On Second Thought . . .

Okay, kids, let's put on our thinking helmets for a Pop Culture Quiz!

"Pro-life" Republican state Rep. Tom Hackbarth is detained by police after pulling into a Planned Parenthood clinic with a handgun in his waistband. (You know how those Feminists--so unlike the rest of us--get nervous when someone drives up with a pistol in his underpants.) He says he was just trying to track down a woman he'd met once through the Internet because he suspected she was seeing another man, and he didn't know where he was. Glad he cleared that up.

Multiple choice: Right now, the woman whom he was attempting to stalk is thinking to herself:

(1) "Ooh, that's SO macho/manly/studly/gangsta, just like the last Country/Blues/Rap/mainstream song/video/movie I listened to/watched in the theater/on VH1/Fox/Hallmark. He must really love me!"

(2) "Hmm, he really turned me on because he told me he carries a handgun AND is vehemently anti-abortion--but he doesn't have the Planned Parenthood locations memorized? What kind of a loser/fake/wannabe/dweeb/GOP hanger-on IS this guy?"

(3) "I'm torn. Tom seemed so cool, but Freddo has bigger biceps and a deeper voice and makes a lot more as a bouncer, and says that he votes Democrat only because everyone in the Family does."*

(* Apologies to bouncers, restaurant employees, and rank-and-file unionists everywhere, that is not aimed at you. It's aimed at Mafiosi. If you're in the Mafia and are still offended, please just leave the horse head on the doorstep, we'll see it in the morning.)

(4) "Wow, now I'm even more glad that I came to that first date with pepper spray in my purse and was able to walk away after the two minutes it took to read Hackbarth as a total Red Alert wacko."

(5) Essay answer __________________________________ (have some fun)

//www.startribune.com/politics/local/110518619.html?elr=KArksUUUoDEy3LGDiO7aiU

Resisting the Cultural Undertow on Veterans Day

On this Veteran's Day, Minnesota Public Radio broadcast the story of Col. Jack Tueller's experience in World War II (Dick Gordon's The Story). Now in his 90s, Col. Tueller--who as a child took up the trumpet to salve his soul after being abandoned by his father--spoke movingly of the power of music to charm an enemy sniper into surrender, or to ease his wife--who suffers from dementia--into moments of relative lucidity.

Also today, the bishop of Minnesota called upon us to give thanks in prayer for those in the military who have made sacrifices for the greater good, and for their families. It is a good and worthy prayer; but it leaves out some categories of people who are also part of the greater landscape of war.

I know that veterans need all the prayer we can offer, and more: they require our strident advocacy. The Veterans Administration has only this year changed its standards for acknowledging combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder for troops in combat zones (rather than requiring PTSD sufferers to "prove" that a particular incident in combat caused the disorder); in part, some might like to believe, because a more sympathetic president occupies the Oval Office, but much more obviously because thousands of veterans' family members cried out for it.

But somehow a straightforward request to give thanks to God for members of the military gives me pause.

It isn't that I hold any brief against men and women in uniform. I think of a brave, endearing young man who came to me when I was serving as priest-chaplain on a university campus. He had interrupted his college and career plans to serve in Iraq and though he longed to “get on with life,” he spoke with the unswerving, clear loyalty that marks the best of military professionalism of his willingness to return if needed. But he was facing the prospect of being called up to Afghanistan, to a war he regarded as senseless and immoral. It quickly became clear that as far as he was concerned, “honoring our veterans” had no relation at all to a blanket endorsement of the nation’s military adventures.

It is nonetheless the overwhelming cultural tide in our society to bathe national war efforts in the purity of veterans’ “sacrifice.” To question warmaking is tantamount to dishonoring the dead. That is a peculiarly convenient rhetorical ploy, of course, since it is impossible to poll the deceased to ask them whether they would prefer us to honor them by perpetuating the wars that cost them their lives. Long before he was a U.S. Senator, Vietnam veteran John Kerry testified before Congress in 1971 that it was hard to ask a soldier to be “the last man to die for a mistake.” We have long since pressed beyond his moral scruple: our pundits invoke the dead to insist that war–any war–must be continued at all cost.

