STANDING ON THE
SIDE OF LOVE
Rev. Kit Ketcham,
February 15, 2015
With Michael Rowe
Thanks,
Michael. I have loved hearing your story
and how your experiences with love have shaped you as a human being and as a spouse. I’m so glad you have come to Astoria and our
congregation.
The story
of Unitarian Universalist advocacy for civil rights for sexual minorities and
Marriage Equality for all couples started many years ago, in the 70’s, as we
began to question many of traditional religions’ homophobia and outright
discrimination toward sexual minorities---and our own shortcomings in that area.
The Source
of UUism we are considering today is the one that states that we draw from
Jewish and Christian teachings, which call us to respond to God’s love by
loving our neighbors as ourselves.
However, as
we considered this deeply, it became abundantly clear that we as a religion
were NOT loving our neighbors as ourselves.
At least not those neighbors whom we perceived as different, as having
sexual attractions that were not “normal”, that were hidden and somehow worthy
of ridicule or even persecution. We had
no right to cast stones at other traditions.
We had
ordained ministers serving congregations who lost their jobs because of their
sexual orientation. Not because we had
church policies against homosexuality, but because we were afraid. We had fears about being perceived ourselves as
gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, if we defended or befriended certain
people.
We were afraid we’d become known as
“the gay church or the transgender church”.
Even though we knew intellectually that there was nothing intrinsically
wrong with being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender, there was still a
lot of fear and confusion about homosexuality and gender.
We felt
uncomfortable knowing that there were human beings whose sexual attraction or
gender identity was different from our own.
Sometimes we questioned whether we ourselves might be gay or lesbian or
bisexual or transgender. We weren’t
completely comfortable with our own sexuality.
Somebody else’s sexuality---well, that was more comfortable to obsess
about.
We often didn’t
think twice about using derogatory terms to describe people whose sexuality
made us squirm. We joked and laughed,
even when we had friends who were openly gay and lesbian.
We were baffled by males who felt
female and wanted to change their gender and females who felt male and went to
the extent of having surgery to transform their bodies. It was scary! What did it all mean?
It rapidly
became clear that we had a job to do—on ourselves. We had ministers and members desperately
unhappy because they could not be themselves, who even committed suicide rather
than deal with the prejudice they were facing, even from their own
congregations.
Some Jewish and Christian groups
were refusing to allow them to join congregations, to serve as leaders, and to
ordain them, they said, was totally against God’s law. Marriage, of course, was impossible!
What did it really mean to love our
neighbor as ourselves?
I remember
my first introduction to the idea that I actually knew people who were gay and
lesbian. I was about 35, living in
Denver with my husband and small son, when one of my best friends from Linfield
wrote me a letter.
“Kit,” she
wrote. “I don’t know how you’ll feel
about this, but I am tired of hiding who I am.
I recently attempted suicide by driving into a steel beam on the
Hawthorne Bridge but paramedics patched me up and I’ve decided to be honest
about myself. I’m lesbian, I love women,
not men, and I’m telling the people that I can trust. I hope we can still be friends…. And by the way, I’m going to be in Colorado
in a few weeks. Can I visit you?”
Well, I was
definitely in the “fear” stage at that time.
I was scared to see her but couldn’t bring myself to jettison somebody I
cared for because of my fear. So, Fern
came to visit and it was fine. She was
the same person I knew in college, still funny, still an artist, still my
friend. And the honest way she answered
my questions opened a door in my heart.
In the
years after that experience, I was a teacher and school counselor, where I met
teenage students who were desperately unhappy because of their attraction to
the “wrong” people, whose churches preached openly against same sex
attraction. Some of these kids attempted
suicide. Some just endured the bullying
and the public ridicule. Some I didn’t
find out about until years later, when they wrote me notes and told me their
news.
This became
my personal civil rights cause. In 1994,
I asked our minister at Jefferson Unitarian Church, the Rev. Robert Latham, to
help me put on a service about gay/lesbian rights. As far as I know, it was the first time ever
that homosexuality and the pain of injustice had been linked at JUC.
A group from the local Rainbow Harmony
chorale, a mixed group of Denver men and women, performed selections from “Boys
and Girls with Stories”, composed by David Maddux . And, my knees knocking, I offered a
reflection on my own experience entitled “My Friend Fern”.
The sanctuary was packed that
morning. I saw people there who I didn’t
know were gay or lesbian, friends who had never dared say who they really
were. A teacher from a school I’d
served—and his partner; the parent of three of my students; a colleague who was
a counselor at a local high school. The
extent of my ignorance felt overwhelming.
As a minister, in the next few
years, I had chances to extend my knowledge and my experience and my group of
friends. My friend Fern had given me a
great gift that continues to affect my life today and, I hope, all my days.
When I moved to Portland in 1999,
to serve Wy’east UU Congregation, Oregon was debating Lou Mabon’s hateful
ballot issue, a measure to forbid any mention of homosexuality in the schools
and to discipline teachers who dared to discuss the topic with students.
We UUs and other progressives fought
back and defeated that referendum and turned our sights on civil rights
legislation to protect sexual minorities from job and housing and insurance and
inheritance discrimination.
