March 7, 2004
Rev. Dr. Frank Carpenter,
D.Min.
St. John's Unitarian Universalist Church, Cincinnati, OH
I want to begin by thanking Sandy and Pam for sharing with us their planning and excitement about going to San Francisco to be married this week. I know that the support of many of you means a great deal as they undertake this wonderful adventure. As a progressive religious community, I think it makes us feel right on the cutting edge. Unitarian Universalists and this congregation in particular have long played a role developing support for gay rights.
It’s a wonderful way to welcome our new members. It says to our new members and visitors that we take seriously being an inclusive community, respecting people of all kinds. We gather here to reflect upon what it means to be human. What more significant questions can we be asking, than, what it means to be a woman? What does it mean to be a man? We are here to think about our lives, and that means thinking about sex and gender. Sex is about our biology: are you male or female? GLBT people remind us that that is not always a clear cut distinction. Gender is different than sex. Sex is about anatomy, gender is about social roles: masculinity, femininity. What do these mean? Can an anatomical male take a social feminine role? Thinking about sex and gender is something we all need to be doing as we live in changing times.
It seems to me that we have been at this a good long while. Our reflection about sex and gender began with the impetus of feminists in the 1970’s. We as Unitarian Universalist have been far more progressive in responding to the questions of women than responding to other progressive questions. A significant moment came in 1979 when a number of Unitarian feminists gathered in Loveland at the Grailville Conference Center. One of the workshops asked the question “The UU Principles: do they Affirm us as Women?” A resounding no came and they said they also failed to indicate a respect for the wholeness of life and for the earth.
From that gathering at Grailville came the movement to rewrite, degenderize, the Principles and Purposes of the UUA. These are in the front of our hymnal, our degenderized hymnal, and represent the efforts of Unitarian Universalist women supported by their allies.
It is good this day as we welcome new members that our thinking about gender is an integral part of our history. It is also good to acknowledge this on the first Sunday of Women’s History Month. The rights of woman is a concern of many. Even those whose support is questionable are required to at least give lip service to women’s rights. Women’s rights are in issue in the ‘War on Terror,’ as the Iraqi people struggle to develop a new, democratic constitution.
When the US began bombing Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, the oppression of Afghan women was used as a justification for overthrowing the Taliban regime. Five weeks later America's first lady, Laura Bush, stated triumphantly: "Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women."
Today we know that woman in these countries still live in great fear. And not just there. Irene Khan. Secretary General of Amnesty International, reported on Friday that up to one billion women-one in three-had been beaten, forced to have sex or otherwise abused, often by a friend or family member.
I would submit to you that our thinking about sex and gender is not done.
That Sandy and Pam need to go to San Francisco to be joined in legal matrimony, we can not but be reminded of the various legal debates that surround the question of gay marriage. The state of Ohio has recently passed a bill outlawing gay marriages saying that marriage is between a man and a woman. The current administration has called for a constitutional amendment prohibiting gays from marrying, and defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
It is interesting that we need a legal definition of marriage. Why does marriage need to be defined as between a man and a woman? Well, because it hasn’t been defined that way before, for whatever reasons. But once this legal definition of marriage should become the law, people will need to ask, what is a woman? What is a the legal definition of a man. Is a woman defined by sex, by gender? If a male is defined because of anatomy as a man, then it is the doctor who makes the decision. But why does a person have to live with the decision of a doctor when they were only a few minutes old about who they are?
Many people, transgendered people for example, dispute the doctor’s decision, they spend painful years in search of themselves, often disrupting the lives of their loved ones. Why can’t people decide what sex they are, what gender roles they want to suit up for?
Should a Constitutional Amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, prohibiting same sex-marriage, pass, we will then go on to the next battle, defining what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman.
When I lived in Newport RI, our next door neighbor was one of the most out gay men in town. He was good friends, perhaps college class mates of the then Executive Director of the gay advocacy group, the Human Rights Campaign. My neighbor had a few friends over for an evening. I was fascinated as the Director of the Human Rights Campaign told us of their official position on the question of sex and gender. Their point of view is that sex is on a bell curve. Very few people are 100% straight and very few 100% gay. Most of us have are a bit bi-sexual.
So, if the people who wish to prohibit same sex marriage succeeded in passing a Constitutional amendment, then we will need to define male and female. Does a real man only have sex with women? Does a real woman devote herself to child bearing? From various other laws that the Traditional Values Coalition is trying to pass, it seems to me that advocates for woman as childbearing, biology determining destiny, advocate paternalistic, hierarchical families. That, it seems to me is what at stake in the position of same sex marriage. It’s not just about gay marriage, its also about straight marriages, straight families
So, let’s think about sex and marriage. Let’s ask, why do people want to define marriage as a relationship between different sexes? They call it the defense of marriage bill. They say that they fear the marriage is under attack. Not from divorce rates, not from escalating medical bills, but from GLBT people wanting what they’ve got.
