Religious Liberty

Our brothers in the Roman Catholic hierarchy have launched a campaign, Fortnight for Freedom, against the birth control mandate being imposed on religiously affiliated institutions that serve the public. Their argument is that, even though those institutions will not have to pay for the inclusion of birth control in the health insurance they provide their employees, they will still be paying for it indirectly, as, one must assume, will all the rest of us through our insurance premiums.

They are, of course, right, as there is no free lunch. Someone has to pay. However, that is the entangled nature of things in our society and economy. We cannot avoid paying for things we don't like, things that may well be contrary to our deeepest religious convictions. Pacifists pay taxes that support the military. Home schoolers pay taxes that support public schools. Texans who oppose the death penalty pay taxes that are used to execute people. There is no way to avoid this entanglement, as my mother learned when she refused to pay the portion of her federal income tax that went to the Pentagon.

The Bishops have also complained that agencies like Catholic Charities have had to stop providing adoption services because they would be required to provide them to gay and lesbian couples, in violation of the Church's teaching. The problem with that objection is simple: the adoption programs were financed with money from state governments. When you want to use government funds, you need to be willing to follow government rules.

I have some simple advice to the Bishops. If you don't like living in a secular republic where governments have to decide how best to provide for "the general Welfare," I know a small theocratic state in Italy where you might prefer to live. Or, if that doesn't suit, perhaps you might want to stop whining and grow up.

What Kind of Campaign?

Last Sunday I celebrated the 62nd anniversary of my baptism by presiding at the Eucharist at Trinity Church in Topsfield, Massachusetts. In her sermon, our rector, Jo Barrett, challenged us to think of how the Spirit is leading us - in our personal lives, in the parish, in the wider world. Jo's challenge got me thinking about how the Spirit might be leading us in this election year, not how I feel myself led as I decide how to vote, but how all of us are being led. What came to me, and maybe it was of the Spirit, is how much we need election campaigns with no demonizing of any of the candidates or those who support them. We need campaigns that focus on issues of public policy and the experience and character of the candidates.

I am not optimistic about our getting what we need, but, as always, I can hope.

Forsaking All Others

There has been, as one would expect, a lot of talk about marriage equality in the past few months, especially since the President's announcement about his support of it. Although his support of it is not surprising, a great many odd comments have been made about it, some accusing him of changing his position for purely political reasons. I happen to think that there is nothing odd about a state senator supporting marriage equality in Illinois, but deciding not to do so as a US senator. Different roles often call for slightly different positions. What should be obvious is that the President has been a supporter of the rights of Americans who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered.

More troubling to me than the critical comments about the President's position, have been assertions that marriage equality puts us on a slippery slope to accepting polygamy. Most of those who make these assertions are Christians, arguing that same-sex marriages are inconsistent with Biblical marriage. Of course, anyone who has actually read the Bible knows that there is not just one pattern of marriage seen as acceptable. However, these critics of marriage equality do get one thing right. Over time Jews and Christians came to believe that monogamous lifelong unions were, if you will, God's will. In western democracies these have also been accepted, with perhaps some waffling on lifelong, as the one kind of relationship that deserved legal recognition. Sadly, what we have now in the US is both lifelong monogamy and serial monogamy. There is, I think, no reason to believe that marriage equality will do anything to increase the incidence of serial monogamy. It will not destroy what its critics like to call traditional marriage.

There are two qualities of marriage that I think are just as likely to be true in same-sex as in opposite-sex marriages, and may, for a variety of reasons be more likely in same-sex marriages: mutuality and fidelity. When a couple marries in the Episcopal Church, they include in the statement of their intention to forsake all others. I often like to point out to couples that the others should include anyone or anything that becomes more important than one's spouse, but the most obvious meaning of this is that what the Church describes as a union in "heart, body, and mind" is intended to be exclusive. I think one reason why fidelity is essential is because without it mutuality will not be possible. Even with fidelity, most married people find mutuality challenging at times. This may be particularly true for men married to women. Patriarchy is still a powerful force in society and it is often very hard work for men - and at times women - to leave the father knows best mentality behind. Mutuality means, as a colleague once said in a wedding homily, that it's not about me, it's about her. If I am in the relationship to get my own way, to get my needs met, then I am not committed to mutuality. While all healthy relationships do involve mutuality, the mutuality that is intended in marriage, that union of heart, body, and mind, is not possible in polygamous relationships. We cannot give ourselves wholly and unconditionally to more than one person.

Like the domino theory on the 1960s, the slippery slopeargument against marriage equality sounds hollow. What rings true, and what the wider society needs to hear from Christians, is our support for lifelong monogamous marriages marked by fidelity and mutuality, our belief that it is such marriages that most of us will flourish.

Bullying

I bullied another student when I was in junior high. I only did it once. A friend and I decided to gang up on a classmate we didn't like, although I cannot remember what it was about him that we didn't like. Things went as planned until somehow the boy we were bullying got me down on the floor, sat on my chest, and punched me in the nose. My nose broke and I learned a lesson.

Not that bullying was wrong, but that I wasn't much of a fighter.

I learned the more important lesson much later as I began to hear stories about kids who didn't fit in being bullied. Perhaps Mitt Romney hasn't heard those stories or hasn't made the connection between the bullying that happens every day in America and the "pranks" that he did when he was at Cranbrook. Maybe Romney doesn't think bullying is serious. It is and what Romney and I did as teens was wrong. Not a a little high spirited horsing around, but ugly use of power to hurt and humiliate another person.

I like to think I was lucky to have had my nose broken that day in junior high. Maybe if I had succeeded in my bullying I would have kept on doing it. If the stories from Romney's fellow students at Cranbrook are accurate, he was a more successful bully than I. As hard as it can be to own up to our bad deeds, I think Romney would do us a great service by admitting that what he did was bullying and join other leaders in taking a stand against bullying

Marriage and Diocesan Autonomy

In a recent post Fr. Eric Funston pointed out a distinction between marriage, a relationship governed by the state, and matrimony, the Christian sacrament. In describing marriage he said that it was a relationship which the parties could not dissolve by themselves, but only with the consent of the state.

As I read his post I recalled my use of the metaphor of marriage to describe the relationship between an Episcopal diocese and the Episcopal Church. When a group of Episcopalians get themselves organized enough to want to form an Episcopal diocese, they ask that this new diocese be admitted into union with the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, the highest authority within this hierarchical church. The organizing convention of the new diocese has to agree to abide by the Episcopal Church's rules, its Constitution and Canons. 

It was the use of the word union in describing the new Diocese's relationship with the Episcopal Church that led me to use the marriage metaphor to talk about that relationship. Granted, the metaphor isn't perfect, but I think it helps us as we consider those dioceses whose conventions have voted to leave the Episcopal Church. While there is no canonical provision for such a separation for dioceses within the US, there is provision for dioceses that were organized outside the country. It provided that such a diocese could request to become part of another church within the Anglican Communion. Those requests would have to be agreed to by the General Convention. Taking that canonical provision as a starting point, I concluded that the only way that a diocese could divorce itself from the Episcopal Church was with the consent of the General Convention. Both the diocese's organizing convention and the General Convention agreed to the union, so only the two bodies together could dissolve it. While a marriage can be dissolved without the consent of both parties, that only happens when a civil court agrees with the party seeking the divorce. As there is no court in the Anglican Communion to settle these divorce questions, the mutual consent of both parties would be required for an Episcopal diocese to leave the Episcopal Church.