There was a time–for those in the military, it does not seem so long ago–when donning a military uniform was genuinely a matter of service, even sacrifice, to a greater good, a brighter future. That was a time when “just war” was a meaningful category; when soldiers could think they were fighting to defend the powerless. But the inevitable logic of military occupation is that the powerless become the intractable dull mass of civilians who refuse to yield up their hearts and minds in gratitude; eventually, they become the enemy. However the pundits may resist it, the logic is clear enough to many veterans.

The cultural tide–and its undertow now reaches into the churches–favors an unconditional adulation of veterans. The hard-headed analysis required of a conscientious citizenry would ask: What are the true goals of the latest invasion and occupation? What purposes are evidently served? How do the purported objects of our solicitude--acutely vulnerable men, women, and children--actually fare after years of warfare? –Those that survive, that is, in refugee camps or curfewed cities? But such analysis is washed away in the crashing surf of “honoring the sacrifice” of our military personnel as if they alone, uniquely, supremely merited our concern.

There is a relentless horde of flag-waving flacks, pundits, and politicos eager to require of us our silent assent in the war effort, for the wars du jour and the next war, and the next. If we protest, we are told we disrespect the dead; but have not the valiant died for something other than continual war? Cold-blooded “national security” hacks speak readily enough of endless war, but what soldier wants that, prays for that, gives his or her life for that?

And what Christian may give blanket assent to prayers that stop with thanksgiving for those in uniform? Do not these courageous men and women themselves ask us for more? If we fall silent without naming the suffering of the innocent, the courage of the dissenter, are we not limiting our imagination to the militarist vision of endless war for causes that must remain unspoken, unseen, unthought? But are we not commanded to lift our eyes to a broader horizon, a future free of war?  

Another prayer comes to mind. It was included in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer in the years following Vietnam, and it follows the prayer For Those in the Armed Forces of our Country (p. 823). It reads:

O God our Father, whose Son forgave his enemies while he was suffering shame and death: Strengthen those who suffer for the sake of conscience; when they are accused, save them from speaking in hate; when they are rejected, save them from bitterness; when they are imprisoned, save them from despair; and to us your servants, give grace to respect their witness and to discern the truth, that our society may be cleansed and strengthened. This we ask for the sake of Jesus Christ, our merciful and righteous Judge. Amen.

 

 

"Free Market" Magic Has Had Its Chance

To what should be our shared astonishment, the GOP sticks to its one-note theme: tax breaks for the wealthy and for corporations are the ONLY means to create new jobs.

In an orchestrated campaign the impudence of which should take our breath away, GOP candidates across the country have spent their time (and a whole lot of corporate-donated cash) pounding this message home, over and over again, without bothering to produce a single real-world example.

Let's be clear. This isn't a matter of dogma (except to GOP acolytes who hope for a long, lucrative career sucking at the corporate pig trough). This is a matter of simple empirical observation. Facts either validate or repudiate the "trickle-down" hypothesis. (I know, in the age of Palin I should say "refudiates," just to connect with some readers, but I remain, stubbornly, in the Reality-Based Community.) 

We have a thirty-year track record to test the theory of "trickle-down" Reaganomics.  ("Voodoo economics," the man who would become Reagan's own  V.P. called it, before surrendering principle to become the second-in-command--if you don't count Alexander Haig.) If tax breaks for corporations and the rich could spontaneously generate new job growth, we should have seen miracles over the last thirty years. Explosions of jobs, increasing wages, happy families (enjoying adequate medical care), happy children (enjoying working public schools) . . . but this is not left-wing utopian rhetoric: this is the delusional drivel on offer from the neoliberal right.

