Dylan's argument for the equal rights of homosexual people stands on the back of the greatest commandment, to love the Lord above all, and the neighbor as oneself. In a world of nuance and division, this message simplifies the terrain and encourages us to enlarge our concept of the human family. This is the second essay in our series on homosexuality -Editor.
I was asked to write a "liberal" response to the idea of homosexuality, a subject that is being debated here as well as many other places in our culture right now. I don't want to do that. I think these two teams have already done a very fine job of establishing their talking points and worldviews by this point, and all the movements, laws, websites and other armaments are firmly institutionalized to support either position. This culture war is already a war of attrition, each side hoping...I don't know, that the other side will be worn down enough that they'll relent and admit intellectual and theological defeat? Or that maybe the issue will just disappear, and all the detractors with it? I doubt most people even have a strategy for how this should all play out. They have strong emotions, and convictions, and that's enough to dig in and swing away - thoughtfully at times, crudely and aggressively at others. Either way, it'll likely fall to our children to settle this debate, mostly by not being interested in it. They'll have the robot uprising to think about after all, and gay rights will be lumped into the "issues my parents fought over" bucket, along with Facebook privacy concerns and lamentations over the death of paper books.
So this is all fairly condescending, as though I've transcended any of these very natural and predictable human behaviors. I haven't, and when pressed, I will most definitely pull out a typical "liberal" defense of gay rights and gay marriage. I have gay friends, and I have gay friends who are in love. I love them, and I support them in their pursuit of happiness. That's all there is to my position, and any defense more intellectual than that would be inauthentic. I'm pro-love.
With that out of the way, I do have some other intellectual thoughts I'd like to share. I'm a big fan of intellectual thought, generally, and increasingly interested in intellectual thought accompanied by an optimistic, embracing tone. In a world full of altogether too much information delivered at an unforgivingly relentless pace, I'm more than ever trying to hone in on that Swedenborgian sweet spot of wise words spoken with loving intention. To that end, I'd like to endorse a video from The Royal Society in England about "Empathic Civilization". It's worth a few minutes of your time, but you don't have to watch it to read on.
In this video, Jeremy Rifkin talks about our very natural and predictable human tendency to make teams and dig in our heels. We've always formed an Us that is in opposition to Them and then treated Them with trepidation and uncertainty, if not open hostility. Christian or Jew, black or white, gay or straight. There hasn't been a time or place where we didn't pick teams and fight over something. You might even say we're hard-wired to do this. And in this way, humans are inherently flawed, etc.
And yet - Rifkin goes on to talk about another human behavior that happens with equal predictability but gets much less airplay. It seems that "other"ing groups of people mostly happens when we don't know much about them, and when we don't have direct contact with them. Empathy plays a role in this. It's also just more difficult to Other somebody to their face than it is from across the valley.
You can chart this historically. Before language and society took hold, families and tribes formed the first dominant Us group. Any tribe on the next hill, their intentions uncertain, posed a potential threat. As communication and travel increased, and human society grew larger and more organized, the Us group had to grow with it, and moved slowly from tribal to religious identities. Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and heathens were the biggest groups that we could recognize, summarize, contrast and compare. We fought wars and built empires based on these designations. But humans kept intermingling, and as economic markets increased in size, and the activity of trade encompassed multiple religions, the Us group grew again. The nation state emerged. Religion wasn't lost, but was subsumed into larger Us and Thems -- British, Chinese, American, Russian.
From this perspective, the noisiness of our world right now is a little more understandable. It feels in many ways like our culture is more divided than ever, that Us and Them has never been more prevalent. But we've also just finished exploding the remaining communication barriers that kept us apart, and only in the last generation has the world flirted with, then dived head-long into a fully globalized awareness of what's going on everywhere else on the planet. It's a confusing time for everybody. The economic and communication infrastructure has grown so fast, in fact, that we haven't remotely caught up with it on a psychological or cultural level. Multi-national corporations and global mass media have made national identity an increasingly complex situation, and have thrown into flux all the traditions and sacred cows that formed our pre-global cultures, religions and perspectives. And what do we have to hold onto? None of us grew up with a precedent for thinking of ourselves as anything more than American or Christian; global citizenship is still a very niche group, a Them to many established Us's. Will the Us group keep expanding, as it has always done, or is it now doomed to turn back in on itself, fracturing endlessly on however many cultural lines - gay vs. straight, black vs. white, Christian vs. Muslim?
I do think, actually, that most of us grew up with a precedent for global citizenship, with an Us that encompasses every other human on the planet. Jesus said many things, and every Christian-themed argument on controversial social issues has a supporting passage or two in its back pocket. But when pressed with complex, seemingly paradoxical matters, Jesus had a fairly simple answer.
And one of them, an expert in religious law, asked him a question to test him: “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus said to him, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. The second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:35-40)
Of course, I say this is simple, and yet contained within it is enough ambiguous and interpretable language to support any kind of argument. Who is the neighbor? What is love? How is love communicated? There are plenty of Swedenborgian caveats and yes-buts here, but do me a favor and consider this passage for a second from the perspective of the growing Us. Love God, above all else. Love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets depend on these two commandments. For me, it's hard not to look at this passage and feel the Lord's pro-love agenda. Especially because the Lord *is* Love itself (Divine Love and Wisdom 4), we can even take the commandment to be “Love [love itself] with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. Love.
The Lord anticipated that this message was maybe a little too straightforward for some, and followed it with several warnings for those who would skew its meaning.
“But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher and you are all brothers." (23:8-9)
“But woe to you, experts in the law and you Pharisees, hypocrites! You keep locking people out of the kingdom of heaven! For you neither enter nor permit those trying to enter to go in." (23:13)
“Woe to you, experts in the law and you Pharisees, hypocrites! You give a tenth of mint, dill, and cumin, yet you neglect what is more important in the law – justice, mercy, and faithfulness! You should have done these things without neglecting the others." (23:23)
I could now elaborate on these warnings to hammer my point, but for what? If I'm right, our children won't care about this issue because they'll have been in proximity to openly gay couples their entire lives, and their Us will already include this group. They'll have seen that gay relationships encompass the same range of love and lust as straight relationships, and manifest the same range of human emotions, yearnings, and spiritual desires. The conceptual conflicts that tie our hands will form the basis of their world view, and like every generation before them they will look at the world a little more broadly and openly than their parents did before them. If I'm wrong, it won't matter, because we'll just keep fighting.
This is just my experience.
My girlfriend and I are getting married soon. We got engaged a couple days ago as I write this. Talis is from Mexico, and I'm from Canada, but we met in America, and that's where we both live right now. I doubt many people would be able to peg our "true" national designations unless we told them. Talis looks Lebanese, and I look Irish. Talis was raised Catholic and I was raised New Church, but I've never met someone from any faith whose worldview and perception of God matches mine more specifically. Our diverse backgrounds put us in the increasingly common position of needing to co-create new identities for ourselves - our given ones just don't wholly capture our combined experiences, or totally reflect the world that brought us together. We relish the opportunity to discover meaning in the experiences we get to have that no society before us got to have.
We love each other, and we love God, and we want to be a team, standing together for our decidedly pro-love agenda. In addition to at least three countries' worth of family and friends, we're inviting our straight friends and our gay friends to our wedding, because we love them and they love us. This, for us, is all that it comes down to.
You're welcome to join Us.