It’s Passover, as I’m sure y’all know, and tonight we’ll be heading over to a friend’s house for a distinctly unorthodox (and late) second seder.
The seder — the ritual Passover meal — actually follows a Hellenistic form: it’s a symposium, a feast in which the gathering converses into the night on some topic of interest or importance.
When a symposium is a seder the focus is on liberation, on justice, on the meaning of freedom and on the obligations that such a transformation imposes on those who are no longer slaves. Most important, by long tradition and, in the best of my family’s customs, the Passover story is one to be told and re-imagined in the present tense. That’s the meaning of the phrase in the traditional text (the Haggadah) cited in the title to this post. Every year we are enjoined to tell the tale and to discuss its meaning understanding that we ourselves took part in the exodus. We talk through the ritual of getting up on our own hind legs and moving (fitfully, incompletely) along that long arc that bends towards justice — us, ourselves — with no “as if” caveats involved.
I thought of all this reading Tom Junod’s post over at Charles Pierce’s shop on the gay marriage battle. In it, he writes of his 28 year marriage, and his understanding that no one else’s nuptials constrain his own. He writes, rightly, “like anyone who has ever been married, I understood that whatever threat there was to my marriage came from within rather than from without.”
That’s true — or rather, it’s a commonplace, obvious, the baseline of a humane understanding of love, connection and commitment. But Junod is after more than a well-spoken penetrating glimpse of the obvious. The meat of his piece lies with his account of the way in which his straight family is, in the eyes of those fighting the bad fight against same-sex marriage, gay as the day is long:
…my wife and I are not of the same sex; I am a man and she is a woman. But we are infertile. We did not procreate. For the past nine years, we have been the adoptive parents of our daughter; we are legally her mother and father, but not biologically, and since Tuesday have been surprised and saddened to be reminded that for a sizable minority of the American public our lack of biological capacity makes all the difference — and dooms our marriage and our family to second-class status.
…..before long I started hearing an argument based on biology or, as groups such as the National Organization for Marriage would have it, “nature.” For all its philosophical window dressing — for all its invocation of natural law, teleological destiny, and the “complementary” nature of man and woman — this argument ultimately rested on a schoolyard-level obsession with private parts, and with what did, or did not, “fit.” There was “natural marriage” and “unnatural” marriage, and it was easy to tell the difference between them by how many children they produced. A natural marriage not only produced children; it existed for the purpose of producing children. An unnatural marriage not only failed to produce children; it resorted to procuring children through unnatural means, from artificial insemination to surrogacy to, yes, adoption.
To be clear: Junod is not pulling a Portman. He makes it plain that his conviction in favor of gay civil rights derives not from his personal skin in the game as discovered in the “gayness” of his family, but from the idea limned above, that one’s marriage is one’s own business, and the opportunity to experience marriage is a universal right.
No, the point Junod makes here is that the recent arguments have distilled the anti-civil-rights position to its most craven and ugly core. To those seeking to bar same-sex civil equality, the only acceptable form of marriage is one in which children emerge the old fashioned way. It is one in which the core function for the woman involved is as an incubator. It is one which denies every other possibility that two people could form a lasting commitment to each other centered on affection, on daily business of making a life across all the dimensions we traverse in this world. As Junod re-articulates, the campaign against gay marriage is not mere selective disdain for one class of people. It is (as all civil rights battles are at the root) an affront to everyone‘s claim to full humanity.
Again, that’s the nature of civil rights: when you deprive people of rights to their own labor, their own person, those slaves suffer the worst of the damage by far — but no one gets out of that relationship unscathed. Masters and indifferent bystanders suffer diminuition too. When you deny access to the vote, and hence to power, and hence to practical autonomy…well, hell. It’s not as if Jim Crow brought the south a dynamic economy or cultural life.
And, as Junod writes, when you demand that some among us must do without the full emotional, spiritual and public benefits and obligations of marriage because only baby factories need apply? The contraction of human possibility is obvious, and universal.
This all struck home the more because like Junod, my wife and I are adoptive parents. I try never to discuss personal matters on the ‘tubes unless they belong to me exclusively. My wife’s life and that of my son are theirs; I try not to trespass there in any matter of substance. So I’m not going to provide any context, any further information, nothing, except that one fact, and it’s bearing on this issue.