Instead we have seen repeated, consistent proof that given the chance, corporations will (1) "downsize" (fire workers), (2) "out-source" and (3) "relocate" (hiring new workers and moving factories and offices to states or foreign nations with even lower tax rates); (4) lobby Congress--using extravagant budgets no citizens' group can match--for deregulation from basic safety, environmental, product quality, and employee-rights rules; and (5) use massive advertising campaigns to try to convince us that all this is for our own good and that we have no real alternative.

The pro-corporation advertising has been packaged as "news" (Fox), but its fundamental character as blackmail has been made explicit, repeatedly, by think-tanks and corporate CEOs who have alike threatened that "the rich" will simply take "their" money and go to a state with a cheaper tax rate. The threat encompasses both the personal and corporate taxes these skinflint rich will take with them, the jobs they promise to take elsewhere, and the "value added," through sports teams and other benefits, that they purport to bring their inferiors simply by living among us.

If this isn't reality, then I beg the advocates of neoliberal "free-market" ideology to show us a single case in which deregulation and taxpayer subsidies have resulted in significant net job gains.

Can you hear the crickets?

It is long past time we all called the corporate hacks and  GOP candidates (to the extent these are different groups) on the nonsense they are trying to peddle among us. First of all, it's not "their" money. They are getting rich from the work that hundreds, thousands, of other people do for them. (Compare the CEO/employee pay ratios in all developed nations and think, really hard, whether you've ever seen a CEO come close to earning the extra dough. Where does that money come from?)

Second, if they really believe the "invisible hand" of the free market produced jobs of its own magic, let them show us the results. Now.

And if it's not that anonymous, miraculous "invisible hand," then it must be the actual wills of living, breathing CEOs and stockholders who could decide, tomorrow--no, tonight--to raise the wages of their employees, guarantee health care, invest in their employees' children's education, and so on. 

Why haven't they done so in the thirty years in which their mumbo-jumbo magic has been the dominant economic policy of the land?

Because they know, perfectly well, that it's not true. Because no responsible CEO or board member is about to cut into their precious profit margins by paying decent wages. Because it's actually cheaper for them to spend money waging campaigns against workers than paying workers what they're worth.

The cant of the Republican Party is breathtakingly shameful--the sort of shame one senses in one's nose when one stands downwind from of a gigantic corporate-farm manure lagoon. To believe this cant, thirty years on into the experiment, isn't an act of faith: it's an act of stupidity. 

On Getting Over It (Gay Love and Marriage)

As the culture war over same-sex love and marriage intensifies, I marvel at the crowd who insist on “defending” one kind of marriage by legislating any other kind out of existence. What must their own marriages be like? Do self-righteousness and an obsession with finding fault with others make for sound and happy marriages?

Or is the point to enforce a rigid conformity to strict rules in order to please a punitive God? Somehow that doesn’t sound attractive. Wouldn’t they make better headway “defending marriage” by illegalizing divorce, requiring ten-year courtships supervised by parents and grandparents, and forbidding anyone in the 90210 zip code from going near a justice of the peace? If enforced righteousness is so important to them, why do they fret so (well, Newt Gingrich does) about the imminent imposition of “shariah law” in the United States? I mean, wouldn’t these folks be happier under a homegrown, “Christian” version of shariah?

I’m reposting here a column I wrote in 2004 because I think it still speaks to the issue of “defending marriage”; the Minneapolis Star Tribune published the column on January 2, 2004.

 

For Couples Like Stephen and Michael, Blessing and Hope

 My first official act after being ordained to the Episcopal clergy two years ago was to serve as deacon at what is customarily called a “same-sex blessing ceremony.”

Nothing particularly surprising there. Such ceremonies have been conducted in Minnesota for years—quietly at first, but at their 1999 convention the people of the diocese declared their resolve to “include, welcome, and embrace [their] gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender members” and “to continue to make available to them all of the blessings of Christ’s beloved church.”

I’d seen Michael and Stephen in church for weeks preceding the ceremony. They were obviously experienced in the complexities of Episcopal worship, standing and sitting at the  appropriate places and joining in the prayers without having to look at their prayer books. They also stood side by side with the ease and comfort that comes from an established affection.

