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Why churches fear gay marriage
9:37 AM Posted In feminism , homophobia , homosexuality , religion Edit This 1 Comment »"You said recently the real issue behind the anti-gay marriage movement is the crisis in the family. What do you mean?
American families are under a great deal of stress. The divorce rate isn't declining, it's increasing. And the majority of American women are now living alone. We are raising children in America without fathers. I think of Michael Phelps at the Olympics with his mother in the stands. His father was completely absent. He was negligible; no one refers to him, no one noticed his absence.
The possibility that a whole new generation of American males is being raised by women without men is very challenging for the churches. I think they want to reassert some sort of male authority over the order of things. I think the pro-Proposition 8 movement was really galvanized by an insecurity that churches are feeling now with the rise of women.
Monotheistic religions feel threatened by the rise of feminism and the insistence, in many communities, that women take a bigger role in the church. At the same time that women are claiming more responsibility for their religious life, they are also moving out of traditional roles as wife and mother. This is why abortion is so threatening to many religious people -- it represents some rejection of the traditional role of mother.
In such a world, we need to identify the relationship between feminism and homosexuality. These movements began, in some sense, to achieve visibility alongside one another. I know a lot of black churches take offense when gay activists say that the gay movement is somehow analogous to the black civil rights movement. And while there is some relationship between the persecution of gays and the anti-miscegenation laws in the United States, I think the true analogy is to the women's movement. What we represent as gays in America is an alternative to the traditional male-structured society. The possibility that we can form ourselves sexually -- even form our sense of what a sex is -- sets us apart from the traditional roles we were given by our fathers."
It reminds me of another article, can't remmber where, that argued that male homosexuals are seen as particularly "evil" because the "dominant male" is seen as "demeaning" himself and his role as a man by performing what is seen as the traditionally female role during sex. In other words, it messes with the religious and cultural mindset that the man should be in charge and the woman should be subservient to him. Although it didn't get quite so much into how lesbians twisted this alleged hierarchy.
1 comments:
Well, for lesbians it's pretty clear; while a homosexual man "demeans" maleness by taking a submissive role, a homosexual female is "uppity" by assuming the dominant role (note that there is always the assumption that someone has to be submissive and the other dominant, and that the roles can never switch). It's for this reason, I think, that so called "lipstick-lesbians" take the least flack of any homosexual group. After all, they are women, acting feminine, in a sexually submissive role, so they are completely non-threatening. Add in the fact that they can be sexualized for male gratification, and they are golden. Meanwhile, transwomen are the ULTIMATE threat to traditional male roles and are easily the most targeted homosexual group (although I acknowledge that applying that term to trans-folk is murky and in many cases outright wrong, that's how they're generally perceived).
~Reave
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