A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
May 1, 2005
A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
May 1, 2005
We are, today, sixteen days short of one year as the first state in the nation fully to recognize the civil marriages of same-sex couples
— and, among religious bodies, our Unitarian Universalist Association led the way. Did you see the great banner on our headquarters, facing the front lawn of the State House, emblazoned with the words "Civil Marriage is a Civil Right — Unitarian Universalist Association" ?
The day the courageous decision in Hillary Goodridge vs. Department of Public Health took effect in Massachusetts, a throng of couples, and friends, activists, and press, crowded the Northampton City Hall grounds next to our meeting house. One hundred thirteen couples applied for marriages licenses here, just behind Cambridge's 268 and Provincetown's 154. At the UUA headquarters that day, our President, Bill Sinkford, married the two lead plaintiffs, Hillary and Julie Goodridge, two dedicated UUs. And by the waterfall at Smith College, I first spoke the words "by the authority vested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts" to two women.
In this first year, 5,000 same-sex couples have married in Massachusetts. I have conducted a dozen of these weddings. In this first year, the far right and the Roman Catholic Church targetted those who supported us for defeat in the November election. Not a single one of them was defeated, and we gained five seats.
That historic decision declared:
The benefits accessible only by way of a marriage license are enormous, touching nearly every aspect of life and death. The department states that "hundreds of statutes" are related to marriage and to marital benefits.
There is a long list of a few of the hundreds of vital protections and benefits, regarding property, regarding inheritance, regarding insurance and pensions, regarding children and for the sake of the children, and on and on and on.
Only a fraction of these rights are governed by State law. Most are governed by Federal law: like Social Security. Spouses of persons who have contributed to Social Security by paying FICA taxes are entitled to spousal and survivors benefits, but same gender couples get nothing — not spousal benefits, not survivors benefits — even though they pay the same taxes.
And even if they did live in Massachusetts, no license I could sign could protect two friends of mine who live far away in another state I won't name — one a European, the other a native of the U.S. Despite their many years together, a large part of their lives consist of evasion tactics to dodge the INS, and deportation. Instead of welcoming the spouse of a gay citizen to our country as it does for heterosexual spouses, our government deports them. Just contemplate that, if you will.
What our Massachusetts has done is only the beginning of the revolution.
We are journeyers, on a pilgrim path that turns toward life that is full and free. We have dwelt in smaller places, the societies of ages past, and in the present, too much of htis society remains still in that dark past. We have dwelt in suffocating places whose ancient boundaries denied the essential air to those many caught in them.
But we sense a new dispensation. We see its first manifestations. Ramparts of narrowness are shaken. The circles of human community are widened. The power is gone out of superstitions. The frightened shells remain and scream their protest. But something finer is taking hold.
Powerful vestiges of an older order remain and we cannot be oblivious or naïve about them. When the late Pope died he left in his place the mind behind his many backward-looking words and deeds, the apostle of this narrowness of soul, the denier of faith in the unfolding human splendor; one who looks at beautiful gay and lesbian and bi and transgendered people and sees instead the monstrous serpents in his own unenlightened soul. Now he has ascended to a place of enormous worldly power, and wields an awful influence over uncounted throngs of people. The crusade of repression and defamation against queer people roars on.
On this day we are called to remember:
Remember those who lived alone in terror, and dread, alone, isolated, misunderstood, despised. They hardly had a name for their love. But that dark past is more than the prejudice we in our time call homophobia. It was an all-encompassing system of domination and exclusion, of terror and suffocation.
The fetters that chain the human mind and spirit have not yet been wholly broken. In the year that has elapsed since this enlightened decision by the Massachusetts court, a dozen more states have brought the total to eighteen states to write this narrowness of souland the contempt into their constitutions, denying the sacredness of our love, the legitimacy of our most essential human ties; — Kansas joining their number just last month, and that by a vote of 70% to 30% in a popular vote; and South Carolina, with only one dissenting vote in its legislature. A nineteenth, Texas, will soon join them, making impossible, in those states, what is now possible in Massachusetts alone among these United States.