Now as they stood before the priest, I had the opportunity to catch their eyes. Michael seemed about to burst into laughter or tears, or both, trembling slightly with a powerful blend of joy, solemn awe, and nerves. Outwardly more serene, Stephen beamed at his partner with a loving solicitude, as if to radiate calm with his gaze.

I scanned the congregation’s faces and found the usual mix of radiant smiles and joyful tears. I also saw one or two people looking rather apprehensive, as if they weren’t sure what would come next.

What came next was pretty familiar stuff, following the general outlines of a traditional church wedding. We listened to scripture, to specially chosen music, and to the priest’s homily exhorting and encouraging the couple to be gentle with each other. Then they pledged their lives to each other in love and mutual respect. We joined in prayer that their life together would be a source of blessing to them and to others.

Like a lot of people, I get choked up whenever I hear two people make outlandish public promises to love and honor each other. This day was different, however. I didn’t know what challenges either man had had to face to bring him to this moment, but it was safe to presume that neither had been able simply to coast with the cultural current, even in Minnesota. It took courage for each to stand before an assembly of the people who knew him best and declare undying love for another man.

Amid the controversy swirling in my own church and elsewhere, we hear cries of alarm that accepting homosexual relationships will somehow endanger “traditional” marriage. For the life of me, I don’t know what that means.

How could the example of committed love between two men cause me to defect emotionally from my wife, unless I were secretly gay myself? In that case, wouldn’t my marriage rest on a very fragile foundation already? Wouldn’t dissolving a marriage based on a false premise free two people for new, more fulfilling, emotionally secure, and lasting relationships, including, perhaps, a much stronger heterosexual marriage?

Perhaps the alarmists fear that if all of us were free to follow our own hearts, marriage as we know it would come to an end. But doesn’t that anxiety presume already that our hearts aren’t in our marriages?

Stephen and Michael’s vows did stir up strong feelings within me. I was inspired to return to my own marriage with renewed commitment, a clearer sense of what mattered most in my life. But that’s just what we ask of every wedding ceremony: “Grant that all married persons who have witnessed these vows may find their lives strengthened and their loyalties confirmed,” as the Book of Common Prayer puts it.

In our consumerist society, the commodification of sex and the infinite interchangeability of relationships are pervasive values. Any two people preparing to commit themselves to a shared life need all the support and encouragement a community can provide. In my own search for such a community, courageous lovers like Stephen and Michael have been important and powerful examples. I’d rather have them as allies and models than shut them out in fear, circling the emotional wagons around only the people who I presume think and feel just as I do.

I think the Episcopal Church is trying to build that kind of supportive community. When, this past August [2003], we approved the election of an openly gay priest as bishop, we were saying, first, that we recognized the gifts and calling that our New Hampshire neighbors had seen in this holy and gracious man. We were also saying that we recognize the beauty and godly worth of caring, self-denying love, and that we seek to bless, support, and defend it wherever we find it. Since our General Convention in 2000, that’s been the official teaching of our church. I pray we have the grace and good sense to practice what we preach.

Coming Out

National Coming Out Day has passed. I didn't miss it, really; I received a number of e-mails asking me to identify myself as a "straight ally" of LGBT folk (let's call them "those people").

I want to be counted as one of "those people."

I should have come out twelve years ago, when I was involved in the "discernment process" for the Episcopal priesthood. This was before Gene Robinson's consecration as the first openly gay bishop ignited a cultural firestorm; back when dioceses like mine practiced an ecclesiastical equivalent of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Kind and sympathetic people on my parish discernment committee, the diocesan Commission on Ministry, and the bishop himself asked me all sorts of questions, but no one asked me whether I was--how shall we put this--"actively" involved with the woman with whom I slept every night. (We were married halfway through that discernment year.)