I confess, I hadn’t been paying close attention to the “marriage-must-produce-children” nonsense until reading Junod just now. First — it seemed purely risible, just monumentally stupid. Menopausal women and low sperm-count-men shouldn’t marry?–and so on. The claim reduces itself to absurdity without any external effort. And second, who needed that deep foolishness to be persuaded of the case for marriage equality? If I had a damascene moment, it came years ago, in the nineties, when I was working on a book in Berlin, and passed every day the unobtrusive triangular plaque on the side of the Nollendorfplatz U-bahn station, memorializing the 25,000 gay men transported to the camps under the Nazis. If any lone symbol can wake one to the implications of any denial of full civil status, that one does. And there’s always the my-enemy’s-enemies test to fall back on too.
But Junod’s post reminded me of the deeper point. It’s not that by virtue of being an adoptive parent I share in the stigma that anti-marriage-equality are trying to paint on my gay friends, neighbors, fellow-citizens. Rather, this is what the Hagadah said to me this Monday; what it will say again (eccentrically) tonight. The fact that my son came to me from beyond the walls of biology is my joy, and it reminds me that this is happening — right now — to me as I leave Egypt.
Try to deny that, try to diminish me to some fraction of myself, my procreative possibility or whatever, and I need to demand justice for me and my family. And, as always, it can’t be justice unless it is not for me alone. To paraphrase again the words of the old text:
This year we may all be slaves.
Next year may we all be free.
Images: Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, The Last Supper, c.1750
Jean-Marc Nettier, Madame de Clermont as a Sultana, 1733.
aimai
I love the Seder on any day but Monday. I was going to punt this year but the girls decided to do the whole thing for me and we turned the Seder into an impromptu editorial meeting on what was and was not important in our Haggadah. I tried penciling out the boring bits and I’m going to re-write and reframe it for next year. Still, we definitely hew to Seder as Seminar at our house and our guests, who were both Christians of various stripes, were thrilled with all the footnotes and general theory-of-Kabbalah underlying the performance aspects of the Seder. Happy Pesach Tom to you and yours. Next year with even more Brio, wherever we are!
Mnemosyne
Speaking of religious rituals, the new Pope did the traditional foot-washing (a ritual that recreates Jesus washing the feet of his disciples at Passover) and caused a scandal by including not only non-Catholics, but wimmins!
I dunno. I’m starting to have a little hope for Pope Francis here.
Corner Stone
But was it a symposium in a trapezium? Or a symposium in an Emporium?
Alex
Speaking of unorthodox seders… the Obama Seder has recently started including the Emancipation Proclamation in their services. I think they started it two years ago, and it sounds like a really neat thing to add.
Chyron HR
So if we smear some blood on the front page, will it keep [insert name of your least favorite commenter] out?
Ben Franklin
Happy Easter !
I know what Passover is, but can someone tell me what the Easter Bunny and colored eggs have to do with Jesus arising from his tomb?
gogol's wife
Beautiful post.
My religion comes down to this: Love is good.
? Martin
@Mnemosyne: They weren’t just non-Catholics. They were Muslims. Pam Gellar and company must be absolutely apocalyptic.
Cathy W
@Mnemosyne: So far I definitely approve of his willingness to acknowledge that non-Catholics are human beings…
? Martin
@Ben Franklin:
Well, when you take over a pagan holiday, you can’t always rub out all of the original elements. See: fat man and trees on Jesus’ birthday.
Valdivia
I felt this year the gay marriage arguments on the Passover days resonated in a poetic way. We also watched Lincoln yesterday which felt like the best movie-type modern Hagaddah one could watch.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
No more C-sections then, I take it. What about epidurals, do we have to give up that too? Natural Law arguments are all fun and games until somebody
has an eye poked outhas to give up their pain medications.raven
I went to my first seder in Vietnam of all places. My Jewish friend invited me and it seemed like a good idea since he is the one that informed me that all the nicknames my grandfather had for us were Yiddish. Gramps had grown up in a Jewish neighborhood in Chicago and just picked it up.
Villago Delenda Est
It’s fucking common sense, which means it means nothing to the invisible sky buddy bothered.
Fuck these people. Over and over again, with the most rusty, unlubed chain saw you can find.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chyron HR:
That shit only works in Hollywood and fairy tales.
But I’m being redundant.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@Ben Franklin:
As all good Christians know, on the third day Jesus emerged from the tomb, appeared before his disciples, squatted and laid a brilliantly colored Easter egg.
