DOMA
In The Name of God
In Jesus' Name
The recent focus on the upcoming challenge to the 1996 Defense
of Marriage Act in the U.S. Supreme Court has a raft of
politicians and preachers (most notably last week’s CPAC
Republican Homophobe Convention, former President Bill Clinton
disavowing DOMA, which he signed into law, and GOP heavyweight
Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) sounding off on the right of same-sex
couples to marry. This, to me, is a heinous and appalling debate
harking back to the long and tragic years of foot-dragging by
whites in this country to simply grant all people—regardless of
race or gender—the exact same rights as anyone else. Who are we
to debate whether or not to grant a specific right or set of
rights to a specific class of people? A right is, by definition,
something we are, by virtue of our humanity, deserving of. You
don’t vote to grant rights to a minority class. They are
Americans, human beings, ten fingers and ten toes. There must be
absolutely no question or debate about whether or not any one
group of people should be “granted” the same freedoms and
protection as any other.
The fact this nation actually needed to amend its own
Constitution to actually say that—that everybody has the same
rights—speaks directly to the racist and sexist nature of the
dominant class of people who wiped out this nation’s indigenous
race and dragged our ancestors here in chains. These thoughtful,
reasonable, God-fearing people have a terrible evil so deeply
embedded in their cultural DNA that they actually had to write
that down—all people are people, all people are entitled to the
same rights—a wholly ridiculous idea to commit to paper as any
child could tell you that.
The title of the Defense of Marriage Act is wholly ridiculous as
this heinous law portends to protect the institution of
marriage. First of all, protecting a religious sacrament is not
the purview of a government committed to a separation of church
and state. Second, there is absolutely no evidence, no social
study, no science anywhere that suggests same-sex marriage in
any way threatens traditional marriage. The very idea is absurd.
Why on earth would two gay guys getting married affect my
marriage? Am I suddenly somehow “less married” because Sister
Ann and Sister Jane got hitched?
Most anything as stupid as DOMA has usually been shoved through
Congress by (a) white people who claim to be (b) Christians,
when Christ has absolutely, positively nothing to do with any of
this. Jesus Christ never once mentioned or taught on the subject
of homosexuality, but most Christians (who don’t study the bible
anyway) simply assume He condemned it and that forcing everyone
in a secular society to live a “Christian” life under
“Christian” rules is somehow our job. It’s not. There is
absolutely no biblical model for this idiotic behavior. Jesus
never once tried to change Roman law, Paul never mounted any
political campaigns or spent so mc=much as a shekel of church
funds on Mesopotamian ballot initiatives. Where are these fat,
pious loud mouths getting the idea that our role, as Christians,
is to force all people, even unbelievers, to behave like
Christians?
MegaTeleEveangelicals spend millions of their faithful tithes
and offerings—money biblically commanded to be used to feed the
poor—policing social behavior and enforcing Christian rules on
society in an misguided an un-Christlike effort at social
engineering. Jesus did not come to change the world or even to
condemn it. He came to offer us life and to teach us how to
love—things the Christian Right has little interest in actually
doing.
The Defense of Marriage Act is an affront to our values as both
Americans and, yes, Christians. There is nothing whatsoever
“Christian” about DOMA, which has written bigotry into law. The
mere fact that there’s even a debate about the
constitutionality of a law created to deny a specific class of
people equal protection and full faith and credit under the law,
is obscene.
Searching For A Biblical Model
As a matter of faith, I cannot be supportive of gay marriage
because I cannot find a biblical model for it. Maybe if we
called it something else I could logic my way around my
convictions, but, for me, “gay marriage” sounds a lot like
“jumbo shrimp,” an oxymoron where two diametrically opposed
terms have been linked together. I go into more detail about my
reasoning
here.
This is what happens when we substitute what we consider logical
and reasonable for what the Word of God says. God exists within the
realm of holiness, which we often confuse with a Pollyannaish
naïve purity, but it’s really not. Purity is certainly a
component of holiness, but holiness is a state of being that has
been denied to us since mankind’s disobedience in the Garden of
Eden. Fairness and justice are certainly components of holiness,
but, if God were fair and if God were just, I’d be a dead man.
Because of our disobedience—not Adam and Eve’s, but yours and
mine--you and I would get what we so richly deserve rather than
the free pass God’s plan of salvation offers us.
Jesus’ parable about The Prodigal Son was an abject lesson in
unfairness. The unfaithful, greedy son disgraced his father and
squandered his inheritance partying and whoring, while the
faithful son remained at his father’s side. But who got the
party? Who did the father rejoice over? Not the faithful son but
the disobedient child who’d disgraced him, when that wayward son
finally returned home. Christians expecting fairness from God
miss the entire point of Jesus’ ministry.
Faith is a choice to embrace God’s truth and follow it even when
that truth confounds both logic and reason. In and of itself,
trusting in God is viewed by the world as unreasonable; you and
I as wack jobs. The human mind craves justice, fairness,
reasonableness and balance. Faith confounds all of those things.
Justice, fairness, reasonableness and balance are subjective
concepts which we redefine from culture to culture and from age
to age. God’s word is immutable, transfixed and eternal.
As a civil rights issue, however, I cannot imagine why so many
people are exhausting themselves and spending so much time and
money trying to keep hatred and bigotry in our nation’s laws.
The institution of marriage is in no way threatened by LGBT
persons; straight people destroyed that institution long ago. I
don't believe in Buddhism; should we ban that, too? Should we
back an anti-Buddha constitutional amendment? Do
things I don’t believe in threaten those things I do? Of course
not. For, if they did, my belief would be meaningless. As a result,
I am perhaps a little too ambivalent about the issue, other than
that I really don’t think the matter is any of our business. The
community and the state should not be in the social engineering
business. Who are we to tell people who they can love and who
they can or cannot marry? Remember when it was on the law books
that blacks could not marry whites? Imagine the government
writing that nonsense back into the constitution.
I am, perhaps, a disappointment to my LGBT friends because I am
not pro-gay marriage so much as I am anti-bigotry. I am, after a
fashion, insisting on having it both ways: disagreeing with the
concept of same-sex marriage while defending, absolutely,
anyone's right to practice it. I would not
be a great advocate for gay marriage so much as an energized
defender of people having the right to love who they love and do
what they want so long as they keep the noise down and don’t
bother me. While I cannot locate a biblical model supportive of
same-sex marriage, I do find one for loving people as they are
and as we find them. Jesus was never so concerned with who folks
were sleeping with as He was with connecting them to God. This
is our mission: not to police behavior or force everyone to
believe what we believe, but to tell the world Who Jesus is. We
can hardly do that if we're preoccupied spending millions on
institutionalized hatred while ignoring thee plight of the poor.
The resources white conservative Christians invest in this mess,
in the anti-abortion mess, surely offends God because the church
leaves hungry and lost people on the street while spending
millions on private jets for their megapreachers and millions
more on ignorant glossy mailers trying to convince people to
vote for this thing or that guy. This is not what the church was
deigned to do. We, like Jesus, should go about our ministry
without distraction, first remembering what that mission
actually is.
Christopher J. Priest
28 June 2015 Page One
24 March 2013 Page Two
editor@praisenet.org
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