That's really quite appropriate. If any of them had asked (they all had better sense), I would have replied, "none of your damn business." But my gay, lesbian, and transgender peers in seminary didn't have the luxury of coasting through that part of the gauntlet. They visibly shook as they anticipated their encounters with Commissions on Ministry in less enlightened dioceses. 

During that same period, I was involved in a debate on the Roman Catholic university campus where I was a faculty member. The pope's latest declaration on "human life" reiterated the line that human sexuality was inextricably tied to procreation. Hard-liners on campus said yes, that meant that any sexual act that couldn't result in a baby was inherently sinful. I cheerfully volunteered myself as Exhibit A: I had married a woman with whom I would not have children (I'd had a vasectomy years earlier) and we both were rather enthusiastic about the prospect of being--what is the word--active, though not reproductive.

It was a small gesture. Nevertheless, I was surprised by what I will call the vehement silence from Roman Catholic colleagues---indeed, no one followed what I grandly considered my "lead" and volunteered their own ecclesiastical transgression---and by the gratitude bestowed, though covertly, by members of the campus LGBT community.

I want my point to be clear. Heterosexuals travel with a passport of privilege. We aren't asked questions that would damn our non-het neighbors to hours of delay, ostracism, and possible physical harm. Why not? By what moral right do we fly above the moral radar while our friends, siblings, children, and neighbors are whisked aside for questioning (and worse)?

A Rutgers student has committed suicide after fellow students covertly videotaped his sexual encounter with another man. The liberal world is mobilized! But listen to the privilege that oozes from the declaration of a Rutgers coed, carried by AP: "If he'd been with a woman, this wouldn't have happened." 

Think about that. If the sexual encounter being secretly videotaped in a Rutgers dorm room had been a heterosexual encounter, then yes, the average straight male student would have been far safer--not only than the gay student down the hall but, more importantly, than his female partner. She, after all, might awaken the next morning to find her image proliferating, virally, on the Internet under the keywords "girls gone wild" or "campus slut." That Rutgers coed's comment is just wrong. Shame, ostracism, humiliation---those aren't just risks of homosexuals. Statistically, women in heterosexual encounters are just as vulnerable. 

Let's hear that right. A woman in my parish who's been a lifelong activist  for---well, for any cause you can name, so long as it's connected to empowerment and justice---gave me an earful about my city being the national leader in child prostitution. It also happens to rank near the top for two immigrant populations. The two facts are uncomfortably related. Girls in vulnerable immigrant populations, especially those who don't speak the Queen's English, are easier prey for gang-related prostitution rings that condemn them to lives of misery. 

The larger point I wish to make happens to have a comfortable home in the Episcopal Church, whose social teaching is clear, and has been clear for more than a decade. The issue is justice in sexual relationships, not orientation. 

But the great majority of us can think of that as someone else's problem, their problem. Surely it's past time for all of us to come out: to refuse all the insipid little privileges, the smiling silences, the nodding indulgences, that come with being "straight." Come out, come out, wherever you are--you beneficiaries of straight privilege--or show yourselves cowards.

The Blessing of the New May Beer (c) 2004 Neil Elliott

The Blessing of the Maibock

 

Litany for Beer Drinkers © 2004 The Rev. Neil Elliott

 

First performed at the Town Hall Brewery, Minneapolis, in April, 2004

 

 

This is what I recognize as good: to eat, and drink,

and find enjoyment in our work

during the few days of life that God gives us.

 

(Ecclesiastes 5:18)

 

Welcome to this Blessing ceremony!

 

As long as human beings have gathered over drink they have invoked the holy, in many ways and by many names. The Blessing of the Maibock (which has also taken many names through our history) takes place when people have gathered together in the evening.

 

 

A Reading: The Divine Tavern-Maid’s Advice

(from the Epic of Gilgamesh)

 

This portion of the Epic of Gilgamesh survives only in a fragmentary tablet from ancient Babylon; dated ca. 2000–1500 b.c.e., it is the oldest sacred epic known to us. Long away from home, the hero Gilgamesh arrives in a tavern where the divine Siduri gives him beer. He laments that his comrade Enkidu has been taken by death; his quest for immortality led him to Utnapishtim, survivor of the Great Flood, but the old man gave him no help. Siduri’s advice is the turning point of the plot, sending the hero back to his city, Uruk, and his family.

