Religion and LGBT rights often stand in opposition. A new study (PDF link) in the June 2008 Journal of Family Psychology, however, found that “religiously invested lesbians and gay men, and those with children, were the most likely to cohabit and to legalize and ritualize their couple relationships.”

Study participants were residents of Illinois, so legal recognition through marriage was not an option. Cohabiting same-sex couples who legalized their relationship by making wills or granting powers of attorney to each other, however, were more likely to belong to a supportive religious congregation than non-legalizing cohabiters. The researchers say, “it may be that faith communities encourage the structural validation of same-sex couples, even if partners do not desire ritual,” an intriguing and little-explored example of the positive impact of religion on same-sex relationships. Read more »

Two people are dead and seven injured after a man entered the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church Sunday and fired a sawed-off 12-gauge semiautomatic shotgun during a children’s performance of the musical Annie.

The shooter, Jim David Adkisson, left a letter in his car stating he hated liberals and gay people and was motivated by frustration over his unemployment. He told investigators “all liberals should be killed.”

Investigators are treating the case as a hate crime. They should.

At the same time, I think we need to be careful not to view this tragedy purely as a matter of liberal vs. conservative. As the Rev. William Sinkford, President of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, said in a statement, “This crime was the action of one man who clearly must have lost the battle with his personal demons.” The Christian Science Monitor explains, “a deep sense of victimization and scapegoating” can cause someone to seek vengeance through indiscriminate violence.

Adkisson himself may have been inspired by ultra-conservative pundits, but violence doesn’t always follow political lines. Last December, a gunman shot and killed two teens at Colorado’s New Life Church, after killing two other people at a nearby missionary center. It seems he had been thrown out of the missionary program a few weeks earlier, and had been sending it hate mail.

New Life Church’s brand of Evangelical Protestantism is far too conservative for me. Former pastor Ted Haggard’s views on “homosexuality” (not to mention his hypocrisy when he was caught with a male prostitute)—well, you can imagine what I think of that. Still: teens shot in church; children almost shot. The denomination doesn’t matter. Easy access to guns and a system that doesn’t identify and help those most likely to use them for murder. Something has to change here, folks. Read more »

Here’s a situation we wouldn’t see here in the U.S.: A couple in the U.K. was refused permission to become foster parents after they told a panel that their [Christian] belief would prevent them from addressing a child’s homosexuality in a positive light.” The panel rejected their application, citing the recent Sexual Orientation Act that forbids businesses or organizations providing public services to discriminate because of anyone’s sexuality.

This is a tough one. I am vehement that schools teach tolerance for those of all sexual orientations and gender identities. At the same time, I’d support parents’ right to teach their children privately that homosexuality is morally wrong, much as I abhor the thought of them doing so. (I’d draw the line, though, if they were inciting their children to acts of harassment or violence. That would have to be stopped.)

Is this couple’s situation clouded by the fact that they are foster parents, however, and the children are ultimately overseen by a public authority? Is it acceptable for a foster care agency to say “We can’t always predict which children will come out as LGBT, so we can’t risk placing any children with someone who would view that as a negative, causing emotional harm to such children”? I’d be interested in hearing foster parents’ views on the subject.

Originally published in Bay Windows, April 19, 2007.

When I first read the title of Waiting for the Call: From Preacher’s Daughter to Lesbian Mom, I expected the tale of a woman rejecting her religious upbringing and denouncing her parents as she came out. Jacqueline Taylor’s memoir is thankfully not as simple as that. It is an insightful, compassionate story about coming out, motherhood, and faith, woven into a narrative that reveals the many layers of what we mean by “family.” It is less about rejection than transformation. Read more »

Today is the last day of the three-day Blog Against Theocracy event, for which we are asked to post about the separation of church and state. As a sometime graduate student in medieval history, I know me some theocracy. I also know that what worked in Western Europe 800 years ago might not be the best model for today’s society.

Religion and government are hard to separate, though. The authors of the Declaration of Independence wrote that “all men are . . . endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights.” Despite separating many aspects of church and state governance, they were not trying to remove God from the picture. Even now, both the U.S. House and Senate have official chaplains. The Senate Chaplain’s Web site states “Throughout the years, the United States Senate has honored the historic separation of Church and State, but not the separation of God and State.”

