Permission, Property, Propriety, and Personhood: Hands, and the Question of Asking for them in Marriage

I am sure that it's a difficult, confusing thing to be a woman in the 21^st century. I know this because even from a place of white, male, upper-middle class privilege, I find the landscape of rights, wrongs, rebuttals, and retributions incredibly confusing. As a white man raised in a politically conservative, protestant, Christian, economically safe, and emotionally supportive environment, I find almost any interaction with anyone to be a complicated maneuver of trying recognize and avoid stereotyping, systematic disrespect, and personal disrespect, while trying to remain affable, practical, and avoiding the "guilty white man" personality. I do my best to respect all kinds of persons in all kinds of contexts, and while I think I do a reasonably good job of it, I know it's hard, and often there are times when one simply cannot have one's cake and eat it too.

Case and point: Asking a woman's dad for her hand in marriage.

This is a complicated issue that I think deserves careful consideration from persons in all walks of life, of both sexes. The matter touches on important notions of filial respect, maturity, feminism, humanism, pragmatism, and of course tradition. Lately, I have given a great deal of thought to the matter, consulted the best sources available to me, and I'd like to present my thoughts here.

Why Not?
The understandable impulse of the traditional person inside all of us is to throw up the hands and ask in exasperation, "Why do we even need to talk about this?" After all, the tradition as it stands accomplishes a number of worthwhile aims.

First and foremost, its very concept unequivocally acknowledges the important truth that even adult persons with fully formed rational, autonomous capacities are the product of particular circumstances, more specifically of their parents, and the way those parents have chosen to raise the individual in question. Whether a person responds affirmatively or negatively to the way their parents raise them, initiating a marital commitment "from the top down" does an excellent job of acknowledging the parents of one's beloved as the most influential figure(s) in that person's life.

Furthermore, it begins the crucial relationship between a spouse and their in-laws on a basis of mutual respect and recognition. Despite what movies would have us believe, however they may seem in-laws are a crucial part of any family, on a meta-level if not on an immediate level, and beginning one's relationship with in-laws on a firm, mutual basis of respect is unquestionably good.

Finally, in correlation with the previous two points, asking to become a part of a family acknowledges in a very healthy way that even a newly married couple is not a new family, but that they live in multiple spheres of influence which form the most intimate, meaningful relationships of our lives. Just as a contract should be read and considered by both parties before being signed, it is important to realize and to recognize that marrying a person is not an isolated act, and the "ritual" of asking for a woman's hand in marriages accomplishes this goal very well.

All the same, there are a number of flaws, some of them particularly disquieting, which are more or less inherent to the practice.

Indecent Proposals
Prima facie, I think the first objection to the tradition of a suitor asking a father for a woman's hand in marriage is also the most potent objection. Though the choice to marry or not to marry still ultimately lies with the woman in question in our cultural arrangement, the practice finds its roots (and most of its history) in a deeply entrenched, misogynist tradition that did not and in many places still does not leave the ultimate choice up to the woman in question. At first glance, the agreement still looks uncomfortably like two men agreeing on the fate of a woman as if she were a piece of property. No amount of ultimate female autonomy can erase the firm appearance of misogyny in the tradition.

Furthermore, it strikes me that any adult relationship which has progressed to the point of intimacy at which two individuals are ready to marry is beyond the reasonable jurisdiction of a parent in the 21^st century. To first ask a woman's dad for permission to ask her to marry is ultimately to disrespect the primacy of her decision-making authority in her own relational arrangements. In addition, what couple in the 21^st century, genuinely ready to marry one another, would actually heed the prohibition of a parent? It may be that I am a vain, disrespectful person (it probably is) but I cannot imagine that failing to secure permission from a woman's father would really prevent me from asking her to marry me, and I think that I am nowhere near alone in that sentiment.

Thirdly, if the gender roles in the equation are switched, the tradition seems strange. Disregarding for a moment our problematic notion that only a man should propose, even then it would seem vaguely strange and out of place for a woman to ask a man's mom for permission to marry him. Why then does a switch to the traditional arrangement make the tradition justified? Because of its longstanding base in patriarchal gender-power dynamics? As in the same ones that still to this day create innumerable problems for women all over the world?