— Stephen Colbert
Tom Levenson
@Villago Delenda Est:
Not to get all persnickity or anything, but I’m guessing that once you introduce chain saws into the carnal act, the state of oxidation and/or dearth of KY are secondary details.
Just sayin’.
JPL
Tom, I had read the article earlier. Remind me again what pro-life means. In the early 80’s I lived a few doors down from the administrator of a large hospital in Dallas. Outside their house was 24/7 armed detectives. The couple had received threats because the hospital performed abortions.
The couple had two adopted children that had been previously abused. Remind me again what pro-life means.
Villago Delenda Est
@gogol’s wife:
Heresy.
MONEY is good. That’s what all the Televangelists are telling me, all the time.
Love is for suckers. Take the money, and run!
JPL
@Ben Franklin: You should ask O’Reilly since he thinks that there is a war on the easter bunny. He might be right. If the darn bunny eats my garden, there will be blood.
Roger Moore
@JPL:
The way the religious nuts use it, it means pro-birth. After that, kid, you’re on your own.
Scamp Dog
@JPL: it’s support for that wonderful period of time between conception and birth. At which point the life makes the transition from a sacred blessing from God to being a useless moocher, unless the parents have sufficient wealth to be worthy of society’s adulation.
Highway Rob
@Villago Delenda Est: 1 Timothy 6:10. That must be one of the ones that conservatives are allowed to treat as a metaphor.
Highway Rob
Pretty sure the way the other side gets around this is to say that childless het couples at least set the good example of one-man-one-woman union. (Not sure what they do with all the piss-poor examples of one-man-one-woman unions, because they’re generally anti-divorce, too.)
EvolutionaryDesign
@Ben Franklin: Saint Peter was actually a rabbit. Just ask South Park
elmo
This is incredibly timely and moving for me: my partner and I attended a seder for the first time on Tuesday. I am what some might call a militant atheist. I have little respect for faith in any form. But by FSM, that seder was an experience. I’ve never attended a dinner that was also a seminar, with fifteen or so intelligent, educated, lively people talking about the meaning of liberty and justice over four glasses of wine.
And the gentleman presiding over the festivities made a point to include “LGBT” people as those deserving of justice and freedom, and being denied basic rights. I was just incredibly moved by the whole thing, and this post is a continuation of that.
Culture of Truth
From this Sunday’s Bobblespeak:
Gregory: what’s wrong with gay marriage Ralph?
Reed: because men parts fit better with lady parts
Mnemosyne
@Ben Franklin:
David Sedaris tried to explain it to his French class, but it didn’t go over very well.
the Conster
@Mnemosyne:
I’m having a total crisis of faith – all of my life I’ve despised the pope and dismissed every utterance as self-serving medievalist mumbo jumbo, secure in my faith that I would never ever have to reconsider my belief in his unerring assholery – and now I find myself beginning to like this one. I’m not sure who I am anymore!
JPL
@Scamp Dog: Pretty sure they should be the chosen color also.
scav
@the Conster: A pontificate is long and multi-faceted. A good trailer does not ensure a stellar movie.
Villago Delenda Est
@Culture of Truth:
How the fuck would Ralph Reed know this?
Cathy W
@Highway Rob: That was the explanation I got from one colleague: that as long as there’s an “innie’ and an “outie” involved, there’s the potential for procreation, even if it would take a literal act of God to make it happen.
On the other hand, you’re also likely to hear that intentionally childless (white, middle- or upper-class) straight couples are merely selfish, possibly just as bad as teh gayz.
the Conster
@scav:
Phew, thanks. I’m back in off the ledge.
Mnemosyne
@the Conster:
Hey, I’m just as shocked as anyone else. I was expecting Benedict Part Deux, and here the guy is, breaking rules of protocol right and left. Given that the Church is 90 percent symbolism, I think it’s a fairly big deal, but we’ll have to see how it goes.
catclub
@the Conster: “all of my life I’ve despised the pope and dismissed every utterance as self-serving medievalist mumbo jumbo,”
Word is that John 23 was not too bad. Were you alive when he was?
JPL
@the Conster: John Paul I was warm, kind and friendly. He was the pope after John 23 but died after only 33 days in office. He was only 65.
the Conster
@catclub:
I was too young to know anything substantive about him from my Lutheran mother and agnostic father. All the local priests were Cadillac driving, gold ring wearing smokers who looked like skeevy pervs to my innocent eyes back then, and lo and behold, they all were!