 

. . . O Gilgamesh, why do you wander?

The immortality you seek you shall not find.

When the gods created the human race

They made us mortal; death claims us all;

immortality they hold for themselves alone.

But you, Gilgamesh, take your fill of good food;

Make yourself merry by day and by night.

Of each day make a feast of rejoicing,

Day and night, dance and play!

Let your garments be sparkling fresh,

Wash your head, bathe in water.

Pay heed to the child who clings to your hand;

Let your beloved delight in your embrace!

This, this alone, is your task.

 

(A moment of silence is observed, if circumstances permit.)

 

A Litany for Beer Drinkers (The people stand, as they are able).

 

With all our hearts and all our minds, let us pray to God, singing

 

 

From wasting money on thin beer, and time in thinner conversation,

  Good Lord, deliver us.

 

From jerks, creeps, mashers, the pathologically boring, and those who think they are your gift to everyone else in the bar,

  Good Lord, deliver us.

 

From thinking beer has made us clever when we’ve only begun to sound stupid,

  Good Lord, deliver us.

 

From all recklessness, belligerence, and the impulse to pick fights with people larger than ourselves,

  Good Lord, deliver us.

 

From mornings when we cannot even remember the joys of the night before,

  Good Lord, deliver us.

 

From drinking to our own harm, or the injury of others; and from the need of bail bondsmen, towtrucks, and attorneys,

  Good Lord, deliver us.

 

From the distress of waking with headaches, crankiness, and days when sunlight seems too much,

  Good Lord, deliver us.

 

From the peril of drinking alone and unprepared,

  Good Lord, deliver us.

From the foolishness of not having designated someone to bring us safely home other than you,

  Good Lord, deliver us.

 

The Blessing of the Maibock

 

The Maibock may be censed.

 

Let us pray:

 

Eternal God, the source of all life and all joy,

You bless us with the gifts of water

and grain rising up from the earth;

you have given to some the wisdom and skill

to produce fine drink;

 

Bless now the Maibock of this new year. (The Maibock is censed.)

 

May it be the occasion of much laughter,

of good cheer and good conversation.

May those who enjoy it together deepen their friendships,

let go their anger and enmity,

and look forward to the greater feast of peace

to which you welcome all people.

 

This we ask in the honored name of Jesus,

who did not draw back from the risk of being called a drunkard

so he might enjoy the company of strangers at his table. Amen.

 

  Cheers! L’chaim! Salute!

Building an Islamic Center at Ground Zero? The Horror!

Some people think Muslims should never be accorded the right to freedom of religion guaranteed in the First Amendment. The Constitution and Bill of Rights were good for their own time, these people suppose, but this is post-9/11. While we're at it, here are some other things I think we should definitely criminalize FIRST:

• driving a car using oil from any OPEC country in the Middle East (this dishonors the sacred victims of 9/11)
• supporting any war to control oil reserves in Iraq or through Afghanistan (this trivializes and demeans the sacrifice of those who died on 9/11 and in wars in both those countries)
• allowing the continuation of the CIA, since in the 1980s the CIA gathered, trained, funded, and armed the violent extremists who would spawn Osama bin-Laden and his ilk. Also because the CIA continues to work closely with violent extremists in these and other countries
• reacting with paranoia to Muslims in general (since this clearly lets the terrorists win)

Frank talk about "God's Plan for Marriage"

Since the Hon. Vaughn Walker ruled that California's Prop. 8 was unconstitutional, the right-wing blogosphere has metastasized, convulsing with heated frothings about God's Plan for the One-Man, One-Woman Marriage. These are tired old platitudes but they deserve another serious kick in the head. 