Yes. Those ones.

Finally, while the tradition does accomplish a number of admirable aims, by its very nature it undermines itself by cutting off most of the parties involved in the formation of a new family. Surely, a suitor and a woman's father should both have one another's perspective on a prospective marriage. But shouldn't he also have the perspective of his lover's mom? Shouldn't SHE have the perspective of her parents on the matter? What about the man's parents, would not his parents also have important, helpful contributions to make both to their son and the woman he plans to marry? The tradition as it stands turns what could, what should be a meaningful opportunity for six different people to openly offer advice and insight to one another into a private conference between only two persons.

All the same, the benefits of seeking parental wisdom are unquestionable for any young couple, and completely discarding the whole concept seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so next week I will try to piece together what I think a more coherent, helpful model for engagement as an institution would be.

Until then, please feel free to comment and share your thoughts on the matter.

9 Things That Only People Like Me Will Understand Because We Are So Special and Unique Like Precious Snowflakes

1.  How much everyone else sucks at everything because they are not like us.

  

For real though, why do they even try?

2.  How petty and pathetic and silly and totally not problems everyone else's "problems" are.

  

FOR SERIAL! Do they even know how pathetic they sound?

3.  How little everyone else understands how unique our particular challenges are.

  

They have no idea because they are different than we are and also stupid.

4.  How amazingly difficult our lives are in totally unique ways.

  

Like, really! No one else understands because they just haven't been there, you know?

5.  How fucking amazingly, overwhelmingly genius-tastic we are.

  

They should totally step aside and let us do all the things we want to and do all of the things we don't want to.

6.  How amazing we are. Like, seriously, we rock so hard and everyone else doesn't even understand.

  

Dance party for how awesomer we are than everyone else!

7.  How special we are in ways that other people are not, unless they are like us.

  

Because we know we rock and are totally different from everyone else in every way that is really important.  They're all so pedestrian they would've used "The Rock" clapping here.

8.  How we are totally special snowflakes who are certainly not seeking every piece of substandard uniqueness to firmly grasp as we inexorably drift toward death and the fact that history will inevitably forget us and render our lives essentially meaningless in the wide swath of the human race, much less so the vast span of natural life, which is itself mostly imperceptible in the great cosmic flurry of the universe.

  

Move along Debbie Downer! No denial here!

9.  How we totally don't engage in meta-criticism of cultural phenomenon that we find vapid for the sole purpose of staving off and ignoring our own casual engorgement in and of consumer media, thereby providing a smug, momentary solace from the terrifying fact we are also a part of the problem.

Totes not the case.

Joseph Schwarz - Prologue: From the Heart of a Dying Star to the Hand of a Dying Man

It was the least fortuitous glass of water that Joseph Schwartz would ever encounter.  Not that he knew it at the time of course; one never knows that the axe has been raised in the first place until its hideous momentum has carried the blade too far.  Then and only then, and even then only with a small sense of vulnerability and the faint notion of something moving above us, do we ever sense our imminent demise.

It began like most glasses of water do.  Some great time ago in a galaxy probably very close to our own the atoms began huddling around one another, convinced that if only they shared themselves enough they could keep the black abyss before them at bay.  And that warmth was good, and comfortable, if not peaceful.  Closer and closer they drew to one another, convinced like cattle that if they moved away from that dangerous blackness behind them; if they just moved away to a space where they could be closer together, they could be safe.  Of course we all know how this ends.

Eventually they came to share their innermost parts with one another, a bond that would quite literally burst forth into glorious day, and all was well for a time.  This bonding and sharing and becoming went on for quite some time, until the relationships between the parts became quite unstable.  This part would not and could not interact with the other, and so on and so forth until it seemed perhaps that the joining and the struggling and the huddling together might have all been a terrible idea to start with.  All the same there could be no return, for no matter how bad things were on the inside, on the outside there was still the terrible abyss, the fear of which had really been the start of the whole enterprise.

