Marriage Equality

Summary:

While the political right seems to want to shift the debate over marriage equality from a religious perspective to one focused on family, we should not be fooled. For many of the opponents of marriage equality, homosexuality is a violation of God’s law as expressed in the Bible, which is understood as the Word of God. But, again, this is a misunderstanding of the Bible. It is not a monolithic, univocal work. It contains the voices of many people expressed under varying circumstances. The voice of a priest like Ezra expresses a very restricted understanding of what constitutes the covenant community—those who had experienced the Babylonian exile as God’s punishment and refinement of an apostate people. But from the same period arises the voice of a prophet who has a much more expansive view of the covenant community, one which happily includes those who had always been rejected by the priestly class focused on ritual purity. Those of us who support marriage equality should do so from the prophetic biblical perspective of universal humanity.



Full text:

While the Supreme Court deliberates the constitutionality of Congress’ “Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)” and California’s Proposition 8, it’s high time to reframe the religious argument that is so often brought to bear in the debate. Besides, let’s not be fooled. While the religious right is trying to reframe their argument in terms of family and procreation, we all know what they really mean. Religious fundamentalists and the politicians they support cast gay marriage as a violation of God’s law, insisting that our nation cannot be sustained in the face of this violation.

Leaders of more liberal religious movements that have accepted marriage equality insist that God’s law is not stagnant, but evolves as humans gain new understanding of the world and of God’s role in human affairs.

This more expansive view of the flexibility of religious law and its connection to human knowledge and understanding is useful and important as human moral values unfold and evolve. I would suggest, however, that this vision does not go far enough in conceiving a new perspective on the nature of religious scripture, the divine/human relationship and how that relationship can inform a contemporary approach to moral and legal issues. I call this new perspective Religious Humanism, which insists on the human dimension of religion and recognizes religious scripture, including the Bible, as multivocal expressions of the divine/human encounter.

When approaching the broader issue of sexuality from this perspective, we must begin with the understanding not only that the Bible is not the “Word of God,” but more significantly, that there is, existentially no such thing as the Bible. What we call the Bible is, in fact, a collection of books—indeed that’s what the word Bible means—each of which are themselves composite works, perhaps emerging from an early oral tradition, written or compiled over a period of roughly 1,000 years under varying historical, social, political, economic and  religious/theological circumstances. As a result, what we really have is not some univocal, monolithic work that we can simply turn to for answers to our questions. It’s not a dictionary or an encyclopedia. It is, rather, a polyphonous, multivocal work conveying the perspectives of various writers at various times.

These various writings began to coalesce into what Christians today would call the Old Testament and Jews would call the Tanakh or the Hebrew Bible during the 6^th – 5^th centuries BCE. The Kingdom of Judah had been invaded and conquered by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. The Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and a good portion of the citizens were sent into exile in Babylonia. Fifty years later, in 536 BCE, the Persian King Cyrus, having defeated the Babylonians, allowed exiled peoples, including the Judeans—the Jews—to return to their homelands and rebuild their temples. It is in this context of exile and eventual restoration that we need to examine the seeds of the composition and compiling of the Hebrew Bible.

Probably due largely to Persian imperial politics, the political development of this restored Judean community was kept under fairly tight imperial control. There was no king of the newly restored Judea; it became a Persian province ruled by a governor appointed by the Persian king. Often this was a Jew, as exemplified by the biblical figure Nehemiah. Local authority emanated from the Temple, rebuilt with the support of King Darius of Persia, giving the priesthood a good deal of status and authority. It is these priests who were responsible for compiling the various literary strands and oral traditions that came to form what Jews call the Torah, or what is called in English the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses. This is a crucial point to bear in mind. The Torah, in its final compilation—more or less as we have it today—is the product of the priests of the second Temple.

We should also bear in mind that the sparse verses referring to male homosexuality in the Pentateuch derive from an earlier priestly work perhaps going back to the first Temple, namely, the Book of Leviticus, with its detailed instructions for the sacrificial program of the Temple and the rules for ritual purity meant to protect the Temple from ritual contamination.

We get a glimpse of the mindset of these second Temple priests in the biblical work ascribed to Ezra, a leader of that contingent, identified in the book that bears his name as a priest and a scribe. In that book, the author makes clear that the covenant community—the community that could participate in the rebuilding of the Temple and in the communal life that would center around that Temple—is restricted to what the book refers to as “the returned exiles.” These are the descendants of the Judeans who had been taken onto exile by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and who had returned to Judea under Persian rule. In the biblical prophetic tradition, exile came to be understood as God’s plan to punish the covenant people for their sins of apostasy and idolatry. Exile would, in effect, cleanse and refine the community thus allowing the purified community to return to its land. Only these returned exiles had endured the punishment that would purify the community of the pre-exilic sins, so only these returned exiles could be considered part of this restored covenant community. Those who had remained in the land of Judea, who had not gone into exile, who had not endured that punishment and had not been cleansed of those sins could not participate. That, I would suggest is the voice of the priests of the second Temple.

But there is another voice from the period—the voice of a prophet whom scholars refer to as II Isaiah to distinguish him from the earlier, pre-exilic prophet Isaiah. This prophet’s voice is heard in the latter half of the Book of Isaiah, chapters 40-66. This prophetic voice insists that all who are willing to enter into a covenant relationship with God are accepted in God’s house, God’s Temple.

"To the eunuchs who keep My Sabbaths, who choose the things that please Me and hold fast My covenant, I will give, in My house and within My walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters… And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to Him, to love the name of the Lord… these I will bring to My holy mountain, and make them joyful in My house of prayer… for My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples" (Isaiah 56:4-7).

Even eunuchs, even foreigners, disqualified from participation in the Temple service by the priestly writers of Leviticus are welcomed by the prophetic voice of universal humanity. Those of us who are committed to this prophetic vision of the cosmic, universal worth and value of every human must continue to vigorously confront the “priestly” voice of fear of the other, control, hierarchy, power and authority, but we must do so not just from a political perspective of human rights, but from the prophetic biblical perspective of universal humanity.