Love Politics

I have worked with and for individuals and have friends directly affected by the nature and tone of the social debate and law-making concerning same-sex marriage. I have recently shared space in a shower with a woman that prefers the love of a woman, and I felt perfectly fine about it. The shower was under construction and we discussed mosaic tiles.

All of my five siblings are LDS, as are my parents. Yesterday one of my brothers broached politics to all of us in an e-mail. He proposed that opponents of Proposition 8 are hypocrites for supporting gay marriage, but not polygamy. He indicated that they should have been outraged when the children of FLDS adults were removed from their homes by the State of Texas, because the two groups share nontraditional family ideals in common. He finished his letter by stating that he is against both polygamy and gay marriage.

I responded with a letter to him and I sent it to the rest of my birth family as well. It follows here, with just a bit of editing for some privacy purposes and I have made a couple of minor edits:

I love the opportunity for a reasonable political discussion. I think it is a good topic. I disagree with your take on the subject.

The difference between polygamy and homosexual partnerships is that polygamy is usually a method promoted by a powerful religious hierarchy, from the top down, and often results in underage or inexperienced young women being bound to a marriage without first experiencing the liberty to choose a life for herself outside of religious indoctrination.

Homosexuality on the other hand appears in many cases to be a matter of both adolescent and mature choice resulting sometimes in years or decades of loyalty.

When loyalty and fidelity is a matter of choice instead of coercion, I think it is a big difference. Polygamy has not made the case to me that homosexuality has for this reason. I chose Cicely in two weeks, and I married her in two months. I think several of us would reserve this right to fall in and commit to love. It comes down to free human choice. Thirteen years later I feel that I made a good choice, and it continues to be justified, and surprising. I respect anyone's right to commit to love, crazy as it may be. I can't imagine telling someone whom they could love and whom they can't. But it is an individual's choice, and lucky if the other agrees. Maybe in the end that's all that counts.

Usually in polygamy there is a religious leader that pretends to speak for God about which girl belongs to which man, as if it were God's will, instead of a kinetic mutual commitment between two lovers.

We have legislators that have had numerous wives and more affairs while some homosexual couples have been as steady and cohesive as our own parents. I don't think the legislators are qualified to dictate sexuality to the people. I don't think democracy has the right. Those of us that share a monogamous relationship consider marriage beneficial to such a relationship's sustainability. The relationship is its own proof, and homosexuals are as capable of a life-long love and failure as any of the rest of us. While there are no ceremonies in many churches for this, I think the fact is that many people commit their life to another with or without the blessing of the Church or the State. Marriage, a social contract, not just a religious one, ought to be legally available to those whose spirituality is not defined by any religious dogma but their own.

We have reason to believe in our family that artificial insemination is ok, arguably, not because of divine natural order, but because it is possible. There are homosexual couples that are as bound to God as faithful Mormons, or they might be bound to a different code of time-tried ethics. We don't know. Who should decide? I think it is the couple, not a government.

We have thousands of children that are unloved by their natural parents while capable and loving couples have longed to help. I believe that a team of two dedicated people are better than one. (Cicely has proven this to me over and over.)

Polygamy, from Islam, to Hinduism, to Mormonism, has not proven to elevate women to equals institutionally . Homosexuality without coercion on the other hand is an equalizer. It is a matter of personal sexuality, and I don't know of much else besides sexuality that is so subjective and sacred to an individual. In light of this, for my understanding, I would not have supported Proposition 8.

I am in favor of broadening the civil rights of those who are seeking to accomplish every non-violent right in their power, even if it is not traditional. I feel that an open society is better than a closed one. If an adult chooses homosexuality in an open society, it is better, and should be protected by law. A child forced to submit to polygamy by a coerced marriage in a closed society ought to be able to be rescued. If two informed, non-coerced adults practice polygamy, which I think is rare, then I think it is their right. I guess I would say that polygamy is ok by consenting adults, but not ok where children are coerced into it, which is the model by numerous civilizations that have practiced polygamy, hence the ill reaction many have to it.

Lastly, I find it ironic, if not finally concessionary that the Mormons could put millions of dollars into defining marriage as the union between one man and one woman. I think pragmatism versus divine guidance is a good route for any religion to take, as interconnected and delicate as things are anymore. Thanks for putting me in the loop.