Nonetheless, despite the great fear and the certainty that whatever course was best, it was certainly not returning to that primordial chaos, tensions rose.  The stress rose and rose and rose, the differences became irreconcilable, and anyone looking in from the outside could’ve seen it coming years ahead of time.

The system broke.

Parts that had once held such close accord with one another, plasmic tufts of oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen and helium, once intimate and warm, were flung out into that great, black abyss from whence they came.  They drifted away, floating on the currents of discord into reaches so unfathomably greater than their own size that even we can barely understand, and found themselves all, once more, alone.

Still though, notwithstanding the failure of the previous endeavor, several entities once more seemed to feel almost pulled toward one another, inevitably and indefatigably drawn away from the solitude that was their peace.  Thus it came to pass that new endeavors were brought forth, new clusters and opportunities, hopeful and shining examples of just how productive that cooperation could be.  And all of these came to pass as failures of one sort or another, as do all things.

As this cycle ebbed and flowed, toward the beginning of a particular endeavor around a particular warm community, a number of entities began to cluster away from the center, thinking it was perhaps a good idea to cooperate, but that whole business of everyone going in on it all at once was just exhausting.  Besides, some of these entities, the old and overweight, simply didn’t want to move all those several millions of miles when they felt so comfortable here.  These communities ended up being so comfortable that other, lighter elements were convinced to join in as well, though in their youthful spirits they insisted on staying near the fringe of the community where at least they might catch a warm glimpse of the greater project going on nearby.  Well this idea really caught on, and soon enough stars all over the place were forming little outposts for their more elderly members and the hangers on that attended them.

So then, around 9.2 billion years after everyone had initially decided that the first arrangement was unacceptable, some strident groups of hydrogen decided to shack up with some tamer, but still energetic oxygen communities and form all kinds of parties and celebrations on the surface of the Earth.  For quite some time this remained an energetic if predictable affair, until on one strident morning life happened on the Earth.  

Exactly how and why this happened, whether there was any agency in the matter and, if there was, whose, have all been matters of dispute for all of the parties involved ever since.  But so far it really hasn’t amounted to all that much, so it hardly seems worth going over here.

Anyway, as it happened and as you all know these dihydrogen-monoxide things were preposterously useful for maintaining life, which was a project life seemed very well set on, and the water at least didn’t mind all that much.  This particular group of “waters” had really come from all over, different stars, different systems, and then all over the world.  Some of them had been a point of the Indian Ocean once, and had made their way up and back down through the cycle into tap water when a very rude businessman on a flight back from India had unfortuitously drank a bottle of water.  They all came from very different places, dying stars and crashing nebulas, India and Oxford and Seattle, but on the morning of October first they had all made their way through the tap and into Joseph Schwartz’ morning cup of water.

With the fuzzy carefulness of a man who would’ve rather stayed in bed, Joseph plopped in a few cubes of ice, poured the water into the cup, and made his way to the computer to see if anyone had done anything drastic overnight.  To his disappointed sigh, no one seemed to have taken a strong social media interest in that amazing guitar cover he posted late last night, and it seemed from the general lack of shock that so far the world wasn’t on fire yet.  So, unaware of the dreadful consequences of his actions, Joseph reached for the glass, meaning to take a last drink and pop of the door for work.  He got his hands around the glass, but as he went to lift it, the condensation from the ice, along with the downtrodden force of gravity, drove the left edge of the glass to simply slip from his fingers.  In the half moment afforded him, Joseph tried all that he could to stop his death.  Unfortunately, all that he could do to stop his death mostly entailed a kind of pathetic twitch and a childish, loud noise.

The water had spilled, quickly seeping in under the keys and into the laptop, where no sounds were audible, but a sudden flickering and general discombobulation of the screen made it clear that this was not a small matter.  The damage was done, the water was spilled, and Joseph Schwartz was a dead man walking.

There should be another chapter of this next Sunday.  No promises

Change, Belief, and Communication: An Introduction to a Series

"You never step in the same river twice." - Heraclitus

As an army brat, change has always been something of a favorite concept of mine.  Change has been the defining feature of my life in a way that exceeds the experience of most people, and it's always been a kind of obsession for me.  What is change, and if it is as constant as all evidence suggests, and if it is, as the saying goes, "the only constant," why do we regard it as change to start with, when it would seem that stasis is the abnormality?

