”I stand on the opposite sides of picket lines with people who deny that I am right about my own mind. They insist that millions of people are so deeply deluded about themselves that their own testimony must be disregarded.
Maybe, then, gay rights really are like civil rights after all. “Am I not a man and a brother?” asked Frederick Douglass. Which is to say: I experience myself as fully human. You, if you are listening to me, must hear and see that I am a human being. Yet our society denies my humanity, insists that while I am something close to a man, I am not quite one.
I hear myself saying something similar. Is this not love? Do I not know my own heart? Is my love not that of one human being for another? Not lust or perversion or sin, but love? When straight people really see gay people, when they allow themselves to look, they see that we are people, that our love is love. Similar in some ways, different in others, not necessarily better or worse—but real. We exist.
What I feel like we are still fighting for, in the places where our freedom is still contested, is neither rights nor freedoms nor any particular bundle of privileges, but some more fundamental, and fundamentally religious, human right that has only begun to be articulated: the right to self-definition, to say that I exist—and to be believed.
I was wrong about same-sex marriage
David Frum, a forceful opponent of gay marriage for years, revisits the data, and decides he was wrong.
Amazing.
(via pwinn)
I’ve also come round in the last year or so to support same-sex marriages (having always supported civil partnerships).
In many respects, same-sex marriage is a very conservative idea. It says, in essence, “Given that lesbian, gay and bisexual people exist, how do we integrate same-sex relationships into established patterns of human socialisation and flourishing?”
Perhaps also, far from harming heterosexual marriage, gay marriage can strengthen it: partly by shaking off the patriarchal associations which marriage holds in the eyes of many, and partly because the whole campaign for gay marriage is predicated on the assumption that marriage is far more than “just a piece of paper”. I read something today by one opponent of gay marriage who highlighted the irony of gay marriage being campaigned for by people who have often denigrated straight marriage, but to the extent that that is true, I see it as a good thing.
(via johnthelutheran)
(via johnthelutheran)
