Love wins! Today is the 46th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion in June 1969. It is certainly a victory for struggle for the right to marry and protecting LGBT families with kids.
Justice Kennedy writes for majority decision recognizing same-sex marriage as the law of the land:
The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality. This is true for all persons, whatever their sexual orientation.
As all parties agree, many same-sex couples provide loving and nurturing homes to their children, whether biological or adopted. And hundreds of thousands of children are presently being raised by such couples…Most States have allowed gays and lesbians to adopt, either as individuals or as couples, and many adopted and foster children have same-sex parents. This provides powerful confirmation from the law itself that gays and lesbians can create loving, supportive families.
Excluding same-sex couples from marriage thus conflicts with a central premise of the right to marry. Without the recognition, stability, and predictability marriage offers, their children suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser. They also suffer the significant material costs of being raised by unmarried parents, relegated through no fault of their own to a more difficult and uncertain family life. The marriage laws at issue here thus harm and humiliate the children of same-sex couples.
No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.
The 14th Amendment has been used to define marriage a human right in American history since the 1880s, and it has been used consistently to widen that right to interracial marriage and now to include same sex marriage. These are profound recognitions of marriage equality and the protection of children of LGBT parents. The estimates of children of LGBT parents in 2000 were 10 million, and I am sure that it now exceeds that number. About Parenting– a website about parenting, foster care, and adoption– estimates that 2 million GLB folks in the US want to adopt children.
This inclusion of LGBT folks has a longer history than Stonewall. It goes back to Ruth and Naomi, Jonathan and David, and the Roman Centurion with his youth that Jesus healed.
Theologian Wendy Farley writes, “Christianity moves through history carried by te impulses of domination and exclusion. It despises uppity women, no-hellers, contemplatives, queers, and thinks less off those people outside Christianity outside. But without their witness to the nearness and tender mercies of Emmanuel, the memory of Christ is distorted.” (Farley) Another favorite theologian, Diarmuid O’Murchu, speaks of “Pentecost Queers” at the original Pentecost, those men and women who were outsiders, and the Spirit led to a revolutionary Jesus movement that had to take serious the radical inclusivity of Jesus ministry, and it was oftentimes disturbing and uncomfortable to the Jerusalem church under James, the brother of Jesus. Frequently in Christian history, that inclusion went underground. I want to talk about few underground events that were precursors to the Stonewall Rebellion and the Victory we celebrate being included in marriage and families like everyone else.
But the desire to be married and have families among people who have loved the same gender has a long history.
For example, the story of Sergius and Bacchus, canonized martyrs and saints in the Catholic and Orthodox churches, is a story that we reclaim as part of the minority history of alternative relationships. Let me recount my meditational story from Centering prayer.
Now Sergius and Bacchus maintained a single household; soldiers in the Roman legion—Sergius as an officer and Bacchus as a lesser officer. Yes, gay saints in uniforms! They were denounced as Christians during the persecution of the Emperor Diocletian, the worst of the Roman persecutions where 20,000 Christians perished. They were ordered to sacrifice to the emperor but refused:
Immediately the emperor ordered their belts cut off, their military uniforms, and the gold torc taken from their necks which held their red Roman capes. Sergius and Bacchus were dressed in women clothes and paraded through the middle of the city to the palace, bearing chains around their necks. The emperor attempted to feminize them and mock their masculinity.
In a masculinist military culture, the parading with women’s clothes was to humiliate the couple. Their comment is revealing: “As brides you have decked us with women’s gowns and joined us together…” These are words of defiance, for they understood themselves married to each other and to Christ the bridegroom.
The night that Bacchus was executed, however, he appeared to Sergius:
“Why do you grieve and mourn, brother? If I have been taken from you in body, I am still you in bond of union…Hurry then yourself, brother, through beautiful and perfect confession to pursue and obtain me, when you finished the course. For the crown of justice for me is to be with you.”
Bacchus’ promise if Serge followed the Lord, he would not receive as we might expect a reward the beatific vision or paradise, but Bacchus himself. How many lovers have understood when their partner has died that they will be re-united with them in heaven! We can related with these Christian lovers?
The next day Sergius was forced to run 10 miles in boots in which nails had been driven in. But according to legend, an angel healed Sergius’ feet. The next day he was forced to run another nine miles with spikes driven into his feet. He was executed, but not before praying for forgiveness of his executioners. A gay soldier imitating Christ on the cross—forgiving those that killed him. Gay saints, we can be proud of….Sergius and Bacchus came to represent some of the foremost paired military Christian saints. Their feast is October 7.
Another point made in John Boswell’s book Christianity, Homosexuality, and Social Tolerance is that in the Greco-Roman world same-sex male couples were held up as models of fidelity and love. When Rome declined, he suggests that many men and women who loved the same-gendered entered into monasteries. And it takes me where I want to discuss Boswell’s The Kindness of Strangers—a book about the abandonment of babies and children. It was common practice to leave a child with any disability or physical deformity exposed to the elements and death on hillsides. Christians practiced this custom when they had too many children, too many girls to pay a marriage dowry, or physically disabled children to the elements. Boswell develops the thesis that same-gendered monasteries and convents, full of our folks, took in and raised many abandoned children in an age that had no artificial contraception and no adoption. He hypothesizes that they actually saved and raised hundreds of thousands of children over centuries. It is the kind of hospitality recovered in the last decade where gay and lesbians have adopted children in foster care. A lesbian couple in Florida adopted three severely disabled children handed over by their families to state care. Two gay men friends of mine in St. Louis adopted two half brothers, born cracked addicted. Boswell’s thesis continues in our community.
Love wins a major victory on Friday! But it will not win until a truth of Human Rights Campaign T-shirt I frequently wear with the words “Love Conquers Hate”. That means the murder of nine African-American Christians at Mother Emmanuel Church, including its Pastor, Rev. Clement Pinckney. Those nine welcomed into their prayer meeting a young white male, Dylann Storm Roof. They believed in an extravagant hospitality of Christ, and they were massacred because of racism. The were martyred because they practiced radical Christian hospitality if welcoming a stranger into their midst.
The relatives of the martyred African-American women and men spoke in a preliminary hearing charging of Dylann, they spoke of their pain and grief but extended forgiveness to the alleged murderer. The members of Mother Emmanuel Church are our sisters and brothers, they shared with us a profound belief in extravagant hospitality and radical inclusiveness of Jesus’ ministry. They practice forgiveness. We share those practices of radical inclusiveness and love. What lives on at Mother Emmanuel Church is the witness to the power of love. Love will ultimately win; it will conquer hatred and violence. This is the promise of the resurrection faith that we hold dearly.
President Obama gave the eulogy, confronting white supremacism and racial divide. He also spoke God’s “reservoir of grace,” surrounding the nine murdered and the relatives who extended forgiveness to the perpetrator. That “reservoir of grace” that drive for love and being loved has motivated our community to seek legal recognition for marriage and protection of our children and families.
We scored a victory with Supreme Court Friday. So I modify the title of the sermon from “Love Wins” to “Love Won a Victory for Love.” We have not yet achieved what my tee-shirt from the Human Rights Campaign “Love Conquers Hate.” We have still further to go for a victory not for all humanity but for all life on Mother Earth.