These are questions too big for a blog post, and not really my purpose here.

What I'm about here is a project, perhaps in a sense at once the simplest and the most ambitious I've ever undertaken:

I want to tell you what I believe.  Or, at least, what I believe now.

Before I went to college, I was a politically conservative, theologically conservative Southern Baptist.  Some time, somewhere in there, I became a Free Methodist, then a Catholic.  Then I unbecame a Roman Catholic.  I'm not sure how, when, or by what degrees, but I became what most would call a "bleeding heart liberal."

Now, as a political liberal and a man who finds himself awash in a sea of perspectives, at once holding, bemoaning, mocking, and worshiping perspectives that are a mix of functionally identical, mutually exclusive, outright irrational, reductionist, pretentious and over all, angst-ridden, I feel it may be a good idea for myself and for those who know me and interact with me if I make a project of saying, in clear terms, just what I believe on a number of important matters.  Mostly, these will encompass theology, philosophy, politics and what little I know about economics.

I do not promise that they will be presented in that order, nor that they will be sequentially organized in a way that seems rational to anyone other than myself.  Nor can I ever hope to provide truly comprehensive perspectives on anything that you read here.  When one is talking about matters like the basis of morality (and, for that matter, if morality is a concept worth talking about,) the existence of God, the minutia of apologetics and the arrangement of labor systems, a man without a Ph.D cannot even begin to hope that he might be comprehensive in his presentation.

I do promise that I will be honest and unapologetic, and that as much as possible I will try to write what I do believe, not what I'd like to believe, and that I will try to provide at least a brief sketch of why I believe those things.

My perspectives will change over time, and it's possible that mere months from now I will believe that the positions I hold now are idiotic, but for here and for now, for those who read this and for myself when I look back on this, I will do my best to be clear and to tell you clearly, What I Believe.

What I Believe: Speaking the Words

There really is something about getting an opinion out there.  The formation of the words that we will use, and the way we implement those words can help us cement in our own minds just what it is that we mean to say.  Of course, the act of expression is a kind of intentional vulnerability, an instance in which we give up a piece of what we call our 'interior' and expose it to the reactions of others, whether positive or negative.  My friends can never laugh at my opinion, or point out its flaws, or de-contextualize and misappropriate parts of it, if I do not express it.

By way of contrast, the moment of communication is a moment of surrender, a point at which we remove ourselves from the calm interior where we hold our ideas like a warm blanket, in which we throw open the doors of our hovels and surrender whatever pieces we will allow the the possible mockery and derision of those to whom we have opened the doors.

As such, the act of communicating, the crucial moment in which we open the door and invite the light of criticism, is not self-contained.

If we are careful, we will tidy up our hovels, straightening a line here, dusting off a panel there and making sure that the air is light and airy or dark and heavy as is appropriate to the context in which we find ourselves.  Much like a host, we clean our interior before we present it, we clear the things we do not like and we refine our space until we can present it as, waht seems to us at first, what it really is, the way that we want to see it.

After the communication we are open to criticism, or to a lack thereof, but there is a sense in which this is irrelevant, or relevant only insofar as it informs the process of communication.
I write this, and I am trying to tell you wat I believe, because I believe that the only way I can understand what I believe is to try to put it together in such a way that others can see it, feel it, digest it and accept or reject it.

Until I allow another in, until I at least try to present my ideas at their best, I may not know what they really are, or worse yet, I may allow them to persist in a state of decay or disrepair.
So, come on in.  Enjoy the hovel and mind the warm blanket.  I am telling you this so I can tell myself this.

Tomorrow: What I Believe about believing

A Desperate Plea for Thanksgiving Day

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.
- President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917–1963)


Good morning!  Good afternoon!  Good evening!  Whatever time it is for you when you read this, HAPPY THANKSGIVING!  One of the wisest men I've ever known, Dr. Paul Stewart, once said to myself and an assembled Sunday-school class that Thanksgiving is the best holiday, because of the "big four" holidays it is the least centered on getting some thing for oneself, and the most centered on giving gratitude and benevolence to others.