Betty Cracker
@Mnemosyne: And this from your link:
GTFO! It’s almost as if he actually read all that junk Jesus allegedly said about the poor!
It’s too early to say, of course, but this guy seems a vast improvement over Pope Ratzi.
gvg
There are still people who really don’t consider adoption children “real”. Weird. Reminded of that in foster parenting classes since trainers brought up that people needed to consider if their close relatives were going to treat adopted/foster children differently and trainees response indicated it could be a problem. discussions of how to keep certain family members at arms length etc.
Totally had missed that there is still a significant minority that “feel” this way. My grandmother was adopted at 6. I have 5 cousins some on both sides (out of 28 total) who are adopted and now some of the cousins have adopted…I’ve lost track of that count. It’s not completely a last gasp expedient argument. some people actually think this. They better keep their mouth shut around my family.
Florida has children that go unadopted. Granted some of them have health issues, but not all of them. Infants can usually get adopted. Others not so much. The state tried to block gay adoptions…stupid and cruel. There just aren’t enough homes. Even when it was officially policy that gays couldn’t adopt…in reality officials looked the other way and didn’t “notice” all the time. It was inconsistant and unfair but some gays were doing it anyway with system employee help/pragmatically…well that is what I think I saw. I can’t prove it because I didn’t ask either.
I can’t believe some of the things people are saying in public now they can’t get their way….such ugly souls they are showing.
The Other Bob
Damn brilliant Tom. Great post.
May family as well.
We don’t need to be pulling a Portman to say we are generally moved when something we already supported hits home. I know I was fired up when I heard that arguement.
It is also worth noting that Chief Justice John Roberts’ two children were adopted. I can only assume he chose adoption due to age or infertility, but I am likely guessing right. I wonder what impact those arguments had on him.
suzanne
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Please, God, no.
I commented to my husband this week that none of the people I know who oppose marriage (not going to call it “gay” or “same-sex”, because it’s just marriage) had the fucking cojones to say anything about it this week. More than anything, that gives me hope. Even if they believe the way they do, they’re learning to be properly ashamed and secretive about it, like masturbating with two wetsuits and a dildo.
That Junod piece was fabulous.
catclub
@JPL: John Paul I was also Pope
after Paul VI.
John XXIII died in 1963
Paul VI died in 1978
John Paul I died in 1978
aimai
@Alex: So very cool. We were thinking about including something about Equal Marriage this year but I find that things I’ve included that were non traditional tend to age badly and there was so muhc discussion of theoretical issues that we forgot to actually, you know, dedicate the Seder to anything new.
BruceFromOhio
Awesome, awesome post.
May Gaia bestow her blessings on you, your loves, and your lands.
Lee
I’m adopted and an only child.
I’ve had a blast taking the fundies to task on Facebook when they post stupid crap about marriage being about procreation.
aimai
@Betty Cracker:
Cardinal Dolan apparently went to a (men’s) prison to celebrate Mass for the first time ever in his life as a priest. He must have found out they were going to be giving him a quiz on this shit or something. He sounded absolutely surprised to find himself doing this and moderately enthusiastic–he even had the nerve to say that he was intending to answer at Heaven’s gate, when he was asked whether he had served Jesus and done what he should have in serving prisoners “yes, ask those guys at the prison” where he went just once. The description of how he celebrated mass there reads like a nervous catskill comedian rather than someone serving god and his fellow man–he joked that it was “perfect” for a priest because the prisoners “come early and stay to the end.”
Interestingly enough there was a long and style section article about Jim McGreevey, ex-not-gay governor of New Jersey who has found love and happiness as a house husband and born again Catholic who actually spends weekdays at a women’s prison counseling prisoners and trying to help them. However kooky and revolting the article was, with its rather sick Times fixation on wealth, McGreevey seems to have found a new spirituality of love and acceptance for lower class women in prison which he simply didn’t have time for in his busy life as a closeted Republican.
burnspbesq
It’s tempting to repeat the old joke about Republicans and fundies not understanding that The Handmaid’s Tale is fiction, not an instruction manual–but then I am reminded that the only fiction I’ve ever seen a Republican or a fundie read is Tom Clancy.
Ted & Hellen
@suzanne:
I fail to see why the use of these implements for that which they were intended is worthy of shame and secrecy.
Dildo-ist!
Corner Stone
@suzanne:
Shees! I’ve been doing this all wrong for a while now.