And still today, 156 million Americans, 53% of the population, live in a state or jurisdiction where they can be fired from a job or denied housing simply because of bigotry against their real or perceived sexual orientation. Texas just became the latest state to ban gay, lesbian or bi people serving as foster parents and to authorize investigations into the sexual orientation of current foster parents and removal of children from our homes.
And with an awesome self-righteousness, America's leaders of faith-based hate against us are in fact directly responsible for the continuing surge in hate violence against our people. While other forms of crime continued to fall, there has been a sharp and sudden rise in anti-gay hate crimes beginning with the last half of 2003.1 And whaddaya know, this rise in violence parallels the exact period since the fanatical Christian Right went into anti-gay hyperdrive after the Supreme Court's Lawrence v. Texas decision in July of 2003. Ever since, church pews and the public airwaves have been awash in ugly, anti-gay rhetoric and fear-mongering. And so, as the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force put it recently, "The literal blood of the thousands of gay people physically wounded by hate during 2004 is on the hands of Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and so many others who spew hate for partisan gain and personal enrichment."
But there are signs of movement in New York, in California, and elsewhere, and in the time since Vermont recognized domestic partnerships, it's been joined by Connecticut, California, and New York.
In January Illinois (and isn't it about time!!) became the 15th state to ban basic discrimination in housing, employment, credit, and access to public accommodations — and in April Maine became the 16th.
And beyond the borders of our nation, full marriage rights are now realized in the Netherlands, and Belgium, and Denmark and, in Canada, and now, Spain. The Vatican condemned the Spanish prime minister's initiative and the Spanish parliament's overwhelming vote as "iniquitous," but it will not do to baptize hate in the rhetoric of religion, and now the Spanish people know it.
Throughout the European Union, queer people are enjoying something nearing equal rights and access, even where it isn't called marriage: in Britain, all legal protections and benefits have been extended to gay couples. The European Parliament has called for member states to recognize our families.
We are part of the upward surge of Nature. We will have to be a force of Nature. We will have to rise to the call of these times. We have seen the hideous spectre last Sunday of the so-called "Justice Sunday" television broadcast from a fundamentalist megachurch in Kentucky. A year ago the same sponsoring organizations — Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council — ran three television broadcasts to `protect marriage' that were virtually identical to last Sunday's event, with many of the same speakers.
Both times the cry was `activist judges' and the threat of marriage for gay people. It all came back, again and again, to marriage.
And what are they protecting? The state with the very lowest failure rate for marriages in the entire United States is our very Massachusetts!
We have witnessed a forward advance in the evolution of human society and consciousness and it must not be turned back now.
But what will we do?
Here is what I am asking you to consider specifically today. Dan Hawes of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force is here today, with four volunteers from the Congregation, and they are going to ask you to join us on Saturday, the 14th of May, in a canvass of the constituents of some of our fence-sitting legislators in and around Springfield, particularly Brian Lees, the leader of the Senate Republicans, who's often been on our side but he's afraid. He thinks his constituents are 3-1 against our right to marry. That's because last time the anti-gay forces got out three times as many people as our side did. We need to go and ask those people to send him postcards on behalf of same-sex couples and families ahead of the Constitutional Convention, which is coming in the early Fall. Our Northampton legislators and most of the legislators in Western Massachusetts have been great but the resistance is in and around Springfield. We must stop the amendment that would write hate, discrimination, and exclusion into our great Constitution. Will the four of you stand up so everyone can identify you?
But more important, whether or not you can join us on the fourteenth — The first thing we must do is to acknowledge why we are here, why each one of us is here and why we are here together. Let us embrace the momentous meaning of our lives in these times.
And let us keep the light glowing in this house of faith and love and growing consciousness, where our families are honored, where respect and mutual honor are our watchwords, where children need not grow up into hate and fearful contempt. Let us honor and love and advance this place — with all that we have to bring to it, to protect it and expand it and extend its kind influence.