That is the conclusion of my response to my brother. But a very touchy point about polygamy is that it is laid out in the scriptures sacred to both mainstream Latter-day Saints as well as those in the FLDS communities. Plural marriage is described as the will of God for righteous men, and the order of things in the Celestial Kingdom where Mormons hope to reside with God and to become gods in their own right after their earthly life. This revelation given to Joseph Smith is found in The Doctrine and Covenants, SECTION 132. I am glad that Mormons have strongly and emphatically departed from the practice of polygamy during earthly life, but the scriptures and after-life ideologies remain quite antisocial though readily researchable if one wishes to explore the subject further. I will leave it here.

* * *

I'm back. My brother has raised a good point that children in same-sex marriages would be subject to indoctrination that he finds objectionable, and that this is unfair to such children. I think it is a good point that I have spent some time considering. Indoctrination is the way things are. I find aspects of my childhood indoctrination objectionable. A difference in polygamy and same-sex marriage is that sometimes where polygamy is enforced from the top down, the child's whole life is determined by that coercion, where anyone in an open society, when they are able, can refuse their youthful indoctrination if they so choose.

My childhood religion does not favor eqaulity in heaven, but a culture of eternal servitude by the likes of me, to gods the likes of members of my family that have been married in the Temple. Religion is a good place for inequality to be celebrated, but is not the primary goal of American Government to strive for equality for all under the law?

This is a very difficult discussion. I hope mine is a beneficial contribution to a civil dialogue about a highly complicated issue.

Secular Christianity: Phew!

A debate occupies the editorial page of the local paper, The Methow Valley News, week after week, month after month, political season or not. One side tries to convince the nonbelievers that because of the Founding Fathers we all have a responsibility to be Christian if only because we have a considerably good government. The other side, which I tend to take, is that the idea of a secular government is what we owe our secular education and prosperity to, not to mention rapid advances in social ethics among which are liberal civil liberties. I think the two extremes are irreconcilable but the associations can be mutually beneficial.

I still get my concrete from the concrete plant, and I get my lumber from the lumber yard, but the hum and buzz from the recent Presidential election suggests that for my astounded feeling of history for the better in the making, the guy that loads 2X10’s into the back of my pickup is afraid his hunting rifles will be taken away by the liberal radical that I voted for. The woman that sells me bagged mortar had a sign up on her horse property for McCain/Palin. It’s still very decent mortar, despite her politics. I know of no car or suicide bombings in the whole history of the Methow Valley, though political opinions and perspectives are polar opposites.

Still, it bothers me when people talk about God, as if any one of us were talking about the same thing at all. Transport the lumberyard or the concrete plant to Istanbul or Salt Lake City, or Nepal, and the idea of God will take on a whole new foreign significance and incomprehensibility. In the rural U.S., I think I know what they mean by God, and I just don’t believe in it, even though Barach Obama, a Christian, won, thank gods.

Idolatry was defined well before Christianity ever existed. Idolatry basically meant: Don’t worship any false gods. I feel fortunate and grateful that today in America and much of the modern world I do not have to resort to desperate measures in order to not commit this long-articulated sin. I am not convinced that Moses and Isaiah would have sympathized with Paul, and I think there are entire civilizations of people that might agree. Even so, I do not feel bound to rely any more on Isaiah than I might appreciate John Steinbeck, Leonard Cohen, or the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas.

Even if every one of our Founding Fathers were a Christian, and they weren’t, they set up a new kind of government that prevented the rulers from forcing their idea of God on anyone. The Constitution even prevented democracy from exercising the same sort of tyranny, much like the result of the recent election. The separation of faith and rational prudence, of belief and force, of church and state, is one of the greatest proven wisdoms of our Founders and of ages, for after them came other wise women and men free to express her- or himself, to think, to protest, to work, and to serve. A climate of enlightened rationalism across countries allowed a Darwin to flourish after a General Washington, a Martin Luther King to pulverize the falsehoods of fascist dictators, and un-kept fighting women demanded the right to vote after their refusal of enshrined patriarchy.

I am grateful to rational, humane minds that came before, for centuries and millennia, that have struggled to articulate the divine, wisdom, and humanity, and for our system of inspired government, that while there remains a majority of Christians, I am not forced to commit what in my mind and my experience is idolatry, however appealing and traditional Christianity may appear by some to be. Secular is the stance I prefer and expect from my government to take while I sociably practice my own idea of spirituality. I wish the same joy on believers and nonbelievers alike.