This seems, to me, somewhat undeniable.  There's no Easter basket expected, there's no Halloween candy, and we all know that we organize the schedule of things we want in late autumn conveniently around December 25th.

What's more, Thanksgiving is so simply and amazingly pleasant, at least in my experience thereof.  It most closely resembles what I think Christian feast days are really supposed to be: we come together amiably, we consume a prodigious amount of food, during which and after which everyone is essentially required to do their best to be on their best behavior toward everyone else.  Thanksgiving is the best holiday, and everyone deserves Thanksgiving.

Unfortunately, not everyone (even among those who do celebrate Thanksgiving) gets a Thanksgiving.

More unfortunately, you and I and the people we know and love have probably all contributed to this deplorable state of affairs, more or less directly.

Across the United States, on this most wonderful of holidays, there are probably millions of people at work.  Some of these people do genuinely need to be at work, because they're working jobs that cannot go unfilled: the police officers, the fire departments, emergency service workers, prison guards, and so on and so forth.  Some, unfortunately, do need to miss at least part of the day, for the good of our society.

But does the cashier at Walmart need to carve out 6 hours of work when she'd rather carve out 6 pieces of turkey and a relaxing evening with her family?

Do workers at Denny's, select McDonald's, Pizza Huts, Burger Kings and other restaurants need to serve their customers burgers when they could be serving their families another helping of mashed potatoes?

No.  No, a thousand times.

And this brief list doesn't even take into account workers who must go to sleep early to get up for Black Friday store openings at 6 A.M., or workers who must either sleep through a large portion of the day or forego their sleep in order to work a midnight opening so that you and I and our not-so-Great-Aunt Ethel can get $40 off select Apple products in-store-only between the hours of 2:16 A.M. and 8:47 A.M.

Of course though, we can all lament that people have to work on holidays, with varying degrees of fervor.  But what I would point out, what I have to say, is that if you are out shopping, or eating, or getting gas, if you are doing anything that necessitates the presence of an employee at any place of business anywhere, you are the problem.

Stores would not pay their workers to keep the store open if keeping those stores open did not provide profit for the business, and stores would not receive profit for opening the store on a holiday if people weren't shopping there on the holiday.

If we want everyone to have a full, unfettered Thanksgiving, if that is not too much to ask for the underpaid, underprivileged human beings that market capitalism turns into ground meat on our holidays, not too much to ask from the gigantic businesses that seek to separate you and I from our hard-earned money, then we must stop shopping on these holidays.

Be careful when you stock up on food for Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or Easter, write a list if you have to, take an inventory of your kitchen before you go shopping, but whatever you do, don't go shopping on the holiday.

Get the best deals you can, if you must, on stuff for yourself and your friends, but for the love of your fellow human beings and their families, don't do it at a 12 A.M. Black Friday doorbuster.  The store will be just as open tomorrow, or later in the day, and in all likelihood you can probably find a better deal on Amazon.

All I'm saying here is that by utilizing services and places of business on Thanksgiving, we become part of the problem; we create a social place where there is a need for work.  And if you love Thanksgiving like I love Thanksgiving, and if you want everyone to be able to enjoy it just the same, I hope and I pray that you will join me in staying home and enjoying a nice, calm day at home with friends, family, and food.

God bless, and happy Thanksgiving.

The Mackelmore Fallacy and the Elephant in the Room

"Whatever god you believe in
We come from the same one
Strip away the fear, underneath, it's all the same love"

There is a story, more of a parable really, that is quite frequently used in the modern world to describe what is quite possibly the most simultaneously well-intentioned, arrogant and diminutive generalized perspective on "religion".  The parable goes something like this:

There were, walking along the road, a number of kind, old, blind men.  As they traveled together they happened upon a large elephant and began describing the great beast to one another.  "It is long, slender, and flexible," said one man, gently petting the trunk.  "No, it is large, strong, and rough," replied another, holding onto the beast's leg.  "No," said yet another, as he lightly stroked the elephant's ear, "it is soft, and thin, and light; it moves freely like a butterfly."  Still another, grasping the tusks, chimes in, "You are all fools!  It is hard, smooth and very sharp!"

