[Dialogue] 12/16/10, Spong: An Adventure At a Law School

[elliestock at aol.com]

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Thursday December 16, 2010 

An Adventure At a Law School

Recently, I spoke at the Law School of Marquette University, a Jesuit institution in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My topic was "Homosexuality and the Law." It was in many ways a fascinating experience. I was introduced by an attractive, bright second year law school student, who, I gathered, had worked very hard to have me invited. She was raised in the Roman Catholic Church and is an out of the closet lesbian, who plans to be married next summer in Dubuque, Iowa, where gay marriages are both recognized and legal.
My purpose in this address was to demonstrate how changes in cultural norms occur in all branches of knowledge, certainly including science, law and religion, and that this is what makes it possible to dismiss yesterday's inadequate understandings and to find both the courage and the ability to embrace new realities. There is no such thing, I asserted, as unchanging truth since truth must always be expressed in ever-changing human propositional statements. Whenever any understanding or perception of reality is put into words, these words are captured by the level of knowledge and even the always subjective words of the one speaking and, thus, inevitably that person's words share in a time-bound and time warped view of the world. There is no possibility that human propositional statements could ever become eternally true.
People do not seem to recognize that there were many scientists in the 17th century who challenged the new insights of Galileo and who regarded Galileo as a disturber of settled truth. There were also many biologists in the 19th century who challenged the new insights of Charles Darwin. The great Albert Einstein was himself unable to adapt to the idea of quantum weirdness developed by fellow physicist Niels Bohr. Knowledge is always growing and expanding. There are no such things as inerrant formulations of truth, not in the scriptures or in the presumed infallible proclamations of any ecclesiastical figure, despite what people have claimed for both.
I listen today, sometimes with despair sometimes with amusement, to passionate, but naïve politicians who want to defend something they call a "strict constructionist" view of the Constitution of the United States. Both my despair and my amusement come from their apparent inability to understand how time-warped the Constitution is. When politicians hear that statement they react exactly like biblical fundamentalists do when someone says that the Bible is filled with both human and divine negativity. These politicians are not aware that the Constitution defined slaves as three-fifths of a human being. They do not realize that the Constitution refused to allow women the privilege of voting until it was amended in 1920? Another of our sacred national documents, the Declaration of Independence, proclaimed that "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." These powerful words were written, however, by a slave holder who quite obviously used the word "men" as a synonym for "human" and then defined "human" as being both white and male. A "strict constructionist" in political circles is what a biblical fundamentalist is in religious circles. Their words sound good, but they consist of uninformed, empty rhetoric. "Strict constructionism" really means "I want to be assured that the Constitution confirms my present prejudices." Biblical fundamentalism regards the Bible in the same exact way.
It is this idea of "strict constructionism" in regard to the Bible that has caused that text to be used in the cause of homophobia just as it was previously used in defense of racism and the sexist oppression of women. No biblical scholar today could ever mold the nine obscure passages in the entire Bible that homophobic people quote so regularly into an intelligent and credible argument to oppose today equal rights and justice for the lesbian, gay, transgender and bi-sexual members of our society. Such an argument would simply carry no weight in any court of law. Yet in religious circles of our society these nine texts are still used without embarrassment by religious spokespersons as if they still had some claim to either credibility or respectability. The undoubted facts are that all of the objective medical and scientific data available in our world today asserts that no human beings choose their sexual orientation, they simply awaken to it. To discriminate against homosexual people because they are not heterosexual makes about as much rational sense as our culture's historic discrimination against women because they are not men, our racist discrimination against people of color because they are not white, or our discrimination against left-handed people because they are not right handed. Each of these arguments once employed to sustain each of these long dead prejudices is now simply being recycled to sustain our irrational attitudes toward the homosexual population today. As such they are little more than expressions of prejudiced ignorance.
The last stand in the battle against all prejudices is seen in the almost inevitable suggestion by those resisting change, that these issues should be submitted to a referendum of the voters. The hope here is that there is still enough latent homophobia in the culture that a majority can be achieved in opposition to the constitutional rights of this minority. They also know how to manipulate the electorate. Public relations firms will be hired to frame the issue in such a way as to maximize fear. Hate money will pour from wealthy, but uninformed sources and be used to demonize gay people with both weird stories and veiled innuendos about how gay marriage will "weaken traditional marriage." No one ever quite says just how that weakening will occur, but the seeds of fear are planted. That is why equal protection under the law can never properly be the subject of a popular referendum. No benefit, including the benefits of marriage that has been extended to one citizen can be arbitrarily denied to another. That is the guarantee of the Constitution. People fail to realize that if a vote is allowed on a constitutional right, that vote by itself would transform this nation from a constitutional democracy, which guarantees the rights of the minority, into a "mobocracy" in which the rights of any minority could be submitted to the will of the majority. That is the prescription for tyranny.
To my audience at Marquette's Law School I stated my conviction that the time has come for religious leaders, from the Pope to Pat Robertson, to take responsibility for the uninformed and uneducated homophobia, which emanates from their lips on a regular basis. Homosexual persons are not deviant, as the Pope continues to state, nor are they sinful as Pat Robertson regularly asserts. There is a huge difference between being a minority and being abnormal! Homosexuals are a minority that is all. So are left handed people, red headed people and at least in the western world, people of color. Yet many religious leaders continue to proclaim them abnormal. Ignorance is no less ignorant when it is either spoken by religious people or perfumed with pious rhetoric. No one should hesitate to confront any persons who seek to shape public opinion when those persons reveal how hopelessly out of date they are on the subject about which they continue to make public pronouncements.
When I finished this address one person, who identified himself as both a law professor and a Jesuit priest, sought to defend his church's position that homosexuality is "deviant." It does not mean, he said, that homosexual people themselves are deviant; it means that they deviate from the norm, which is that the purpose of human life is to reproduce itself. This has been the church's consistent position, he stated, as it stretches from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas. Since homosexual persons, he continued, cannot or will not do that they are therefore "deviant."
It was as weird a line of reasoning as I have ever encountered. First, the idea that because it comes from Aristotle through Aquinas means that it is consistent, does not rule out the possibility that it has been consistently wrong. Second, for anyone to suggest that truth has been captured in the writings of Aristotle who lived some 2400 years ago or in the work of Aquinas, who lived about 700 years ago is patently absurd. Third, I asked by what act of hubris comes the power to define the norm as that which has been bequeathed from Aristotle, to Aquinas and thus to the Roman Catholic Church? Fourth, I pointed out that such an argument would also call childless couples deviant and since most of us will ultimately reach the place in life in which we can no longer reproduce ourselves biologically, such a position would suggest that the end of every human life is to become deviant. Fifth, I wondered out loud how it was that this church, which requires celibacy for the prie sthood, could define the norm for non-deviant humanity in such a way as to suggest that celibacy itself participates in deviancy. I read this line of argumentation as that coming from a person embarrassed by his church's position and seeking a way to make its unacceptable quality palatable. Once again, it was apparent to me that arguments designed to defend prejudices are never rational. That is why they must be wrapped inside the convoluted language of most "religious reasoning." That conversation alone was worth the trip to Milwaukee.
Prior to my lecture, I attended a class on the legal issues facing gay and lesbian married couples. It was a "matter of fact class" where the exercise of the day was to develop a pre-nuptial agreement between a wealthy lesbian and her much poorer potential mate. So while the Jesuit professor defended the definition of homosexual people as "deviant", the Marquette Law School was quietly preparing its students to live in the world where gay marriage and gay equality before the law are both inevitable. The time has come to say so boldly. This debate is old, tired and increasingly irrelevant. Let's be done with it. 