And today — let us go forth into this good day and celebrate that courageous court, and those who fought and won the fight, and those who fought and never lived to see victory;
And let us celebrate this forward movement of which we are a part, and let us celebrate ourselves and each other! Let us walk on, in the name of love, and justice, and pride!
Copyright © 2005 F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.
We join today in quiet contemplation
Hearing, beyond our half-conscious mind, —
a stirring of hope, a sweet wind of justice, a dawning day.
We join today in a long forward movement from fear, from dread, from loathing and hate, from ancient superstition and shibboleth —
To walk from the twilight of a dying age toward a marvelous dawn,
a humanity made wise and free,
with a great company of barrier-breakers and
wrestlers with destiny
going forth in the Spirit's light
with the great force of of Love
in an ardent calm, breaking the iron law
by which lives uncounted
have been confined and thwarted
pronouncing a new oracle of freedom and justice
and life made full
We know the road is long
We know that all we have done is ever yet to do:
Baffled and beaten back we labour still;
Sometimes frustrated, spent, we still survive.
We walk on, we labour still, that from us may rise
A larger-seeing human with nobler heart,
A great city of friends, the family of humankind made whole
In this silence.
Chief Justice Margaret Marshall,
in the Majority Opinion,
Hillary Goodridge vs. Department of Public Health:
Without the right to marry—or more properly, the right to choose to marry—one is excluded from the full range of human experience and denied full protection of the laws for one's "avowed commitment to an intimate and lasting human relationship." (Baker v. State). Because civil marriage is central to the lives of individuals and the welfare of the community, our laws assiduously protect the individual's right to marry against undue government incursion. Laws may not "interfere directly and substantially with the right to marry." . . .
The marriage ban works a deep and scarring hardship on a very real segment of the community for no rational reason. The absence of any reasonable relationship between, on the one hand, an absolute disqualification of same-sex couples who wish to enter into civil marriage and, on the other, protection of public health, safety, or general welfare, suggests that the marriage restriction is rooted in persistent prejudices against persons who are (or who are believed to be) homosexual. "The Constitution cannot control such prejudices but neither can it tolerate them. Private biases may be outside the reach of the law, but the law cannot, directly or indirectly, give them effect." (Palmore v. Sidoti, 1984). Limiting the protections, benefits, and obligations of civil marriage to opposite-sex couples violates the basic premises of individual liberty and equality under law protected by the Massachusetts Constitution.
The history of constitutional law "is the story of the extension of constitutional rights and protections to people once ignored or excluded." (United States v. Virginia, 1996) . . . . This statement is as true in the area of civil marriage as in any other area of civil rights. As a public institution and a right of fundamental importance, civil marriage is an evolving paradigm. . . . Alarms about the imminent erosion of the "natural" order of marriage were sounded over the demise of antimiscegenation laws, the expansion of the rights of married women, and the introduction of "no-fault" divorce. Marriage has survived all of these transformations, and we have no doubt that marriage will continue to be a vibrant and revered institution.
Walt Whitman, 1860
When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv'd with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy night for me that follow'd;
And else, when I carous'd, or when my plans were accomplish'd, still I was not happy;
But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health, refresh'd, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in the morning light,
When I wander'd alone over the beach, and undressing, bathed, laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,
And when I thought how my dear friend, my lover, was on his way coming, O then I was happy;
O then each breath tasted sweeter—and all that day my food nourish'd me more—and the beautiful day pass'd well,
And the next came with equal joy—and with the next, at evening, came my friend;
And that night, while all was still, I heard the waters roll slowly continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands, as directed to me, whispering, to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness, in the autumn moonbeams, his face was inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy.
Holly Near:
Can we be like drops of water
falling on the stone
splashing, breaking, dispersing in air
weaker than the stone by far
but be aware
that as time goes by
the rock will wear away
and the water comes again
Walt Whitman:
I dream'd in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the
whole of the rest of the earth,
I dream'd that was the new city of Friends,
Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love, it led the rest,
It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,
And in all their looks and words.