Ain’t I A Human?*
© Melina Magdalena (2010)
*paraphrased from Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech “Ain’t I A Woman?
While we prepared for our union, deliberately not called a wedding, we laughed a little bitterly about the role of institutionalized worship in our relationship. A Reform Jewish Rabbi would have been happy to formalize my partnership with another woman; if only she had also been a Jew; a Christian cleric might have been persuaded to officiate at a mixed-faith ceremony; if only it had not been a same-sex union. And on and on and on the merry-go-round turns, scarcely deviating in its course of division, subjugation and demoralisation.
As for the state of our union? A year and a bit down the track, all of our friends and family members refer to our carefully and cumbersomely titled “Promise Making Ceremony and Celebration” as our wedding. We bow to the inevitable, and do the same. There is no essential difference between our marriage and how any couple learns to make a life together. Life is good. We are expecting our first child in a couple of months, and so our world expands, unfolds and blossoms.
By the way we did mention God – and even Jesus – in our ceremony. The multitude sanctioning our union by their presence included a Catholic nun and representatives of Protestant Christian ministry in their double digits, but sadly no representatives of Jewish ministry, mostly because I have chosen in my last ten years or so, not to engage with my Jewish world on an institutional level. No lightning struck.
The reflections by Gordon Preece, commissioning editor of Zadok Perspectives , on an article written by my beloved’s mother, and printed in No. 106 of this publication, (Autumn 2010) deny our humanity in a vicious and sustained attack upon us as lesbians. I found it shocking, but my beloved assures me that she could have a “conversation” of this nature every day of every week of her life, with someone in “the church”, if she chose to embark on such a self-abnegating venture, which she doesn’t.
The banality of Preece’s so-called scholarship is exposed by the various and oft-cited authoritative texts and ideas to which he refers in his editorial, compared with the single source chosen by him to represent queer thinking – the lyrics to the satirical and deliberately outrageous song by Lily Allen and Gregory Kurstin. In a paragraph where Preece denies church leadership roles for “practising gays”, he demands that “Both sides should move from hostility to hospitality”. Preece is sadly mistaken to assume that his carefully scripted attack on queer humanity is any less damaging than Allen and Kurstin’s song lyrics, just because of the format he has chosen. His attack cuts far more deeply, because it is couched in hypocritically nice language of “clarity and charity”, which very clearly expresses his hatred for me as a lesbian.
=Fuck You Very Much is a refreshingly honest response to those who like to practice their bigoted faith with low acts of hypocrisy and violence against people like me. I’m not just referring to Gay Bashing, as practiced against men in Australia; Corrective Rape, practiced against lesbians in South Africa, and Other Forms of Murder, practiced against homosexuals, transsexuals and queer people the world over, from Uganda to the = United States of America .
Homophobia is mainstream hatred which queer people face every day of our lives, from the ordinary bigoted people who inhabit the worlds in which we as queer people also dwell. The idea that homosexual people are not human enough to lead other human beings in a church context is as homophobic and potentially murderous as physical violence. With his denial of church leadership roles for “practising gays”, Preece advocates spiritual murder.
The issue is always the same. Whether it is the colour of one’s skin; one’s status as a slave or free born; the religious heritage of one’s grandparents and other forebears; the language one learned as a child; the borders of the nation where one was born; physical deformity, infirmity or simply difference, human beings are expert formulators of reasons as to why some people are awarded the title of being human, whilst others are resolutely denied that privilege. Such narrow-mindedness is almost amusing, in an issue of this publication which is sub-titled “Difference & Difficulty”. I cannot laugh at it however. It makes me angry. I must express that anger, lest I internalise it and fall into a depression. Unlike my beloved, I do not have decades of resistance behind me, to bolster my reactions.
Preece has a plethora of groups to choose from in this issue of Zadok. Should he marginalise and condemn people with mental illness? No, that is no longer politically correct, because sufferers who are appropriately medicated can live fulfilling (heterosexual) lives. People with schizophrenia may be dangerous and street-people are tragic, but Preece correctly defines mentally ill people as victims who are deserving of Christian charity. Perhaps then, the spotlight should be turned on the women and men of the church who remain single? Does their failure to marry not mask the fact that they are running around and engaging in illicit sexual relationships outside the institution of marriage? We cannot, surely, in good conscience, accuse virgin missionaries of such shenanigans. Let us let the single people be. Ok, so if not the mentally ill, nor the single people, what about people whose physical bodies fail to match up with what we refer to as normal? These are people whose bodies work in different ways from ours; those who compensate for a lack of hearing, by developing a rich and creative culture from which normal people are barred from participating, simply because we do hear. They are shutting us out. Should we not shun them, and stop them from cultural expression? Surely not! Jesus is cited as specifically including people with disabilities in his house as “an indispensable part of God’s family”. We must instead demand that these groups return the favour.
It is notable that Preece avoids the debate over whether homosexuality is a choice, or biological. The choice that he mentions involves homosexual practice versus (presumably) celibacy. I fail to understand how my homosexual practice hurts anyone at all. The artificiality of separating sexuality from sex is highlighted when religion tries to defend its homophobic stance. The only people who are supposed to be having sex are those who are having sex with their heterosexual marriage partner. So he can have sex with his wife. Fine. But two women or two men who are in a committed marriage-like relationship are not supposed to express themselves sexually, because…?
