Fidelity

A wise person once observed that among the important things for someone to do in her or his life is to find a worthy but difficult cause and to work at it for as long as it takes. The very engagement will make a better person out of the participant. And it will mean their living has a little more purpose than otherwise would be the case…

The good news is there are many such opportunities. I hold up one for your consideration. And that is to support ever expanding civil rights for homosexual persons until they are absolutely, completely equal citizens with all others.

Now to pick one cause to particularly focus on is not to exclude other things, but that very focus gives much power to the project.

And this one is a particularly worthy choice for those of us who count ourselves people of faith to engage. Because the prejudice that fires this institutionalization of second class status (except where people are actually criminalized) is deeply wound up with religions. I think this has to do with how a part of any given religion’s “purpose” is to conserve cultures. Not a bad thing, in general. But it has its shadows. And this is one, making a whole subset of the community pariahs, unclean, is a terrible and obvious injustice to anyone who is willing to step back for a moment.

I won’t spend lots of time here rehearsing the arbitrariness of the dominant religions in our culture’s condemnation of homosexuality in their lists of purity codes, other than to remind everyone involved that those who charge interest are held in greater contempt in the actual source documents, their holy scriptures. And to hold up how slavery with vastly more scriptural warrant has, through a deep looking at the larger view of their faiths, been utterly rejected by the mainstream of those dominant religions.

There is a way through.

The tide of history is with this one.

In my home state we currently have three legislative bills being considered, one would allow civil marriage, another would permit same sex residents of our state who have been married elsewhere to divorce, and the third is a DOMA bill attempting to enshrine the narrow definition of marriage as between one man and one woman. I am active with others in support of the first two bills and in opposition to the third.

I bet there’s something in your state to support or oppose, as well.

The video represents a major move toward civil marriage in California.

Go here to learn more about the Courage Campaign.
Thanks, Beth, for the pointer to this one…