The idea in this amazingly didactic parable is that religion is a single, general, complex and multifaceted entity, and because of this, individual religions and religious perspectives are not so much expressions of truth as they are useful pieces of truth.

This is, I think a major problem in modern (generally secular) religious thought that I believe is fully present in Mackelmore's song Same Love, and although I'm willing to admit I may be reading a perspective I hate into a song over which I feel cautious, doing so because of the perspective's prevalence in the city of Seattle from whence the song comes, I think that within the full context of the song the lines quoted above provide evidence of the perspective.

And, if this perspective is not present in this song, it is quite certainly as virulent as a plague in America and it's still worth talking about.

Just in case you haven't heard the elephant parable before, you may recognize the same perspective as typified in remarks like, "All religions lead to the same place eventually," or "I'd say I'm spiritual, but I try not to isolate myself to one particular tradition."  I don't want to demonize this perspective, but I would like to point out some of its key flaws

1.  The Elephant

The first big elephant in the room with the parable of the blind men and the elephant is, well, the elephant.

The problem is that the moment you typify or symbolize a broad-painted (and thoroughly western) conception of "religion in general" as one entity, you have begun from the individual perspective that there is such a thing as "religion in general" and that, furthermore, all religions are expressing in different ways the same essential essence.

This is a notion that is very easy to romanticize, but it is far too simplistic.

Muslims conceive of God as completely transcendent of humanity, and believe that his goodness lies in his arbitrary decision to make us, to sustain us, and to love us, absent any notion of compulsion and definitively not in any way identified with or existing in any plane of existence we can understand

Christians conceive of the same God as three entities in one entity, a doctrine called absurd by critics that at least one believer has called "so absurd that it must be true."  We believe that the infinite being in whom Muslims and Jews place their faith made himself finite and, what's more, definite in a single person and then assumed that definite (read: human) nature into his own infinite nature.  So the infinite becomes finite and makes the finite infinite while being at once one single being who is three infinite beings who can be defined as not the same thing as one another.

Meanwhile, those who fall under the great variety of traditions and schools normally labeled Hinduism believe that all substances, both visible and invisible, are ultimately one substance, which they call Brahman.  So all finite things are ultimately a part of the infinite reality of all existence, while still remaining definite from one another: after all, within the Hindu conception it is crucial that "atman is brahman", the individual soul is also the world soul...

But this is made explicitly distinct from Buddhist teachings (at least within the Theravada school) that the self does not ultimately exist.  Actually, when you get down to the core of it, Theravada Buddhism insists that what we call existence is only an illusion and that the ultimate reality of all things is that there is no ultimate reality of anything; or, for that matter, any reality of anything, ever.

At the modern edge of all of this, Scientific Atheists like Richard Dawkins tend to insist that the physical universe as we observe it is ultimate reality, and that furthermore that reality is, by the very principles that govern it, multiplied across dimensions into every conceivable possibility that has ever been, well, possible.  There is, understandably, no God in atheism, but there is a radical, beautiful, and sublime cosmology of possibility and instance that firmly deserves consideration within the spectrum of the religious systems it denies

At the very least, can we please acknowledge that the perspective which says that all of these incredibly different perspectives are the same thing is DEFINITELY in and of itself a completely separate perspective?

Furthermore, the "blind men and the elephant" perspective assumes that where the greatest religious and atheist minds of human history have tried their hardest to understand the ultimate meaning (or absence thereof) of all things and come up quite genuinely disagreeing with one another, modern, casual, impious speculation has found the real answer and can see that in the end there is, in fact, an elephant for the blind men to see.

2.  The Blind Men

I don't have much to say on this point, except that the perspective and the metaphor that best exemplifies it is just fundamentally offensive.

