Tag / Civil Unions

by Michael

Civil Unions, pt. 3 of 3

My first post was about the supposed association between the struggle for civil unions and the struggle for civil rights.  Yesterday I went on about marriage and how churches and church people are naturally concerned about it, particularly when we come close to the edge where law and spirituality meet.  This last post is a short reflection on why I think civil unions will be good for the people of our state.

I think that any move toward a more just society is a good move.  My hope and expectation is that civil unions will not be a step in the “wrong direction” or that marriage, as its been practiced and understood, will be damaged, but that the unions will be another chance for rights, protections, and benefits to be extended to citizens.  Here are some practical and not-so-practical implications that our state’s legislation leads me to consider and suggest:

  1. I’m trying to appreciate the complexity of civil unions.  The groundswell of antagonism and debate leading to the passage of this Act in Illinois was full and wide.  I think it was because the unions didn’t and don’t fit in a box.  They’re not just for gay couples.  I read reports of straight couples who didn’t want to marry standing in lines to get unions.  I heard a talk radio show where one person asked if it would legally be possible for a married person to have a civil union with another person precisely because it wasn’t marriage.  My head spun, and I think all these types of conversations keep me interested in politics, in how legislators negotiate the dips and cracks of our state’s laws.  And reading laws can be boring.  Complexity keeps it engaging, don’t you think?
  2. If you haven’t already, get your paperwork done.  If you don’t have a living will or an irrevocable trust, you need one; you might need both.  You need to get your papers in order so that people who care for you aren’t left with all the responsibility of caring for you when things like illness and death come.  I know that a part of the expressed desire of folks who weren’t covered by Illinois law (and still aren’t by the federal government) was being able to leave property and things to particular people at death.  Well, whether you’re getting a union, a marriage license, or neither, consider what will happen with you and your things when you can’t dictate or choose.  You will get sick.  Probably sooner than you think.  Who will make medical decisions on your behalf?  Who will administrate the affairs and messes and untied strings you leave at your big departure?
  3. Consider your own proximity to all those ‘isms.  I grew up with a memory in my bones.  It’s a memory from some slave plantation that one of my relatives–of course I don’t know which relative so don’t ask–labored at.  This relative loved a woman, married her, and was forced to leave when he was sold.  His family, his heart, was torn asunder because he couldn’t stay with his own choices.  I stand closely to that history, that shared history with African Americans, even though I’m decades from it.  And that history comes up for me when I think about the rights and protections of other marginal people.  It checks me in my gut when I hear words that sound like or hint at racism or bigotry or sexism or ageism.  I’m close to racism, to being mistreated by it and to being poisoned by it, because of my history.  And my history includes a long wall of theological nuances about sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular.  What about you?  Do you flinch and shudder with anger or bitterness when you hear about gay folks being given rights that were denied them because of their homosexuality?  Could it be because you’re afraid and fearful of homosexuality or because you hold judgments of gay people?
  4. Live justly and walk humbly.  Can this law help Illiniosians practice justice?  I think it can.  I had no difficulty at all looking at the people celebrating the passage of this law, though I was in my office preparing for a monthly prayer meeting when folks were at the municipal building or out in the park.  That’s because I saw in their faces the brows and noses of people I know, family members and friends.  When you know people who are affected by discrimination of whatever sort; when you recognize a person who is impacted by your hermeneutic, your way of understanding Scripture; when you talk to people and love people who can’t visit a hospital room, it humbles you.  It should.  This morning I officiated Christina and Joe’s wedding.  They had two passages read, one from the love chapter in Corinthians, another from Psalm 15.  I’ll end with the psalm because it fits for the day.

Who may worship in your sanctuary, Lord?  Who may enter your presence on your holy hill?  Those who lead blameless lives and do what is right, speaking the truth from sincere hearts.  Those who refuse to slander others or harm their neighbors or speak evil of their friends.  Those who despise persistent sinners, and honor the faithful followers of the Lord and keep their promises even when it hurts.  Those who do not charge interest on the money they lend, and who refuse to accept bribes to testify against the innocent.  Such people will stand firm forever (Psalm 15, NLT).