Higgs Boson's Mate
If the bigots and/or Bible thumpers who oppose same sex marriage would instead devote their energies to keeping their own marriages green the divorce rate would plummet.
Redshift
No one. It’s conservative backwards logic — start with your preferred conclusion, and hunt for “reason” why it should be true. They don’t have to be very convincing, because generally they’re only intended for people who already agree with you to use to shout down people who are never going to be convinced.
We get the more extreme versions like “everyone knows that marriage is only about conceiving children” after their previous “arguments” (like “marriage has always been between one man and one woman, how dare you presume to change it!”) have been shot down, and they have to start looking further out in the fields of weirdness.
The Other Bob
@gvg:
Heard that and been to those foster classes. Yup people want to know when I will have real children, yadda yadda.
Have stopped communication with one Aunt over it. No loss.
Joe Levine
Brilliantly written Tom! (How many people have told you that you should have been a Rabbi?) Hugs and love to you and your family!
Ted & Hellen
@aimai:
Merely an example of one One Percenter being fellated by another, Nancy Impeachment Is Off the Table Pelosi’s film maker daughter Alexandra; all of whom are in turn fellated (or cunnilingulled) by the Times writer.
But I’m certain Alexandra’s connections had nothing whatsoever to do with her earlier GWBush film’s getting made, nor this one.
Redshift
@burnspbesq: And they treat that as an instruction manual, too.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@suzanne:
That is a very good thing to hear, thanks.
aimai
@Ted & Hellen:
So what? I mean that. So what? Your extreme sexual antipathy towards women in general (really, you had to describe all this in terms of oral sex?) is just disgusting. Its as though when you get a chance to attack women in sexual terms you just seize on it even though it is completely unnecessary to your presumed (fake) political opinions about impeachment or anything else.
JPL
@catclub: Thanks .. Forgot about that. .
dedc79
My family’s seder is never complete without a thirty minute argument about the four children and whether it’s fair to call one wicked and one wise based on the questions they ask. Good times.
Ash Can
Junod’s argument is basically the one I’ve been making for years — that no matter how any argument against same-gender marriage is spun, it always comes down to tab-A-into-slot-B procreation. In other words, the anti-gay-marriage people do nothing but make us hetero-married folks out to be breeders. Livestock. Male and female marriage partners alike. And if there’s anyone or anything at all debasing the sanctity of marriage, it’s precisely that attitude. My husband and I are not livestock, and the anti-gay-marriage brigade can march themselves straight to hell for implying that we are.
SG
It’s not just which parts fit where, it’s all about the blood, the bloodlines, the lineage, the breeding, the clan, the purity. It’s who is part of the clan and who is not. It’s the the ultimate underlying energy of conservativism: Preserve the lineage, privileges and inheritance of the elites.
It’s the mindset that produces words like “miscegenation” and laws against it. It’s the mindset that produces books like “The Bell Curve.” It’s the mindset that dreams up categories like “octoroon” or “quadroon”.
If all of those people are second- and third-class procreators in the primitive views of the right, non-procreators are similarly benighted. It’s essentially a pre-literate, tribal approach to who is allowed to mate and who owns the children of the mating. Women must be sequestered to prevent outsider bloodlines muddying the power relationships. Dress it all up with divine injunctions to be fruitful and multiply (a particularly disastrous course in a world of 7+ billion) and warnings not to spill your oh-so-precious seed on the ground, and you’ve got a recipe for the misery these fucking jerks impose on normal human beings lucky enough to find someone to love.
Ash Can
As for Pope Francis I, I can unfortunately iron-clad guarantee that he’ll do something at some point to infuriate us all, and most likely sooner rather than later. That’s unavoidable. My own hopes for him basically amount to hoping he’s better than Benedict, and I’ll be positively overjoyed if he’s closer to Paul VI than JP II. (Another John XXIII would be far too much to hope for, I’m afraid.) So far, I definitely like his attitude. I hope he keeps up the good work, within the boundaries of papal behavior that are at all realistic to hope for.
Ted & Hellen
@aimai:
“So what? I mean that. So what? Your extreme sexual antipathy towards women in general (really, you had to describe all this in terms of oral sex?) is just disgusting. Its as though when you get a chance to attack women in sexual terms you just seize on it even though it is completely unnecessary to your presumed (fake) political opinions about impeachment or anything else.”