"No," says the modern spiritual person to the religious person, "you don't really know what it is that you're talking about.  It's all fine and well that you've spent your life in prayer and contemplation, that you've gone to worship services and dedicated your fear and trembling to the questions of your existence.  As a matter of fact, good for you, so very good for you that what you're doing makes you happy, but really you're like a blind man grasping at a thing that only a lack of commitment can help you understand.

Jesus?  Saladin?  Ashoka?  The Buddha?  All of them were blind men, and even though they disagreed (probably because they were silly enough to endorse individual perspectives) they were really looking at the same thing and apparently just didn't realize it.

Sorry, but this whole model is diminutive.  I am a Christian, others are Muslims, others are Vaishnavites, others Buddhists and others fall under innumerable other categories I cannot list here.  We can all respect one another, hell, we can all believe that maybe we'll all be more or less on good terms, whoever ends up being right.

But we do not have to resort to saying that everyone is wrong and everyone is right to do that.  We can believe, actually believe something that is fundamentally different from something that someone else believes and we can still have respect for one another when we do that.

The Macklemore Fallacy and the Importance of Orthodoxy

"God loves all his children is somehow forgotten, but we paraphrase a book written 3500 years ago."

So rings one of the most poignant lines in Mackelmore's hit song "Same Love" off of his collaborative album with Ryan Lewis.  The song, if you haven't heard it, is on the whole a much-needed and very welcome hip-hop endorsement of legal rights and social acceptance of those persons who fall within the LGBTQ spectrum, and it's profundity is perhaps only matched by the amount of musical talent and insight poured into it.  Being a piece by Mackelmore, it's primary narrative impetus comes through rapped verses, although a hauntingly beautiful chorus which echoes the essential cry of the persons with whom the song is concerned is provided by Mary Lambert.  What's more, the song as a musical piece is given a kind of musical grandiosity and a decidedly religious bend by both several lines, one of which is quoted above, which make direct reference to God and/or religion in general, and in case the religious point of the song was not driven home thoroughly enough by Mackelmore and Ms. Lambert, the song fades away to the attributes of love as listed in 1st Corinthians chapter 13.

This is a good song, a well-needed catchy and universal cry for LGBTQ rights, and it deserves almost every bit of praise that can be given up to it.

Nonetheless, there are two specific problems I find with the song's stance on religion.  Both of these problems, while well exemplified here, are far from rare and deserve, because of their befuddling and pervasive presence in 21st century life, special consideration

The first of these is the line quoted at the start of this article, a statement which seems agreeable and tempting at first, the faults of which are evident upon even the lightest inspection.

There is, of course, the somewhat obvious (though nonetheless significant) issue that the Bible, the obvious target of the remark, is not a single book, and while most of the Bible is likely drawn from a strict oral tradition reaching back maybe 3500 or so years ago (although that does set things back quite a ways), even the book of Leviticus, the earliest explicit condemnation of homosexuality in the Biblical text, was likely actually written down closer to the 6th or 7th century B.C.  It is, of course, easy to dismiss the difference between 2500 years ago and 3500 years ago, but let us be clear that we're talking a difference of 40%, but one thousand years.  If we assume a very generous average lifespan of 40 years, this comes out to twenty-five generations of people, and although the world didn't change terribly much by modern standards in that thousand years, it did significantly change and, more fundamentally, 3500 years and 2500 years are quite simply not the same thing, so the comment is first and foremost careless in its misuse of dating.  This is not likely done for intentional reasons to cloud the judgement of persons listening to the song, but it is incredibly ignorant, an extreme exaggeration, or some amalgamation of the two.

Still, this dodges the real implied meaning of the line.

The obvious point in saying that "we paraphrase a book written 3500 years ago" is that we, in this context "we" being those who do not endorse LGBTQ rights, have not only made a general human error, but have done so by misinterpretation of an old text with which we have allowed ourselves to become out of touch.

I want to be clear here, I really do love Mackelmore's music, I love this song, and I consider myself a firm supporter of LGBTQ rights, but this notion as presented in an otherwise admirable song is a farce.