Any thoughts on these three posts?

by Michael

Civil Unions, pt. 2 of 3

I love marriage as a matter of philosophy and practice.  I have one wife, have only had one, and I’m giving all that I can (and sometimes all that I can’t) to my relationship with Dawn.  To have a marriage that is honorable and full of love is a long life project.  Sometimes I really enjoy it.  Sometimes it’s grueling.  My closest friends know that I’m not the easiest to live with.  I know that my wife, the darling she is, is not always easy to live with, and the result is til death parts us.

I come to the enactment of this law with marriage in my view, with it in my experience.  I can’t quite imagine not being married.  Well, I can, because I have a creative and dancing imagination, but I’m trying to push a point.  When you’re married, you’re supposed to give yourself wholly and completely to that relationship.  And giving like that makes it difficult to envision yourself unmarried.  But as I thought about this Act–and it’s not about marriage but civil unions–I had to stretch into that imagination.

What brought me back was the pastoral viewpoint.  I think a lot of people of faith express strong sentiment against civil unions.  Of course, people of faith express support for them, too.  The same can be said about marriage.  What I want to point out, though, is that the Church (and its people, if you will) has always been concerned with marriage, and it should be.  That’s because the Church had focused on the sacraments, with what is sacramental.

To talk about the sacraments is to talk about experiencing grace.  One way of understanding sacraments is that they are expressions of invisible gifts from God through visible things.  The Church is good at dealing with what is sacramental.  Marriage is a sacrament in the Catholic tradition, but it is sacramental for other traditions too because it carries grace.  Marriage brings with it the daily reminder of our dependence upon the One who loves perfectly.  So, the church has reason to talk about marriage.  It has always had reasons.

That said, the Church has to be cautious when stepping outside of the realm of the sacraments.  I think the Church needs to be related to the civic or public arena.  But I also think that we must acknowledge that our role is unique and different from the civic arena.  Obviously I’m suggesting a split that isn’t quite borne out in real life; people from/in the Church are in the public life.  That’s good and that’s necessary because that truth makes religion relevant for daily life.  But my point is the Church holds and handles the sacraments, while the political institutions of our time handles the laws.  The thing is that marriage is a legal and spiritual institution.

When things like civil unions come up, it pushes us to an edge where we can’t help but meet at the tips of our borders, the Church’s border being the sacraments and the political world’s border being that which is judicial.  We look at each other and come to terms with what the Church’s role and concern is and what it isn’t.  I think spiritual leaders should debate and fight and pray about marriage and how it’s protected, preserved, and even revered in a culture that’s so poisonous to long commitments.  But that struggle, those prayers, and those debates are because of the grace-filled nature of marriage, not because of rights and protections and legal benefits.  Those legal benefits are properly qualified to the realm of law and politics and legislation.  Those aren’t what I deal with daily.  Those aren’t what the Church holds, handles, and invites people to participate in.

I’m celebrating a wedding tomorrow.  One of things I’ll say is that the couple before me is signing up for a long life course in commitment.  When I say that, I’ll be thinking about how everything around them will frustrate their vows and their commitments.  Their own histories will object.  Their dispositions, daily changing with the winds, will too.  But that’s the vow.  And that needs to be protected because it is a means of grace and transformation.  That’s what the Church does, engage in the prolonged discussion and celebration of grace.

Now, and I’m almost done, how that looks is different from one Church or denomination to another.  That’s because communities of faith find their answers first in the Scriptures.  Diverse readings yield diverse interpretations, which bring about a buffet of practices.  That’s how many churches can see something like marriage or gay marriage or divorce or baptism so differently.  The Church or the denomination has to do its best work, asking the question, “What do we hear from our best source?”

