South African Parliament Permits Gay Marriage

The esteemed and much loved United Methodist Pastor and Civil Rights Leader - Rev. Gil Caldwell - reflects here on the decision of the South African Parliament to Permit Gay Marriage. As always, his prayerful depth of wisdom unites Spirit and society in a clarifying light. God bless this man.




THE DECISION OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN PARLIAMENT

TO PERMIT GAY MARRIAGE

It is past time for all of us to engage in some soul searching and some re-visiting of our attitudes toward same gender loving persons and the desire of many of them to have equal access to marriage or unions. I suggest the following self-questioning.

1. From whence comes the negative emotions often conjured up by the prospect of same gender love and marriage? How do those negative emotions differ from the negative emotions that many have/had vis-a-vis interracial marriage?

2. If we claim the Biblical description of "abomination" for same gender sexual intimacy, do we feel the same about shellfish and their description as an abomination? The comedian
Jon Stewart in an effort to point out the inconsistency of our use of Scripture, had a skit where someone was holding a sign that said; "God hates homosexuals and shellfish." Does he make a point worth considering?

3. Growing up in North Carolina I remember someone pointing out the irrationality of anti-black prejudice by quoting this ditty:

I do not like you, Mr. Fell,
the reason why I cannot tell.
But, this I know and know real well:
I do not like you, Mr. Fell.

There is something irrational about this feeble justification of dislike, prejudice, even hate.

4. Negative stereotyping of persons has a way of becoming negative profiling. We think of "them" in the most negative of terms, because "some of them" have done things that we disagree with. This has a way of trickling across from race to sexual orientation to.... I often wonder if persons understand that I as an African American who has been around for a long time have had to work at not assuming that ALL white folk are like the white folk who have done and who do things that I dislike. Making universal decisions about any group of persons because of the actions of a few is prejudice. I continue to be amazed that persons who have known negative sterotyping because of their race or their gender, see no contradiction in their negative stereotyping of LGBT persons.

5. Finally, we hear persons say, "I hate the sin but not the sinner." The conviction that same gender love is sin, flies in the face of those of us who say that "God is love" and the love we have for each other flows from God. Those who resist same gender persons from making commitments to each other through marriage seem to believe that the foundation stone of marriage is the marriage of a female and a male and no more. What happened to love, commitment, companionship, patience, common struggle, living through the valleys and enjoying the mountaintop experiences of marriage? Denying same gender loving persons the right to experience the struggles and joys that occur in marriage following a public commitment, makes of those who support this denial, accomplices to the minimization of democracy.

The South African Parliament has spoken! How I wish that the American - African American community that has some primary experiential appreciation of civil rights, might have been in the forefront on this issue in the USA. Our silence and/or our complicity with those who have used same gender marriage as a political wedge issue, has provided some retrospective tarnish to the significance of the Civil Rights Movement. We who struggled to gain our civil rights through the courts, legislation and executive order have not understood that the same electorate in Michigan that voted against Affirmative Action is no different from the electorate that excludes persons from marriage because they do not meet their "definition" of marriage.

Sometimes as we who are African American sing:

We have come
over a way that with tears has been watered.
We have come
treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered...

I wonder if we understand the tears our insensitivty is causing others? I wonder if we understand that our "hating the sin of homosexuality" has given brutal people their justification for bloodying those who are same-gender loving?

Thank God that in South Africa, elected leaders who knew the awfulness of racist apartheid would not legally continue the apartheid of persons because of their sexual orientation!

Gil Caldwell