Hey, I hate to ruin your (fake) rage-gasm in defense of all that is woman kind, but first of all, McGreevey is you know, a MAN, and second of all, you DO know that men perform oral sex, too, right? On men and women, right?
You are not a feminist. You are a wing nut’s wet dream parody of a (fake) feminist.
Ted & Hellen
@aimai:
Where to start?
You might not know it, but McGreevey is a MAN. You might not know this either, but oral sex is not limited to women. So the only way to twist my comment into an attack on women is to react as you do to most things; that is, not as a (fake) feminist but as a wing nut’s wet dream of a parody of a feminist.
Which you are doing, so uh, carry on.
Oh, and fuck you. Oops, fucking is clearly limited to women, so that also is a sexual attack on all women everywhere, but mostly on you.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@SG:
An awful lot of politics boils down to this. Hairless apes flinging poo at one another and at leopards both real and imagined. Civilization is a thin veneer layered over top of primate behavior.
Chris
@Ash Can:
I like the analogy that was made earlier to Soviet reformers like Andropov. I think we can take it for granted that any Pope of the Catholic Church is bound to fall well short of what we here consider acceptable, in the same way any General Secretary of the CPSU would (I expect no changes on abortion or gay marriage, for instance). But that doesn’t mean they can’t still make meaningful and good reforms from the status quo.
ETA: we’ll see whether or not Francis ends up in fact doing that.
Churchlady320
@the Conster:
Before you fall entirely in his thrall, let’s find out what he did or did not do in Argentina during the dictatorship? Pope John XXIII hid Jews and gave them phony baptismal certificates to save their lives during WW II – there are rumors, and ONLY rumors – that Francis turned people over to the Argentine authorities. My desire to like him is well tempered by that potential awfulness.
Gex
If the Church moderates on gays under Francis, I will be convinced it is because we not only saw saw marriage equality do well in the last electoral cycle, but the other side had a really hard time raising money.
If it is going to hurt the coffers, it will be reconsidered. Gays will still tithe to Big Religion, therefore Big Religion will be able to make a peace with gays.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Ash Can:
Ditto. But this is a darn good start, especially compared with Benedict’s Regensburg address, which was one of his first high-profile public shows of how it was going to go down under the new Pope, the shorter version of which was “Benedict to non-Catholics and backsliders: GO TO HELL (literally)”.
Reformed Panty Sniffer
@aimai:
FYI: McGreevy was never a closeted Republican. He was a closeted Democrat. He may have shared his closet with Republicans, but . . .
He was, however, the only Jersey Governor ever elected with an actual mandate.
Sgaile-beairt
ooh, ooh, i know about the bunnies & the eggs now!! there are red & black & white ceramic eggs painted with pictures of aphrodite discovered ancient greek tombs, springtime & all attendant fertility symbols were particularly sacred to the goddess of love & life renewed, including hares/rabbits for their rampant procreation…..so yes it is the holdovers of ancient pagan festivals of equinox….
Swellsman
What so many of the arguments made by social conservatives always seem to devolve to is that there is some class of people — always other than themselves — who are not deserving of civil rights and equal protection before the law. In the past, of course, these arguments most famously focused on blacks, but minorities of any type, and women, and religious minorities, and gays — really, any outsider group generally lacking in social power (they never go after the powerful, preferring to kick those who are already down) are all subject to this same type of argument, to be raised whenever convenient to the socially conservative cause.
What has always fascinated me is just why it is so important to the social conservatives that entire other classes of people be deemed “less than” themselves.
Ultimately, I have come around to thinking that this is just something they pursue — whether they consciously realize it or not — because keeping entire classes of people down makes them feel better about their own social standing: “At least I’m not [gay], [black], [a woman], [an immigrant], [a Jew] [etc.] So I got that going for me.” Their self-image seems to require that others be demeaned in order for them to feel good about who they are.
It is childish and petty, sure, but it is also a deeply, deeply sad sense of self.
Chris
@Swellsman:
Because, as with any cult, an enormous part of the members’ self-worth is derived from their identity as a member of The Group, and that makes those who haven’t followed their choice inherently less worthy.
Christian fundamentalists, for example, are taught from childhood that human beings are a fallen, filthy, sinful race incapable of saving itself and completely undeserving of the love Jesus chooses to give them anyway… and that the only way for them to redeem their unworthy selves is to “accept Jesus” (e.g. join the church). It’s a very conscious and intentional process of destroying your sense of self-worth as an individual so that your belonging in The Group will become the only thing that allows you to like and respect yourself.