If Scripture is a best source–or in some communities the best source–then it’s always a part of that discernment.  If a community is under Scripture, that yields a different conclusion than if a community is next to or over Scripture.  If first place is given to culture and ethos and social acceptability, the language of Scripture (and the God of it) will be too strange to listen to when matters like gay marriage come up.  So the interpretations will be different.  But each community of faith, handling the sacrament of marriage as it naturally does, can look differently.  And the clincher is, somehow, we are still one Body, one Church, immersed and joined into one baptism if the New Testament is true.

by Michael

Civil Unions, pt. 1 of 3

My wife did a smashing job in her review, didn’t she?  Well, today I’m moving away from jumping the broom, moving a bit.  But I’m staying close still.

Earlier this year, Governor Quinn signed civil unions into Illinois law, and yesterday the law went into effect.  It is called the Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Unions Act.  From what I can tell a civil union will afford a person the same legal obligations, responsibilities, protections and benefits given to a person in a spousal relationship, stopping short of the ability to legally marry.  For many Illinois people in committed same-sex relationships this legislation is a splendid and welcome gift.  It’s a gift for heterosexual couples who have put off marrying for whatever reason as well.

There has been a good amount of fear across the country in the last decades about marriage and the need to preserve and protect marriage.  Much of that fear or, to be more charitable, concern has come from religious people.  People of faith, many of them Christian, have expressed and promoted their concerns.  As a professional religious person, I am naturally connected to these expressions.

I see three issues related to the new legislation in my state.  One is the connections that have been made between civil unions and the civil rights era.  A second is the issue of marriage itself, the preservation or detraction of the institution, the right to marry, and the like.  A third issue is the civil union itself, what it is, what it allows.

I’d like to think out loud about those three issues in the next few posts.  My reflection on the connection between the struggle for civil unions and the struggle for civil rights in this country is simple, almost boring.  I don’t think there is a relationship.

There are probably lines connecting the intentions of folks working and hoping for civil unions with the intentions and needs in the movement toward civil rights for people of color, particularly Black folks.  But Black people were discriminated against in legal forms, segregated against throughout the country because of their blackness.  The thread for them was historical and long and formulated by law, again, because of their racial identity.  That link was not present for people in Illinois seeking the passage of the Act for civil unions.  They weren’t discriminated against because of their ethnicity.  They did not receive the same protections as married couples, yes.  They were going without certain benefits, true.  But the absence of those protections weren’t inside the stream of four centuries of racism, discrimination, and segregation.

There are Black folks who were denied, for all practical purposes, spousal rights because they cannot be legally married.  Black people looked forward to midnight today so that they too could be acknowledged inside the new legal structure and know some freedom and some liberty.  Those Black folks are likely drawing their own connections to the earlier movement of Black people in this country.  Perhaps I should be more measured in my criticism of those folks because they are, well, Black.  But I do think that the connection is a forced, artificial one.  I’m cautious in general because of that long, existential thread that links me to a person or a relative or a people who were told who they could love and what rights they could and couldn’t have.  My blackness makes me much more liberal in that way.  But those unions allowed under the pronouncement of the judge or the lifestyle celebrant today weren’t like the earlier unions in the brush harbors of slave plantations.  There was no “more powerful other” in the ear of those couples downtown today when Judge Evans and Mayor Emanuel snapped photos and smiled and congratulated.

I think it is an advance in our state’s political arena that the civil unions have happened.  I’ll get to that in post three.  But I am concerned that the language of the struggle has borrowed, taken from, and used the narrative of the civil rights movement.  I am concerned that the practice and habit of using Black folks for everybody else’s progress continues.  I am concerned that the hardships, fights, prayers, work, and deaths of people with skin like and darker than mine can so easily be employed and appropriated for somebody other than themselves.

I think it’s a misuse of our forebears.  It may well be consistent with movement toward a more just society.  It may be a politically expedient decision to make.  But does that mean we, once again, drop into the collective story of Black people, take what is theirs, and push it into the discourse of the next popular topic because those people’s story of struggle is effective?  It that is the case, it won’t be without people  like me thinking out loud and demanding some reconsideration.

What do you think?