abortion is just the tip of
a much larger ideological iceberg about women’s place in the world.” (Reproductive
Rights Receding More Quickly for Some Women: A Review of "Crow After
Roe"http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/16264-reproductive-rights-receding-more-quickly-for-some-women-a-review-of-crow-after-roe )
However, if there is an upside to the Guttmacher report, it could be
that some states are beginning to move toward prevention of unplanned
pregnancies through sex education. Five states, including Colorado, which is
considering banning abstinence-only instruction “because it is more harmful
than effective”, are falling into line with popular opinion and seeing the
benefits of sex education.
Sexual Justice and Unitarian Universalism
Now, here is where we as Unitarian Universalists can come in. We are
good at this; we’ve got this covered. In the year 2000, the Unitarian
Universalist Association joined with the United Church of Christ in publishing Our Whole Lives, a multi-volume lifespan
sexuality education program. This congregation, for example, has for years sent
volunteers to become trained instructors in OWL for all age ranges, and has
offered OWL courses.
And of course, this congregation is a designated Welcoming
Congregation. So the language of the UUA’s Reproductive Justice curriculum
should sound familiar to us: We must be prepared to respond to this situation as
progressive people of faith, and live in to our values concerning life,
sexuality, and religious freedom.
So the call for reproductive justice is one that we can answer, here
in Augusta, as well as in other congregations across this country. Because we
know the value of education. We can educate on the values we stand for:
self-worth, sexual health, responsibility, justice and inclusivity.
Unitarian Universalist martyrs like Viola Liuzzo and the Rev. James
Reeb gave their lives in the civil rights struggle. Now, the struggle for equal
rights has involved civil rights veterans, like Julian Bonds. He was at
the forefront to promote marriage equality legislation in Illinois, calling
citizens to say, “Gay and lesbian
couples have the same values as everyone else: love, commitment and stable
families. They should have the same right to marry as the rest of us.”
Our
designation as a Welcoming Congregation – and to those very values of love,
commitment, and stable families - demonstrates that the Unitarian
Universalists of Augusta practice what they preach; that we may work to make
small changes, but that big changes come out of that work; and that we are the
leaders of change that benefits not only our faith community, but the larger
community of this country and indeed, the world.
Some of us will take part in Augusta Pride, and
some of us will attend GA and bring back resources on Reproductive Justice that
we can use here. Some of us here may not yet have engaged with the issues I’ve
talked about this morning.
Many of our younger folks may follow George Takei, who posted
this last week on Facebook: “The next time you feel fatigue from hearing about
LGBT issues, ask yourself this: Do we live yet in the kind of society where
violence, hate and prejudice is not an issue? Until we do, be part of the
solution, and stand always for justice and equality for all people.” (George
Takei on Facebook post 5/28/2013)
The struggle for civil rights will still go on,
led by determined people. It is not over. It is still a fight. I used that word
a few minutes ago: ‘fight’ is a word that could mean we have to stand up
against an antagonist, maybe trade punches, maybe get down and dirty. As much
as we would like not to fight – because, after all, Holly Near calls us a
‘gentle, angry people’ – still we need to be ready to fight for justice.
Jay Michaelson, in a recent Huffington Post article, says that the
anti-gay murder of Mark Carson should be a wake-up call:
The
advent of civil rights for African Americans did not end racial violence, still
widespread nearly 50 years after the Civil Rights Act. Feminism has not ended
violence against women. Indeed, from Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall,
to echo President Obama's historic turn of phrase, legal inequality is
only the tip of the iceberg. Submerged beneath it are deep-seated patterns of
injustice, privilege, prejudice and fear.
In
an astonishingly short period of time, homophobia has gone from
commonplace
to contemptible. To take but one example, star athletes are today
punished for saying a word - "faggot" -- that was one of the most common
slurs of 'trash talk' just five years ago. …
We are a Welcoming Congregation; that means we
have to turn around and face the outside world, not just stay in here listening
to stories about bears. We can live in to our commitment to stand on the side of love; we can
take on this call to action to work for sexual justice in our lifetime, so that
our grandchildren will not have to fight this battle again.
We say that we are a beacon of liberal religious
freedom. We need to be the lighthouse for people who are still afraid to come
out, to claim their identity, to even explore their identity; we can each be
the lighthouse for people who need us to welcome them:
They’re out there, right now, looking for you,
As it gets darker, shine brighter, be the
lighthouse,
become the eternal light, Be the lighthouse.
(Steve Coffing, "Be the Lighthouse," http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/Be_The_Lighthouse.html)
May we be the ones that make it so, Blessed Be, Amen.
- Reverend Doctor Gaye Williams Ortiz
June 2 2013
