I’m a bad Homosexual Activist
AUL FROMBERG, on the day after the Prop 8 Ruling in California, paints an interesting picture in today’s Daily Episcopalian:
In the ongoing work of converting a culture ––bending it toward justice, toward the restoration of human dignity and ordinary goodness––you have to recognize what the big struggles are, and which ones are small.
It’s hard for me to see gay marriage as the biggest struggle we’ve got to deal with in California.
As I wrote there in response, I’m terribly embarrassed to call us “oppressed” in any but the most covert ways. I bet someone who is *actually* oppressed because of the colour of their skin or their sex would love to trade places with almost any gay white male in California!
That’s the issue for me. When I look at the levels of corruption and greed in our society, I know it’s far easier for Wal*mart to give me a 15% “Gay Family” discount than it is for them to pay their workers a just wage. The sad thing is, I’ve accepted that discount from hundreds of places… without ever asking them if they pay their workers minimum wage, at least. Making a “just for me society” instead of a Just Society is really rather sinful.
Does that mean you are a bad homosexual who is an activist, or a bad activist who happens to be gay? Also, the AP style book says that the “H-word” is bad because it makes it sound like a disease or something. I dunno. I don’t think being “heterosexual” is a disease, though some folks shouldn’t have children. LOL!
The linked article was called “I’m a bad homosexual” I figured I needed a like-but-not-the-same title. Regarding the style manual, in this case, you should consider it rather like other such derogatory words which members of the indicated class may use with impunity, but persons not of the class when using the same words will get beat up for being un-PC.
Perhaps the best thing to do would be to give the word “oppression” a break, for starters. I have been trying to figure out how to distill my thoughts on this general topic (not the Prop H8 stuff specifically, but oppression in a larger sense, in connection also with the nomination of Judge Sotomayor) into a blog-worthy soundbite, and it’s an impossible task.
Part of the problem lies in the fact that we too often try to use it as a giant benchmark measuring stick of various afflictions– is my backache worse than what happened to two of your your great-great-great-grandparents?
And from a Christian standpoint, I would want to be aware of the hubris of thinking that my little bit of pious material self-deprivation truly puts me in some kind of radical solidarity with some other people, far away somewhere, who aren’t so lucky as I am in getting Borders Books discounts e-mailed to me. Yes, we shouldn’t be complacent about taking actions to work on social justice worldwide, but it’s some kind of crazy psychologizing to think that I can best be helpful (to whom, exactly?) by limiting my own desires– since when did I get that powerful? This isn’t to say that I should buy every gadget I can afford (a short list in any event) since (again from the xtian standpoint) those desires are perhaps spiritually dislocated, and I have some physical responsibility to the planet as well not to go tearing through its resources wastefully. But when I hear people saying that some (other) people’s civil rights will have to wait (as if we can’t multitask at all), I think of who it is who always seems to have to be the ones waiting– don’t forget Prop 8 affected lesbians and all gay people of color as well, cutting them off in many cases from health care benefits. And when I hear us saying these things to ourselves, I imagine Marie Antoinette living the life of a simple shepherdess…
Mind you, I am highly skeptical about the institution of marriage in general, even as a member of the 18,000, but if I were going to set out to make friends with some hypothetical oppressed peasant, I bet I’d get a lot further by finding those common places of powerlessness– when friends betray you, when a child dies, when you’re worried about your mother the widow making a living, etc.
It’s an odd moment: I think Marriage a good thing – and moreso the sacramental sort than the secular one. I’d love to be there when your – in my eyes – real marriage is celebrated at SGN on Sunday.
But, from a Christian standpoint, the only rights that are important are in the second and third person. First person rights don’t exist. And what I’m hearing a lot of just now – not from you, Friend, or from Paul in his article – is first person issues. I’m not saying that Prop 8 was a good thing or that its support by the court is a good thing, but rather, it’s a minor thing, compared to an awful lot of second-person and third-person cases that, seemingly, a lot (again, not SGN) folks seem to be indifferent to.
It’s not that I think Gays and Lesbians should have to wait… being of colour or not – this issue isn’t very important, we can wait longer if we feel like it. On the other hand, “limiting my own desires” in favour of someone else is the essential teaching of Christianity. It is the sine qua non of the faith. It’s exactly what we are called to do in the name of “those of weaker faith” and I think we’ve been confronted with a lot of those in the historic churches of colour, as well as in the RC and LDS communities and among Anglicans. We act like quintessential Americans when we try to force this issue ecclesiastically or politically.
I like your closing paragraph a lot. It makes the point really well, too. I’m not going to reach out to the oppressed here in Buffalo – fiscally, politically, racially, linguistically – by saying “You know, I can’t get married here…” It’s just not going to work. I will need to find other places of connection, other events of opression.
Maybe.
But as a white male, gay or not, I’ve got a lot riding in my favour that will make “when friends betray you, when a child dies, when you’re worried about your mother the widow making a living,” seem rather weak.
Let me explain better what I meant by “limiting desires.” I did not mean that we should go out and do/buy whatever we want, but I’d call that a voluntary limit on the expressions of our desires, and more specifically, thoughtful limits on the expressions of our self-misunderstood desires. I side with Augustine (and others!) on this question– it is our true desire that draws us closer to God (with a mysterious bit of grace thrown in at some point) and other objects of desire are partial approximations of various sorts, some better than others. If I have to have those new shoes to fill some hole in my life, the hole probably isn’t really shoe-shaped on some deeper level. That’s why I suggested that many of our desires are ’spiritually dislocated’; I was deliberately trying to parallel the idea of the Christian as being on pilgrimage in the world– you shouldn’t find it necessary to hate the world, but the world’s labels for you are not exhaustive of your reality either.
Does that make more sense? I always think that Pauline phrase about stumbling blocks can be so condescending so easily. I was thinking about my earlier answer afterwards yesterday, trying to figure out how to express myself better and also thinking of experiences I’ve had in less-flush parts of the world– what should you do visiting a culture where you have tremendous buying power and it is the local custom to bargain back and forth, for example? I was also thinking about power and powerlessness, clearly– do I mistake someone else’s relative poverty for true powerlessness? And yet, of course, there are choices open to me that are not open to them (or vice versa). Can we rank those choices on a single scale of importance? No, although we seem (as a society) to like to argue about doing exactly that. I’m simply suggesting that for many Americans, focussing our debates about oppression or any other thing purely on the economics of the situation is a subtle psychological way of maintaining our self-image as powerful people. Yes, economic inequality is deplorable, especially insofar as it tracks so closely with so many other kinds of inequality (access to doctors, education, shelter), and we have to see clearly how we are hurting ourselves when we treat that as the sole benchmark of a good life, walling ourselves away psychologically from the places where we are humanly powerless.
Wish you could be here Sunday too! We keep having to bump up our estimates on the number of cupcakes we’re providing–