Is marriage, is the family, under attack in our society?
I think here advocates of Traditional Values are right. It is reasonable to feel that the family is under enormous pressure. It’s just that I don’t agree with them as to the source of the threat. Threatened? Yes! By gays? Get a grip. The difficulty is that humans are unwilling to change – and who is excited about change? People go about interpreting reality in the same old way, with the same old categories. DOMA advocates are not willing to interpret the threat they feel outside of the framework of traditional values.
We progressives believe that the dogmas of the past are inadequate to the present. During the anti-slavery campaign, the Unitarian poet James Russell Lowell penned some words which might be taken as a progressive credo:
New occasions teach new
duties;
Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward,
who would keep abreast of Truth.
As a result, working from our human rights perspective, progressives have developed an ideology of choice. What we choose is what we are, penned one Unitarian hymn writer. The result is that we may fall into the trap of convincing ourselves that what we are is what we have chosen.
And like advocates of traditional values, for like reason believing our own rhetoric, we have failed to grasp the threat to marriage and family.
I think that this is one of the points Joan Williams is making in our reading. Williams wrote, “A central goal of this book is to persuade women to think about their own lives in a different way, not as expressions of personal priorities that occur within their heads but as a clash between the way society tells women that children should be raised and the way it chooses to organize market work.”
Marriage and families are under threat. It is real. There is clash between care giving and productive work in our society. It is hard to think of care giving as productive because care givers have to get up each morning and do it all over again. There is no accumulation of inventory, unless it is dirty diapers and dirty dishes.
Our society expects workers, especially successful professional works, the ‘ideal worker,’ to put in fifty, sixty hours a week. People are made to work harder with less. It is meaningless to expect someone who works eighty hours a week to be an adequate care giver. Williams’s point is that the gender roles around femininity are still defined by care giving, and in our free market fundamentalism, care giving is marginalized. It is not women, so much as care giving. But since care giving is traditionally a feminine value, the way it ends up everywhere is reported in the recent Amnesty International report on women: “The effects of economic globalization are leaving more and more women trapped in poverty on the margins of society,"
Most of us have some experience of this. We have creative families in our congregation; people exploring different ways families can be both economically viable and care giving: Dad stays home and mom works. Single mom raises a child. Joan Williams says studies show that lesbian couples are the least bound to tight gender differentiation and explore a greater variety of ways of earning a living and taking care of children and others in the family needing attention.
The conflict between taking care of children and earning a living was central to my own childhood. My father died when I was two. My parents probably thought his government pension would continue to support my mother and me, but it didn’t. So my mother had to go out to work. This was in the late 1940's, just when GI’s were returning form the battle field and women where being urged to go back to the home, no longer playing the role of riveters and making tanks.
In those days there were no day care centers, so my mother placed me in an orphanage. Then she did something kind of different. I’ve never known quite why as she died when I was still unable to understand all these things, but while I was in an orphanage, my mother went back to college. She went to MIT to get her Masters in Public Health. I’ve often wondered if she could have stayed home with me instead of gong to college. I don’t know. But one possibility is that she wanted to place herself in an advantageous position the job market; off she went to college. One thing I knew for sure, in order for my mother to work, I went into an orphanage. The clash between care taking and market work has been very real for me. It has not been a matter of choice; it has not been because of traditional values. It was the day to day struggle human beings are engaged in in order to have decent lives.
Williams calls for different strategies in her book. Understanding discrimination against care givers in the work place as discrimination against women; call for men and women together finding ways to share both family work and market work.
I think we all struggle with that. When my son was born, my then-wife stayed home for about a year and when she went back to work, she worked at the day care center where my son was. Not the best job in the world, either in terms of demands on the personnel or the salaries.
When we got divorced, I am glad that while we no longer lived under ths same roof, for a number of years I was able to meet my son when he got of the school bus many days and spend time with him. Spending moments with my son are some of my most cherished memories. I think care giving is very rewarding personally. As long as care giving is not accepted as necessary to the well being of civil society, families will be under threat. And woman will be discriminated against, Joan Williams tells us.
We need to continue to think about sex and gender. Liberation is not at hand as long as some think that traditional values are relevant to a global market society, or as long as a rhetoric of choice blinds us to seeing that the problem is not in our heads but in our society at large.
New occasions teach new
duties;
Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward,
who would keep abreast of Truth.
We too are called. You as new members of our faith community, you family members, are invited to continue thinking about what it means to be human, what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a man.