What my grandfather taught me.

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister. (1 John 4:7-21)

Last night, I went to bed thinking about Amendment 1 in North Carolina, and how it was expected to pass, and how sad that made me. I felt sad for gay people in North Carolina, whose daily lives would be darkened by other people's prejudice, and I felt sad for all the people who knew it was unfair and had voted against Amendment 1 and were embarrassed by how backwards it made their home state look, and I even felt sad for the people who voted FOR the amendment, for they knew not what they did, most of them. And then I thought about the passage of gay marriage in New York last year and how joyous that event was, how there was this palpable feeling in the air that things in the US could, and were about to, get better. And I thought about how, when my grandkids are in school, they'll learn about the gay rights movement just like I learned about the black civil rights movement when I was a kid, and about how, just like I did in third grade, they'll marvel at how strange and mean-spirited their grandparents' generation seemed to have been. There will come a time when the idea of treating gay marriages differently will seem just as petty and cruel as making black people and white people use different drinking fountains. My grandkids will live in that world.

I thought about these things as I drifted off to sleep in my husband's arms.

Adam and I have been married for almost four years now, and we still fall asleep every night holding one another. We often shift in our sleep (I'm a particularly wild sleeper), but we always fall asleep clasped together in bed. And when we wake up, we still greet one another with a kiss. Even when I wake up earlier than my husband so I can go to work, I always kiss him softly on the mouth before I walk out of the bedroom and pick up my lunch box and head off on my morning commute.

My husband and I are a happily married heterosexual couple.

It runs in the family, I guess. My parents are still happily married after 35 years together. Both sets of grandparents were happily married until my maternal grandfather's death in 1998 and my paternal grandmother's death late last year. My mom's parents, in particular, served as great models for a healthy, happy marriage. They were so in love, so completely into each other. And last night, as I fell asleep thinking about Amendment 1 and how sad it was, I remembered something my grandfather used to say.

My grandpa was a man's man--born into a poor Catholic immigrant family, one of eight kids, he dropped out of school during the Great Depression, lied about his age, and joined the CCC. The government shipped him to Idaho to dig ditches, and he successfully sent money to his folks for three whole months before someone at the dig site figured out that he was still a kid and sent him back to finish high school. As soon as he was done with school, my grandpa signed up for the Navy in World War II and saw several battles in the Pacific. He married my grandma when they were both only twenty, he went to college on the GI Bill, and then he taught high school science classes for awhile, although I suspect that was mostly an excuse to coach football. Then he went and got his Masters and built rockets for Martin Marietta (which later became Lockheed Martin), including the ones that took the Space Shuttles into orbit. He had a big tattoo of his Navy ship on his arm, and he played college football, and he loved yelling at umpires. He ate everything and was known as "Garbage Pail Kovalick" for the way he'd always finish off everyone else's leftovers. He smoked like a chimney until his first heart attack.

And he was the biggest feminist.

He was a member of NOW, he helped stand guard at Planned Parenthood clinics, he worked as a volunteer deputy sheriff on the domestic violence squad. And I remember, when I was little, he had an answer for the guys who used to ask him, "Mike, why do you care so much about that women's rights stuff?"  

"I'm not a woman," he would say. "But I have a wife. I have two daughters. I have a mom, and a grandma, and sisters, and aunts, and cousins. You go ahead and tell me they don't deserve the same rights as men. You go ahead and tell my wife and daughters that. Just try."

This needs to be said, because I don't think we say it as baldly and honestly as we should: there is no decent biblical argument against letting gay people get married. Of course, in a country with a pretty solid wall between church and state, the civil argument should be sufficient. (If you'd like to argue something about the Founding Fathers' faith, go right ahead. They were mostly A) deists, or B) Anglicans like me, so I don't really think that's an argument you'd like to pursue, unless you'd like to start seeing Anglican values, like caring for the poor and letting people have control over their own bodies, enshrined in national law.) But apparently some people think the argument that everyone should be treated the same under the law is not good enough, so, being a theologian, I am well acquainted with "Christian" arguments against gay marriage, and I am here to tell you that they don't work, at all, on any level.

The Bible doesn't actually say anything about gay marriage. It says a heck of a lot about love, of course, so if you've missed that part, you might want to go back and read the whole thing over again. Or once, really. It's a pretty integral part, so if you missed it, you can't have been paying that much attention, anyway.

To enshrine discrimination under the guise of Christian values is to practice Christianity without Christ. To believe that the Bible condemns marriage between two consenting adults of the same sex who love one another and want to build a life together is to completely miss out on the message of the entire last third of Scripture.

And to claim that "biblical marriage" is something we want to emulate today is to be completely ignorant of the way marriage worked in biblical times. Marriage back then had nothing to do with love. It was an economic arrangement, one that served to bind clans together, not to bind two hearts into one. There's a reason Paul preached against marriage (yes, against HETEROSEXUAL MARRIAGE)-- because it bore little to no resemblance to our marriages today. Marriage has become something beautiful and sacred BECAUSE it has evolved--it has moved beyond a bartering system, a way to turn a herd of cows into a woman to breed your children, into something far holier and more dignified.

 I am a straight woman. I'm young and Christian and happily married to a man (and future priest) who is the love of my life. I was born in the South, raised in the Midwest, go to church many times a week. I'm not gay.

But my close friends are gay.

My husband's close friends are gay.

My colleagues are gay.

And my sister is gay.

You go ahead and tell me they don't deserve the same rights as I have. You go ahead and tell me that they don't deserve to nestle into their soulmate's arms every night, to fall asleep in that envelope of love and safety, to wake each day to a kiss and a smile and the promise of a long life together.  

Just try.