Let's proceed as if facts mattered. That will require that those whose perspectives have been decidedly shaped by professional ranters on Fox News can check out whenever they like. (I've been impressed, the last few times I've been subjected to Fox in public spaces, how readily and candidly Fox commentators have distanced themselves, categorically, from "the media." That seems appropriate: Fox and actual journalism have precious little to do with each other.)

Let's consider what I submit as readily verifiable observations:

First, it isn't gay couples who turn heterosexual husbands' heads on the street/in the office/on the beach. For example, as I took the aisle seat on a recent airline flight, the guy at the window sneered, "all we need now is a cute blonde gal between us, right?" Then his cell phone rang and he assured his wife, in a much more circumspect voice, that he'd be home soon and asked her to tuck in the kids. Picking on gays is a huge deflection of attention. Statistically, the greatest threat to heterosexual marriage is heterosexuality.

As a priest, I can't perform the Episcopal marriage ceremony any more without observing, out loud, that the liturgy begins with a bit of a cockup (to borrow the British idiom). We're told God "ordained" heterosexual marriage; also, that Jesus--as flamingly and, for most moderns, incomprehensibly celibate as they come) "blessed" marriage by actually attending a wedding in Cana (John 2). Well, he showed up, but made no comment to the bride or groom or to anyone else about their marriage. By that criterion--showing up--I suppose one could argue that he "blessed" leprosy and demon possession as lifestyles.

Look: even a cursory reading of Genesis 1--3 (something I recommend to any Fundamentalist who can lay hands on a Bible) shows, first, that God didn't "ordain marriage." At least in my Prayerbook (and in the laws of every civilized state in the world), two people have to "take" each other in marriage, with free and explicit consent. In my church, the priest who isn't careful to ensure, verify, and explicitly confirm to the congregation that these two are giving willing consent is in very deep doo-doo morally and canonically. God, on the other hand--not being bound by canon law, of course--never asks Eve's consent before whiffing her together out of the rib of Adam (Gen. 2:18ff); and Adam himself is snoring too loudly to have heard the pertinent question even if it were asked, which it wasn't. So in what sense is this a "marriage"?

As far as God's sacred ordinance goes, what the biblical author draws from the episode ("therefore," 2:24--the only "moral" drawn from the story) is that "a man" leaves his parents' home to live with "his wife." (No room here, apparently, for unmarried men in the created order, but of course--for those who care at all about the actual meaning of words--the Hebrew doesn't say "his wife," it says "with his woman," be'ishshto.) If that's an explicit statement of God's will for all time, then I conclude that John-Boy Walton grew up in a house of sin: after all, his father did NOT leave his parents behind but lived right there under the same roof with Grandpa and Grandma. (Damn the creeping secularism of the late 1970s!)

But let's move on. It's clear, furthermore, that what we know as heterosexual desire comes subsequent to God's command to the human race to reproduce. That command comes in Gen. 1:27-28--before the narration of the creation of Eve. But God's declaration to the woman that "thy desire [shall be] to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee"--a perfect description of what some Christians consider the ideal marriage--comes in Gen. 3:16, after what Christians like to call "the Fall." For those Christians who take the whole idea of "curse" and "punishment" in Genesis 3 with theological seriousness, it sure looks like God has punished the new couple by giving the woman a libido. 

Put that in your literalist pipe and smoke it. That sure isn't the way those saccharine popular Christian books on "God's gift of sexuality" would have it, but it's the Bible. The earliest Christian interpreters--meaning, anyone who commented on the passage for the first three hundred years--all took seriously the apparent sense that God meant the commands to marriage and reproduction to be separate from sexual desire. That makes no sense to us, but it was common sense to them--as carefully documented by Elaine Pagels in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. (Consider reading the book before trashing the argument.) 

It's probably necessary to insert a qualification here. I'm actually very pleased with heterosexual marriage, at least with mine. I do consider sexuality a gift from God, though I'm not sure how anyone would go about prooftexting that case biblically (except, of course, for quoting Ruth's words to Naomi, or David's to Jonathan. Oops). 