For religious adherents, whether they be Christian or Jewish, (since those are the two religious systems that come directly into play in my life), around the heart of the fear of same-sex attraction lies a framework of control devices – belief systems, dogma and rules – that are designed to ensure compliance and conformity. This structure need not be thorn-covered, to divide the acceptable, from the unacceptable. Anyone who is born unable to conform and comply because of the nature of their being is constricted and tortured if he or she is brought up within that structure. My partner describes how wonderfully safe it felt during her childhood, to know her boundaries and where she fit in. She also tells how impossible it was to fit in, when she discovered that she was the wrong sexuality. This was not something she could alter, but in order for her to survive, her worldview had to shift radically in order to accommodate her difference.
Preece expresses concern that in our postmodern world we are kneeling down to difference. He suggests that the concept of difference has taken centre stage on the altar of our western culture and threatens to become the idol of our religious focus, as well. It is a strange fear. Fashioned by God as we were – perhaps even created in the image of God – diversity exists at the deepest level of creation. What use is there in denying the differences that exist between us? With such a fear focus, Preece forgets that there is much more that unites us, than what divides us from one another.
The fear of what is similar lies at the heart of homophobia. Heterosexual people fear homosexuality not because it hurts them or even affects them directly in any way at all, but because they have been taught that it is something to be feared and avoided. To be called homosexual is to be called sub-human and abnormal – Preece has clearly never conquered an upbringing where he was told that homosexuals are mutant deviant dangerous monsters. I can presume he would pass this message onto his own offspring as well, which is monstrous.
The issue is always the same, and it is sad that a publication which purports to “promote informed theological reflection and engagement by people from all walks of life, in relation to Australian public, working, and personal life” continues to support homophobia and to deny the status of homosexual people as human beings. Naturally, issues around bisexuality, transgender and intersex people are ignored in his editorial. It is as though Preece, as representative of Christian thought on the matter, remains firmly blinkered to the realities of human diversity. As my beloved’s mother points out – Jesus was not so blinkered.
What is it, to be human? Like my beloved, I also work with new-comers to Australia. It is work that never fails to move me, in many directions. One of my students posed this question last week, in an English class. We were on the topic of Open Questions; based around the wh- words: who, what, where, why, which, when and how. He wrote on his form “Why are you a human?” and proceeded to parade that question past his bemused classmates, who were unprepared for such a deeply philosophical task. (Their questions were at a different level: “When did you come to Australia?” “Where do you live?” “Which bus do you catch?”) No one could offer a satisfactory response to my deep-thinker and when I turned the question upon him, he could only laugh, and say “I asked you first!”
The concept of a tribe of homosexuals is no less frightening than any tribe of outsiders. For those within the tribe there is at least a feeling of safety in numbers. The reality is that in most Christian congregations there is likely to be a smaller ratio of queer Christians than the 8-10% cited by my mother-ex-law in her article. The reasons for this are clear. Queer people are hated and feared by most Christians and would see little benefit in participating in church unless they had a personal faith that sustained them to find worth in their existence and their participation that was able to raise them above that hatred. A relationship with God (Jesus) might do the trick. I hesitate to posit that this relationship with God could be labelled “Christian” because of the obvious contradictions this poses in a world of mainstream homophobes who also use that label.
As a Jew, I was taught always to heed the fact that as an eternally homeless stranger myself, I can expect no less a welcome than that, which I am willing to offer to other strangers. The apartheid to which my mother-ex-law refers in her article, which “We have practised with our homophobic shudders and avoidance of encounter”, is something which my beloved has experienced all her life, as a member of Christian congregations, and it is wrong. It also exists in Jewish congregations.
As teachers, my partner and I are lucky enough, partly through working directly with marginalised new-comers to Australia, to reach a level of self-understanding that enables us to love our oppressors. We acknowledge that the hatred continually thrust in our direction, does not need to destroy our sense of well-being and purpose. In order to triumph, to flourish and to express our love for the world, we do not need to descend to the level of expressing hatred towards those who hate us.
The merry-go-round grapples with shallow concepts such as acceptance and tolerance at the same time as using a cattle prod to push us further away from the spotlight, and slam the doors of churches (and synagogues) behind us. Walls of words are built to keep us apart from the deserving minions, so that we might not taint the purity of so-called Christ-centred practice.
There is little depth to Preece’s preaching against homosexual humanity. He fails even to take a baby step in the direction of informed research collected about homosexuals. If he had bothered to do so, he would have discovered that many queer people also develop mental illness as a result of their mistreatment by mainstream society and marginalisation by Christians. Many homosexual adults remain single because they have been taught that same-sex relationships are not sanctioned by God and are therefore evil. Though they are attracted to people of the same sex, they choose celibacy in order to not be ostracised from their communities. Thirdly, some people with disabilities are also homosexual. How will “the church” deal with those?
Preece does not mention the unforgivable fact that a same-sex-attracted young person who has grown up in a church community is far more likely to kill himself or herself at discovering that he or she is not heterosexual, than a queer person who grew up outside Christian practice. Perhaps he recommends suicide as the better answer, for queer Christians?