That’s a very fine distinction, and it’s clear many don’t adhere to it, much less one that would embrace the atheists and agnostics among us as well. Terrance at Republic of T has a good list of examples showing how religion is encroaching upon our government, military, and public schools in ways that are frightening and dangerous. In the same post, he also reviews three recent books on the subject. He’s studied modern church-state relations in much more depth than I have, and I encourage you to read his post if you want to delve into the subject.

In the meantime, I hope you have a great holiday if you are observing either Easter or Passover this weekend (or if you combine traditions and eat chocolate bunnies for eight days). Separating church and state does not mean striking religion from our lives. Rather, it means giving each room to flourish in its own distinct sphere.

• A group of seven high-ranking lesbian and gay military veterans called on Congress to repeal the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, and demanded that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace apologize for calling LGBT service members “immoral.”
• The New York Times follows the LGBT blogosphere in highlighting Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s lukewarm response to General Peter Pace’s homophobic remarks.
• The New York Times also reported on the accusation of hypocrisy leveled at the military by LGBT-rights groups after the military revealed that far fewer gays and lesbians have been dismissed since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq than in previous years.
• The Ohio Gay People’s Chronicle examines the Democrat’s support—or lack thereof—for LGBT rights. It quotes Paul Yandura, a former Clinton administration official and Democratic fundraiser, who distinguishes between the goals of electing Democrats and making the Democratic party better on LGBT issues.
• In a similar vein, Bay Windows looks at the current wave of criticism leveled at HRC by bloggers who accuse the organization of being little more than a Democratic mouthpiece and not responding effectively to community needs.

On to specific states: Read more »

Abigail Garner brought my attention to a New York Times article today about a Chinese adoptee celebrating her bat mitzvah. Garner writes:

Cecelia Nealon-Shapiro came to the U.S. in 1994 when she was adopted by a lesbian couple. What’s especially notable about this media coverage is that the questions of identity are centered around being Jewish and being Chinese, not about having lesbian mothers. Not that this is a “non-issue,” but it is refreshing to see an in depth story on a young woman with lesbian parents without it derailing the focus of the coverage.

Hear, hear—and the coverage is still relevant to many of our families, as it explores issues of identity and culture with a nuance not often seen in mainstream media. “Being Chinese and Jewish is normal for me,” says one of the girls interviewed. “Thinking about being Chinese and Jewish is a little strange.” I was also amused by a tidbit about another aspect of modern life creeping into a centuries-old ritual. In order to prepare for her bat mitzvah, Nealon-Shapiro “set her cantor’s reading of her Torah portion to ‘repeat’ on her iPod.” Worth a read.

Today is the 34th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the United States. It is also Blog for Choice Day, so I’m going to venture a little off my usual topics in this post and talk about reproductive freedom as I see it. Read more »

Two items of news today caught my eye:

• Pope Benedict XVI referred to arguments for recognition of same-sex relationships as “dismal theories.”
• The New York Blade recapped a UCLA study (cited in my Weekly Political Roundup last week) claiming “New Jersey florists, caterers, hotels and other businesses would bring in more than $100 million in additional revenue per year if the state allowed gay couples to marry there.”

I was going make a crack that economics being “the dismal science,” this would seem to indicate the pope is right, what with recognition of same-sex relationships stimulating the economy.

I discovered, however, that “dismal science” was first used by nineteenth-century historian Thomas Carlyle to denigrate the views of those who supported the emancipation of slaves. As two modern professors of economics explain: “It was this fact—that economics assumed that people were basically all the same, and thus all entitled to liberty—that led Carlyle to label economics ‘the dismal science.’” Maybe, therefore, the pope is closer in spirit to Carlyle when he refers to “dismal theories.”

What made me really laugh, however, was the sentence in which Carlyle first used his famous phrase: “Not a ‘gay science,’ I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.”

This means we have the pope equating things “gay” and “dismal,” and Carlyle, similarly arguing against the idea of liberty for all, contrasting them. Carlyle means “gay” in a different sense, of course—but the juxtaposition of the two terms again gave me a chuckle. (It’s possible that doing last-minute holiday shopping with a three-year-old has addled my brain.)

With that, I’ll leave you to don your gay apparel for the holidays.

Not to be outdone by Conservative Jews, the Swedish Lutheran Church, the country’s largest denomination, has said same-sex couples will be able to have their unions blessed in any of its congregations as of January 2007. Individual priests may refuse to conduct such ceremonies, but the congregation must ensure a blessing is provided. Although Sweden has had a civil partnership law since 1995, ordained officiants cannot conduct partnership ceremonies.