We could go on: nowhere in Genesis do we see happy consensual marriages like pastoral counseling is designed to promote. We see people tricking other people into (often polygamist) marriage and using slaves sexually without scruple. If God's eternal plan for marriage was clear in Genesis 2, the holy patriarchs seem not to have got the memo. 

Jesus, for his part, preaches a stricter code of marital fidelity (no divorce, period, at least in Mark) than most mega-churches today can stomach. That helps to explain how they get to be mega-churches. But let's be fair: any pastorally sensitive church has to be more responsive to divorced people than Jesus managed to be in his very brief and very un-pastoral career. Not that he was ever approached by a divorcee with the question. Neither was he asked about homosexuality, ever, nor did he ever offer an opinion on it.

Paul, of course, had clear opinions: better to be celibate. He had nothing good to say about marital sex: just a grudging recommendation of it as a prophylactic against "immoral acts" (read 1 Corinthians 7). He must have been a source of genuine agony for married coworkers like Prisca and Aquila, declaring that married people just can't be as devoted to "the Lord" as he was (and, I suspect, burning the midnight oil to dash off screeds like 1 Corinthians while they tried to cuddle on the other side of the curtain). 

There are important debates about the passages where previous generations were accustomed to read Paul blasting away at homosexuals, namely Rom 1:24-27 and 1 Cor. 6:9-10. "Debates" because the Greek words simply don't fit what we call homosexual love. By "debates" I mean whole books, bibliographies of important peered-journal essays, sessions of the Society of Biblical Literature devoted to the questions--not that any of that matters to people who know "what the Bible" says without having to open it. I've been part of those debates, but this isn't the place to rehearse all the arguments.

This is where Americans tend to turn off all their brain cells at once. It's weird: we listen all the time to some men insult each other with "cocksucker" and tell each other, "bite me!" and "eat me!" without thinking, "ah, those men must be gay." We listen to PG-rated late-night comics make jokes about how you should never bend over to pick up the soap in a prison shower--jokes, that is, about homosexual rape--without thinking, "wow, there must be a lot of gay men in prison." We know perfectly well that references to homosexual aggression have nothing to do with homosexual love, in just about every other aspect of culture, until we meet two men at the dinner table who are so full of love for each other that their eyes glow. Then we're suddenly overwhelmed with a biblical assurance that all the hellfire in God's sweet heaven (?!) is reserved especially for them.

I know none of this will convince those people who have their minds made up already: for them the Bible can only say what they know it says. For them, I simply don't understand what sense it makes to pretend that they "listen" to the Bible--they don't: they can simply presume what it tells them. Scholarship, ambiguity, the semantic range of Hebrew and Greek words, the difference between cultures--none of this makes a whit of difference. They live in a warm cocoon of self-assurance, built over the years from twigs and thread. 

I mean only to say to them, please realize your self-assurance is not an argument; it's not compelling, it's not persuasive, it's so fragile that it only appears to others as a delicate web of anxious self-delusion--until you try to insist that it's the only, obvious, and self-evident truth revealed from heaven. Then you simply appear bigoted.

But to others--who have escaped the dreary, burdensome weight of such self-intoxicating ignorance--I want to say: there is a world of people waiting to embrace you, to welcome you, to build another civilization with you. We stand even within churches (some more comfortable than others . . .) and we speak of God as the deep love that underlies our life together; we speak, knowing that we are speaking metaphorically and not literally, of God calling us, urgently, to build that civilization rather than descend into hatred, viciousness, and fear. For some of us, that call is the bright fire at the heart of Christianity.

All Haiti really needs is to receive what they are owed: read Naomi Klein's superb explanation of the REAL world debt, here.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100301/klein

Superb journalist Amy Wilentz (author of The Rainy Season) offers a powerful rebuke to the "Haiti haters" among the punditocracy, at The Nation, here:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100208/wilentz .