Maybe last Wednesday night you tuned in to the live TV or Internet coverage of the second national political convention in little more than a month. Vice president Dick Cheney spoke. That evening he and the others who also addressed the conventioneers didn't talk publicly about marriage equality, a hot national issue. His daughter, Mary Cheney, is a strong advocate of marriage equality. And she is an out-and-partnered lesbian, working at the highest leadership levels of the campaign to get her dad reelected.
We had an ostensible paradox between what Ms. Cheney says she believes in her heart and the high-powered political organizing she is doing ardently on behalf of her father. Immediately after the vice president ended his speech, members of his family gathered with him on stage, as expected, to wave to the well-wishing conventioneers. Ms. Cheney and her partner were notably absent. During the speech itself the vice president stayed away from the subject, in part because marriage equality is inevitably controversial. It's polarizing. The political and religious arguments for and against marriage equality produce strong responses from people who see the debate mainly as an either/or dilemma, a collision of opposites.
Both orthodox and progressive religions are also engaged in a mighty struggle with the compelling issue of marriage equality. There are no easy answers sometimes, even for people of goodwill. Religious leaders of different faiths who do support marriage equality report that they are in quiet shock. They are experiencing some stunning resistance from those supporters, parishioners, and adherents generally regarded as progressive and open-minded.
Others believe the alternative to church-supported marriage is the social and civil route. The belief translates into working out new ways of thinking about marriage equality and a change in marriage laws through the existing political system. That's the kind of robust action deliberately recommended in June 2003 in Supreme Court Justice Scalia's dissenting opinion in the Lawrence v. Texas decision decriminalizing sodomy.
His suggested political mechanisms for creating change, many say, helps avoid the now nearly impossible task of convincing authorities of the church and the temple and the mosque to advocate for a religion-sanctioned union between two women or between two men. Change is hard, often comes slowly.
Recently, based on a fair number of reasonably presented and argued newspaper reports and letters to the editor, some activists in the movement for marriage equality have stressed that greater change is possible. They say it's quite possible, first and foremost, through the political system.
Historically organized religion is, in fact, organized. It is regarded legitimately and understandably as part of the settled state of affairs, the status quo, part of the system of accepted institutions we have to work with to get things done. It's well known that organized religion, for a variety of complex reasons, is sometimes one of the last organized systems to go along with and adopt the practices that flow from social and cultural change. Some faiths insist they are playing a leadership role indeed as change agents. Something to think about and ask is, Could the real answer lie in the complex middle?
Whether LGBT and straight, many believe we have no choice but to honor those claims that ask us to move things forward thoughtfully and, yes, patiently and slowly. Some might think it regrettable having to openly acknowledge the claims because it would discourage the kind of concrete action that some believe is critically needed now. The issue of either civil or religious marriage, or none, for same-gender couples goes to the heart of the preference of the American people over more than 200 years. That tradition, including last Wednesday's convention speakers, seems to call for maintaining in our nation a healthy tension between religion and civil life. The Constitution calls for a reasonable separation of church and state.
Some say it's all a mess—everything—the cultural contradictions, the seeming paradox of the Cheney family, the sometimes crazy tension between religion and public life regarding religious or civil marriage. But then again so is democracy a mess. Messiness is naturally built into the democratic system of checks and balances. And we have to do the best we can to make things better within the mess. A direct frontal attack of anyone rarely is viewed in civil society as a best practice.
Within the first half of the 20th Century, merely 50-60 years ago, we the writers were born. At that time Protestant theologian and cultural critic Reinhold Niebuhr, and Catholic theologian and historian John Courtney Murray, both were telling the nation to pay attention. They said that greater cultural pluralism is coming, whether they or we accepted or rejected that idea. The two pioneering Americans, along with other distinguished religionists and social observers of the time, predicted there would be more people doing many more new things and thinking in many more new ways than ever before.
We didn't hear at the New York convention by Republicans the continuation of a dialogue and debate about marriage equality as one dramatic indication of increased cultural pluralism. Of course that controversial national discussion began anew a month earlier at the Boston convention by Democrats. Both conventions have given us and are giving us the opportunity again to consider what kind of a mess or dilemma, if any, we've gotten ourselves into this time around.
Jim Boushay and Rickey Sain