In 2003, I moved to the Puget Sound
area to serve the Vashon and Whidbey Island congregations and immediately
became involved in an interfaith clergy group we named the Religious Coalition
for Equality.
As a clergy group of Jews, mainline
progressive Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, pagans, and UUs, we accompanied four
couples who went in a group one day to the King County Clerk’s office to apply
for marriage licenses, kicking off a years’ long campaign to secure increased
civil rights for all couples, starting with anti-discrimination laws and
domestic partnerships for same sex and older unmarried couples, culminating in
legislative action approving Marriage Equality.
Marriage Equality legislation was
approved in Washington in 2011, when the legislature passed a bill granting the
right of civil marriage to same sex couples, after a tense session on Whidbey
Island in which our Island County senator, Mary Margaret Haugen, was persuaded
by an impassioned group of Whidbey Island citizens to be the 25th
“yes” vote on the legislation in the divided Senate, forging the final link in
the chain of progress.
The legislation was, of course,
challenged and then survived a vote statewide , becoming the law of the land in
2012. I had moved here by that time and
could neither vote on the issue nor take part in the celebrations, except at a
distance, but, as is always true, it doesn’t matter who gets the credit as long
as the work gets done.
As the opposition dominoes have
begun to fall, one after another, as state and federal judges nation-wide have recognized
the terrible injustice of denying equality to loving couples on the basis of
sexual attraction, marriage equality has now become a reality in 37 of our
United States, including Oregon.
And the Supreme Court has even
hinted, through Justice Clarence Thomas’s published dissenting rant, that it’s
about to become a reality across the land.
Even Alabama, once the stronghold
of George Wallace and the attempted fortress of dissent of Justice Roy Moore,
is now granting marriage licenses to same sex couples in Alabama.
None of the horrific consequences
predicted by opponents has come true.
Instead, women who have been loyal partners to each other for 50 and
more years are now married. Men who grew
old together, caring for one another through sorrow and illness, no longer hide
their relationship but sport their wedding rings.
I’ve had the joyful opportunity to
marry women and men whose relationships have survived the insults, the
discrimination, and the fear of discovery.
Being part of this remarkable sea change in our nation has been one of
the greatest satisfactions of my life.
Love and Marriage, love and
marriage, go together like a horse and carriage, as the old song goes, but we
UUs gradually recognized that this wave of social change meant that our slogan
“standing on the side of love” didn’t just mean romantic and marital love. And we began to realize that loving our
neighbor means more than just our gay neighbor.
What about homelessness? What about immigration and the treatment of
families split up by troubling deportation policies? What about racial profiling and the treatment
of young black men who are presumed to be thugs? What about economic injustice, the fearful
prospect of oligarchy, the rule by the wealthy, as corporations wield more
influence than individual voters? Where
does love stand then?
As we here at the Pacific UU
Fellowship renew our efforts to contribute to the larger society in loving
ways, we are asking ourselves these questions.
In the questionnaire we compiled
recently, we learned that everyone who participated in that survey is serving in
the community in a variety of ways and as we talked at the board meeting last
week about the results of that survey and where the preferences lie, we noted
that one of the two top vote-getters was
environmental work.
We talked about the many ways we can
contribute to environmental causes, how the congregation could be part of road
cleanup and tree planting and that sort of thing, waxing enthusiastic about all
the possibilities.
And then one voice brought us back
to the other top vote-getter: (Paraphrasing
here). “Environmental work is fine, but I
really want us to be involved in actual social justice work. I want us to have an impact on people’s
lives. We have homeless people, hungry
people, out of work people, mentally ill people, all in this area, who need our
help. Let’s not forget them.”
In the next weeks, we will make
some decisions about the direction we want to go with our social action work,
and I’m hoping we will decide to choose projects that will serve the
environment as well as the humanitarian needs of our community.
Unitarian Universalism has, as a
faith tradition, grown strongly in the years since we decided to stand on the
side of love. I think of the closing
words of the song we sang together a little while ago:
“We are standing on the side of love, hands
joined together, as hearts beat as one.
Emboldened by faith, we dare to proclaim we are standing on the side of
love.”
We have set forth on this course,
to defend and protect those who need love, those persons who are hungry, exhausted,
lonely, homeless, and sorrowful. They
need our love. And we, as fellow human
beings, have the ability to provide that love.
We may not be sure yet what this decision, what this ability means, but
we are ready to serve.
And, because we also love this
planet, our home, we stand on the side of love for our natural world, ready to
defend and protect it, ready to stand against harmful practices toward the
land, water, and air which provide us with life, the animals and vegetation
which depend on us for their care, as we fulfill our place in the
interdependent web of life, of which we humans are only one part.
Let’s pause for a time of silent
reflection and prayer.
BENEDICTION:
Our worship service, our time of
shaping worth together, is ended, but our service to the world begins again as
we leave this place. Let us go in peace,
thinking deeply about what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves, as we
have learned from our Jewish and Christian spiritual ancestors. May we find in ourselves the resources to act
in love toward one another, toward the universe, and toward ourselves. Amen, Shalom, Salaam, and Blessed Be.