On the one hand, there is the principle issue several (though limited) verses in the Bible openly and unambiguously condemn homosexual sexual acts.  Leviticus 18:22 and 20:10, along with the first chapter in the book of Romans, unambiguously condemn homosexual sexual acts as sin.  And let us be clear here, these are not verses taken out of context.  The sections of Leviticus from which these verses are lifted are quite literally lists of rules, more or less designed for lifting individual rules out of textual context and applying them unambiguously to a clear situation - this is why the Levitical law is so seemingly hell-bent on the infinite minutia of different situations - law is, in a sense, meant to be taken out of context and applied, and Leviticus is a book of law.

Furthermore, in Romans 1 it is similarly almost perfectly clear that Paul's condemnation of homosexual sexual acts is explicitly what it seems to be, a condemnation of homosexual sexual acts.  There are arguments on this particular matter that Paul is only talking about unnatural homosexuality, but this presents still more problems.  Several verses throughout the New Testament that do not explicitly mention homosexuality nonetheless prohibit what is variously translated "fornication" or "sexual immorality", and there is no honest examination of what these terms mean in their 1st century context that does not include homosexual sexual acts.

Nonetheless, even with these scriptural points being set aside, the core problem with Mackelmore's assertion (which is shared by a good deal of the vaguely "spiritual" culture in which we live) is that it asserts that those who do not completely accept, embrace and endorse the unmitigated practice of all the actions that fall within the LGBTQ spectrum for Christian religious reasons are in some sense out of touch with a vaguely conceived "original" religion or "original" Christianity that they have contorted through modern and/or recent misconceptions.

This is once more a tempting out, but an examination of history quite simply reveals it to be false.

The simple fact is that, the last 60 or so years being excluded, there has never before been a movement or a current in widespread Christian thought that homosexual sexual acts were acceptable.  Quite to the notable contrary, there is a long tradition reaching back through the ages within the Abrahamic traditions of rather specifically condemning homosexual sexual acts as one particular sin among a great multitude of other sinful acts.

The point here is that if we read the Bible, however long ago it was written, and paraphrase it to say that homosexual sexual acts are sinful - we are not arrogantly disposing of some original conception of God loving all of his children and using our religion to manufacture hate - we are interpreting passages of an admittedly old text in the exact same way they have been interpreted since they were written.  We are, in a word, practicing an unfamiliar pattern of orthodoxy.

G.K. Chesterton in his venerable, but quick book Orthodoxy says that Orthodoxy as an idea is "the democracy of the dead," in other words, that it is the meaningful consideration of what we might call the cloud of witnesses who have lived and died before our time, an appropriate rendering of respect to those who do not have the good fortune to be alive at one particular moment.  It is the idea that people who did something long before us, who passed it on to the people who passed it on to the people who passed it on to us, may have had some idea of what they were doing.

In this particular instance, however unfortunate or unpopular or uncouth it is to say, and whatever other subtleties absolutely must be added to a consideration of LGBTQ rights and practices in modern society and in modern religion, the unpopular idea is the orthodox idea, and whether Mackelmore likes it or not, the conviction that homosexual sexual acts are a sin is the conviction which is most closely tied to the great rope of historical interpretations of the Biblical text.

In summary, my great frustration on this point is that the culture as a whole seems to have adopted this somewhat warped notion as fact.

YES, we must always show the love of Christ to all people and NO, as Pope Francis has pointed out it is not our place to judge other persons and YES, if you ask me, all persons of all sexualities, genders, sexual expressions and gender expressions should all have equal rights and freedoms under every law, everywhere, all the time.

But NO, saying that homosexual sexual acts are not sinful IS NOT more faithful to the 2,000 year long history of Christian doctrine, and no amount of insistence that it is can change the fact that we have 2,000 years of Christian history in which homosexual sexual acts were consistently considered sinful, and as is the nature with Orthodoxy we have a chain reaching back 2,000 years of people in our tradition who have held that position who show us that, unsurprisingly, that was their position

It is unpopular and it is very uncomfortable to assert these matters as a Christian in the 21st century.  It is awkward, it can feel antiquated and it often feels irrelevant.  But it is NOT unorthodox.

The aforementioned second issue, often called the elephant problem, will be addressed in my next article.