Not all aspects of the conservative spectrum are that graphic or deliberate, but the “I am worthy because I am in this tribe” ethos is a recurring one all across it. (Even if the exact identity of “the tribe” and the things that make it worthwhile vary across the spectrum). And, of course, the not so unstated corollary to that is “other people are less worthy because they are not part of the tribe.”
LanceThruster
Jesus had a bad weekend for your sins
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@LanceThruster:
And it was a 3-day weekend, too.
Ken Pidcock
Many years ago, my partner, at risk for Huntington Disease, and I entered into a marriage not open to children. One might think that, given the circumstances, this would be understandable, but no. Natural law knows nothing of compassion. The Church takes great pride in not being moved by the lives of individuals. If children are born with horrific diseases or a woman is allowed to die because a fetus was judged viable, that just stands as testimony to their devotion to God.
We had the moral right, we had the duty towards our people, and so forth.
opie_jeanne
@Chris: And woe unto the “born again” fundy if he/she sin again after being born again, at least in many of the fundamentalist congregations. An awful lot of people on skid row back in the 60s and 70s had been raised in that style religion and could quote huge hunks of the Bible, but they had sinned and fallen from Grace and there was no climbing back up, according to them. This is misery piled on top of the misery of alcoholism.
opie_jeanne
@Ken Pidcock: So, I hope you went your own way rather than be bullied by an argument completely lacking in compassion for the reality of your situation. I had a friend who allowed herself to be bullied and things did not go well for her. So-called brittle diabetics probably shouldn’t have children, ever.
Chris
@opie_jeanne:
See, that hasn’t been my experience – quite the opposite, in fact. The nice thing about them is that loyalty to the group is literally all you need to do to be considered a good person; you can sin afterwards (you will, since you’re only human) but you’re still in with God, so you’re all good.
Of course, this is a white guy’s perspective; as with all conservative groups, there are double standards based on your identity. (The congregation will not react the same way to the preacher sinning as they will to a poor unmarried woman doing the same).
opie_jeanne
@Chris: Personal experience, and my family is fish-belly white on that side. Too many Southern Baptist family members who knew deep down they had fallen irredeemably when they took that first drink, so they continued to drink because they had nothing to lose. Some of them had addictive personalities so that when they were dry they took up some other sin, such as gambling and became compulsive gamblers. Those probably would have become alcoholics anyway but the drying out was fraught with extra drama because of their religious up-bringing.
Others dried out but always had this sheepishness of manner, constantly apologetic for not being “True Christians”; I wished they would shut up about it or join a congregation that didn’t give a rip about this stuff.
Yastreblyansky
@Ben Franklin: I wrote up a helpful explanation.
hamletta
Dr. Levenson, that was beautiful.
Brought tears to my eyes, just like the Maundy Thursday service earlier this evening.
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Actually, as Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict led the Catholic side on the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification with the Lutherans. And they signed it in Augsburg on Reformation Day. (If you were Lutheran, that would be kinda significant.)
JPII used to just pat us on the head and say us krazy kids could come back to the Real Church any time we wanted, just like the Prodigal Son.
Bill D.
So when are these religious conservatives going to live up to the standards they demand for others, and immediately get divorced the moment they have finished raising the last of their kids? Or better yet, demand that all infertile straight couples (including older couples whose children are now grown) get divorced immediately to preserve the true purpose and sanctity of marriage?
TerryC
I’ve never been able to get over realizing, as a child reading the Bible, that if I had been an Egyptian child on the night of Passover, the god of the Bible would have struck me dead—even if I had nothing personal to do with oppressing or enslaving the Israelites.
Every time I see the word “Passover,” I can’t help but think about the innocents (Surely not every Egyptian was an evil person.) whose murders-by-deity are being, at least somewhat, celebrated at the same time as is freedom.
Beth
@elmo:
Elmo – I am so thrilled that your first seder was a true seder experience. Was there an orange on the seder plate? Too many seders are a brainless recitation of the Maxwell House Hagaddah we all get for free at ShopRite. The Hagaddah is not canonized – because we are encouraged to make it our own. Seder means Order – there is a list of things that must be covered, but how and commentary is all up to the participants. Children are encouraged to get involved in the discussion. It is by far my favorite of any holiday in any religion I have ever come across. So happy you got to attend a REAL seder with intelligent, curious people who enjoy stretching their minds :)