There is a physical weight I feel when I receive bad news. When my brother called me Christmas Eve 3 years ago to tell me my childhood friend, Cheryl, had been shot by the police I felt this heaviness. When the call came at 4 in the morning from my beloved that her mother had passed in her arms, it felt like soaked quilts shrouded me.
Last November, I had very, very mixed feelings. Barack Obama had just been elected president. We, as a people, voted in the what the majority believed was the better candidate. And in that vote, we made history by also electing our very first black president. Elation followed.
California was instrumental for Obama’s election. With their huge electoral college numbers, he had to win that state. And win, he did. The turn out was huge, the number of first time voters was enormous, the number of people of color voting was tremendous.
Part of the reason the turn out was so high in California was attributed to Proposition 8. Prop 8 took away the right of gay and lesbian persons to marry each other. The wet, soaked quilt put a damper on my elation.
Last night, voters in Maine voted to make pot more legally accessible. They also voted to take away the right, granted through the legislature and signed into law by the governor, of gay and lesbian people to legally marry each other. So, to recap, gay people may now get stoned, legally, but not marry. The majority of Maine voters think the government should have less say as to whether or not you are capable of paying attention and craving all the food in the refrigerator, but two law abiding, tax paying, citizens may not marry because THAT would do damage to the community & families. I mean, think of the children. They may get stoned, but not be gay.
Our democracy, on paper, says we are all equal, we have equal access to life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness. Our rule of law is supposed to be blindly, that is equally, applied, to all people without regard to status, gender, education, etc. etc.
I hear the rhetoric of the right saying we need less government. I happen to agree that government should only do what the people cannot do for themselves. For instance, I cannot pave a road, fix a stop light, run the libraries, the public educational system, the public university system…….these things are way too big and beyond my competence to make happen.
But, government does need to exist to do things like regulate greed (remember Enron and Madoff?), pave the roads, deliver most of the mail, run the military, fly to the moon and beyond. We do not need to make laws that prohibit the rights of some citizens that are enjoyed by the overwhelming majority of other citizens i.e. the right to take legal responsibility for each other through the legal obligations and rights of marriage.
To be blunt, I am pissed at Maine. The whole place.
My church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, in August voted to change our policies about gay pastors with families (we’re allowed now) and that congregations may now honor/celebrate publicly accountable, life-long, monogamous, same-gender relationships. Following that decision, there have been congregations voting to leave the ELCA, the formalization and greater publicity of LCMC which opposes these decisions, redirection of offerings to the ELCA in protest of our decisions. There is the very real threat of schism.
I feel the soaked quilt on me again. This is not supposed to be the way it is, not in American. We are supposed to be a free people, not running about working and giving lavishly to make sure some of our citizens are second class. We put an end to slavery, we recognized the wrong of putting our own Japanese citizens in prison camps, we ruled separate but equal was a cruel fantasy, we stopped miscegenation laws with the best named law suit ever, “Loving vs. Virginia.” Lawrence vs. Texas decriminalized gay people.
I think it is the antithesis of what it means to be an American, a Christian, a Lutheran, to work for the dehumanizing of people.
Jesus gave the dehumanized their humanity back. When the woman cried on his feet and dried them with her hair, he asked “Do you see this woman?” That is the dumbest question ever. Of course they saw her, how could they not? She crashed a party she was not invited to, she acted completely inappropriately. She SHOULD have been ashamed of herself.
But, Jesus saw her, he beheld her, he saw more than the others did. He invited them to look again and see something new. He was always doing this by inviting the children to come to him, talking to a foreign woman at the well, touching lepers. Jesus just did not get that some people are better, more human, than others and these “others” should be ignored, kicked when out of place, stoned, Perhaps, beat them and tie them to a fence and allow them to die, just for being, well, not us.
Jesus was killed not because he was “meek and mild,” but because he broke all the rules, threatened the powers that were, touched the wrong people and ate with known sinners.
Every Good Friday, even after 15 years of living through Good Friday services as a pastor, I still feel that heavy, soaked quilt hanging off of me as I watch the altar being stripped, the lights diminishing and hear the words “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?”
We don’t get to Easter without Good Friday. We don’t get the good news until Jesus defeats the death, damnation, the devil and all the devil’s empty promises. We don’t get to heaven without going through a bit of hell.
Someday, gay people will be boring, common, everyday neighbors. Someday, the best of our democracy will be applied to us. Someday, our baptisms will be just as valid as others. Someday I will not feel like a wet, soaking quilt has been placed over me by my fellow citizens. Someday, but not today.