This is not a “gay blog” per se. My sexuality represents just one part of who I am. Yet, I don’t mind bringing that information to the table when it’s relevant to issues at hand. I struggled through my youth and young adulthood to come to terms with my identity and finally got things sorted out nicely around the age of 30. Now that I have reached my late 40’s, there’s no looking back. I value honesty, both to myself and to the world at large.
My partner and I, who have been together for five years, make our home in a blue dot (Nashville) of increasingly red Tennessee. I am grateful for our supportive families and friends and for my employer who believes providing employees in committed same-sex relationships with access to family benefits is smart business. We go to church, own a pretty generic condo in a suburbanish neighborhood, and do the normal things like going out for Starbucks coffee and Sweet CeCe’s frozen yogurt. A wild night for us would be to drink two beers each at Pie in the Sky Pizza, our favorite neighborhood eatery.
I think we have a pretty good life, and we are blessed in so many ways. This is not a “being gay is so hard” guilt trip piece. Yes, coming of age in the Bible Belt during the 1980’s presented its share of challenges, but we both managed to arrive at a healthy place. Yet, as we anticipate (hopefully) the United States Supreme Court settling things on a national level, it seems that the Volunteer State shows signs of a renewed backlash against the value of our relationship.
According to a recent poll from our Music City’s esteemed Vanderbilt University, aka the “Harvard of the South,” support for gay marriage among Tennessee residents has actually dropped a few points over the past year. Granted, compared with the more distant past, things have improved, but the recent developments in most of the rest of the country may have hit a bit too close to home for some Tennesseans. I will let the armchair politicos among you dissect the results for yourself, but the one figure that sticks with me is that 48% of the states residents believe that same-sex relationships do not deserve any legal recognition at all, whether it be full-fledged marriage or alternatives such as civil unions.
So, almost half of the citizens of our lovely state basically feel that my significant other and myself don’t count legally as a couple. I realize that this doesn’t mean that they hate us. Maybe it’s fear of that “slippery slope” of folks wanting to marry animals or siblings. My response is that this kind of scenario is an irrelevant distraction. As our medical, psychological, and sociological understanding of sexual identity has evolved over the past several decades, the solid consensus of mainstream scientific authorities declares being gay as a normal variation of human sexuality and efforts to change this orientation as ineffective and potentially counter-productive.
The physical aspects of homosexuality represent just one part of what it means to be gay. Those of us who are attracted to the same gender generally hold a wide range of psychological, emotional, and romantic attachments as a part of the mix. It’s not a matter akin to switching from real to decaffeinated coffee or going from driving an automatic to a stick-shift car. It’s not a switch that gets flipped on and off but rather an identity that we do our best to try to incorporate into the many other areas of our lives.
No one has to remind my partner and me that the South is a more religiously conservative part of the country and that fundamentalist and evangelical branches of Christianity hold more sway here than in the Northeast and on the West Coast. Both of us, in our own ways, have had to reconcile our faith traditions with our sexuality. This is not an easy process, and I am not saying that I possess all the answers regarding the “God and gays” question.
In this day and age, most of the public objections to homosexuality do center on religion, and in this part of the world Christianity in particular. When folks want to engage me along the lines of an “it’s a sin because the Bible says so” line of discussion, my first inclination is to try to advocate for a more broad perspective of Christian theology and Biblical interpretation. I would love to “convert” more people to my side of that fence, and I have even put together a few links that explore the gay Christian point-of-view in case that information might be helpful for some of you. I could also get into a long discussion of how “Biblical” marriage evolved over the centuries through shifting cultural and family norms.
However, the risk I run in these exchanges is that I can sometimes fall into the trap of asking for someone’s approval in order for them to grant me my basic dignity as an individual and afford to my other half and me the right to be treated as a couple. Someone will look at my talking points and then say, “Sorry, but no. Your view of the Bible doesn’t match with mine, so I can’t affirm gay rights in any way. No protections for you.”
Sometimes, those accommodations are termed “special rights for homosexuals,” which leaves me scratching my head. What is so “special” about my wanting to work at the job of my choosing without fear of discrimination for being gay? What is so special about me wanting to hold hands with the person I love at the movies? (Public displays of affection ought to operate under the same common-sense rules for everyone in my mind, so I am not talking about anything lewd.) What is so special about expecting the right to make health care decisions involving my partner if–God forbid–something happens where I would need to fill such a role?
As mentioned earlier, our families are wonderful toward us, so they aren’t going to do something that would undermine our relationship in any kind of spiteful way, but this sort of thing happens in cases where gay men and women aren’t blessed with affirming relatives and end up being cut out of the lives of their partners as if they didn’t exist at all. Yes, there are various legal documents that folks have undertaken in the past to deal with these gaps, but they aren’t as comprehensive as what heterosexual married couples have always for granted. It ends up being a patchwork that is better than nothing but a “workaround” nonetheless.
So, I don’t think our treatment should be a matter of appealing to someone’s particular brand of faith. Yes, America was founded on broad principles steeped in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition, and I appreciate those. However, we were also founded on principles of democracy and the rights of the individual tied to the civic values of the ancient Greeks and Romans and the Age of Enlightenment. America is not a Christian theocracy anyway, but even if we pretended for a moment that it were, whose brand of the Christian faith would call the shots? Would it be Catholics, Pentecostals, Seventh Day Adventists, Quakers, middle of the road Methodists like yours truly, or any number of organizations who identify with the teachings of Jesus Christ? Ultimately, a government with no religious litmus tests for its citizens helps protect the rights of people from all faith traditions (or even no religion at all) in our increasingly diverse society.
And just how would legal recognition of gay nuptials destroy the sanctity of anyone’s traditional heterosexual marriage? There is–and definitely should be–a huge distinction between government granting marriage licenses and recognizing the rights of couples and how religious bodies may–or may not–choose to bless matrimony. There are entire faiths and denominations that refuse to perform ceremonies between their members and those outside the flock. There are also religious groups that refuse to sanction marriages where one of the parties has previously been divorced. And, moving away from the heavy-duty stuff a bit, there are individual congregations and pastors who require that couples attend pre-marital counseling or perhaps write a check to the church for a cleaning deposit before tying the knot.
Guess what? None of those practices relate to whether the court-house grants licenses to couples. It’s two entirely different questions. As it stands now, our particular denomination forbids its clergy from performing same-sex ceremonies or its church facilities from hosting these nuptials. There are voices inside working diligently to change this, and some pastors risk losing their ordination by violating this policy in the name of equality. We would love to see the rules change, but that’s a separate issue from being able to enter into marriage through a civil ceremony.
So, my partner and I don’t have a secret agenda to drape Tennessee in the rainbow flag. We just grow tired of feeling as if we have to make everyone love us, though of course we do think we are pretty lovable. We are claiming our right to live our hopes and dreams with each other, even in a state that happens to be turning as red as Elizabeth Arden’s door. In the ground-breaking 1996 film To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, drag queen Vida Boheme–played by the late Patrick Swayze–sums it up pretty nicely with the memorable quote, “Your approval is neither desired nor required, but I will take your acceptance.”
Coloring Outside the Lines 