– John Shelby Spong
 




Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong


Swmbo via the Internet, writes: 
It is more and more becoming my belief that Jesus shows us more about what humanity truly is than what divinity is. As I hopefully expand my Christian understandings, I am now 74, I find I am expanding my humanity. I call myself an existential Christian. Is this too limiting a theology?
Swmbo via the Internet, writes: 
It is more and more becoming my belief that Jesus shows us more about what humanity truly is than what divinity is. As I hopefully expand my Christian understandings, I am now 74, I find I am expanding my humanity. I call myself an existential Christian. Is this too limiting a theology?



Dear Swmbo, 
I find your definition "spot on" as the English say. It is actually amusing to see how religious people through the ages convince themselves that they knew what divinity was and that they could actually define it. I wonder where they saw divinity, how they knew it was divinity and why they believed that the realm of the divine could actually be accessed by the human mind. 
Divinity is a human word, created to describe a human experience. It is not a concept revealed from on high. It took me a lifetime to break this standard religious understanding, but I finally did and came out quite near to where you describe yourself as being. I now believe that divinity is a word we created to describe the fullness of humanity when we escape its limits. I have also become convinced that the way into divinity is identical with the journey into the self and that the way to be divine is to be fully human. 
When I wrote Jesus for the Non-Religious, I took that concept and definition and used it as the lens through which I looked at Jesus of Nazareth. The result was, at least for me, salutary. 

– John Shelby Spong






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