Support marriage equality

Now is a good time to write to your local county councillors to ask them to support marriage equality.

Here is the letter I have written to my local councillors:

I am writing to ask you to support marriage equality in Oxford County Council.

Thanet has become the first local authority in the UK to endorse the government’s proposals for marriage equality.

Some county councils have not yet made available information on how churches and synagogues that wish to do so can register for religious civil partnerships, and the registration fee is higher than for registering as a marriage venue. Please could you lobby for Oxfordshire County Council to do this.

In addition, I want to see marriage equality in the UK, and would hope that Oxfordshire's county councillors would support this. I want to see religious same-sex marriage made available for those religions and denominations that wish to perform these ceremonies (namely Unitarians, Liberal Judaism, Reform Judaism, Quakers, and the Metropolitan Community Church). Pagans would also like to be able to perform same-sex marriages, but as Pagan opposite-sex weddings have no legal standing in England and Wales, the nature of the obstacle to Pagan same-sex weddings is more complex.

Please also support the option for same-sex civil marriage and opposite-sex civil partnerships. This is important as many same-sex couples would like the opportunity to be married, and many opposite-sex couples would prefer the less traditional option.

This is also important for transgender people, who may be in either a civil partnership or a marriage currently, and in order to register as the opposite sex to the one they are currently labelled as, would have to divorce their partner and get either a civil partnership or a marriage.

The background to this is that Thanet County Council has endorsed the government's plans.

Thanet has become the first local authority in the UK to endorse the government’s proposals for same-sex marriage. Please ask your councillors to pass a motion supporting same-sex civil marriages & opposite-sex civil partnerships. Find out your local councillors & email them via this website: www.writetothem.com

BBC report 

Pink News report 

Please ask councillors to support same-sex marriage for those religions who want to do same-sex marriages too.

gender bending

According to the Gender Analyzer, there is an 84% chance that Stroppy Rabbit is written by a man. Well, a friend did once tell me that I am a gay man trapped in the body of a woman...

a stark choice

I just found another attempt to polarise the debate over the existence of the divine (unsurprisingly, in chapter 1 of The God Delusion):

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist (and atheist) Steven Weinberg made the point as well as anybody, in Dreams of a Final Theory:

Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that 'God is the ultimate' or 'God is our better nature' or 'God is the universe.' Of course, like any other word, the word 'God' can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that 'God is energy,' then you can find God in a lump of coal.

Weinberg is surely right that, if the word God is not to become completely useless, it should be used in the way people have generally understood it: to denote a supernatural creator that is 'appropriate for us to worship'.

That certainly isn't what most polytheists mean when they refer to a god or a goddess. Also pantheists and panentheists don't regard the Divine as supernatural, i.e. beyond Nature.

And the debate over whether God is personal or impersonal, ultimately unknowable or fully revealed in the person of Jesus, has been raging for centuries. There is no consensus view of what God means. Even among believers who subscribe to a creed, you will get different ideas of the divine. People have not necessarily always regarded 'God' as a supernatural creator. Some regard the creation as being a constant process, upheld by the Holy Spirit as the Sustainer; some people think it's all a metaphor; and some Pagans believe the immanent divine to be the Goddess, the one who gave birth to all that is. There is also a huge debate over the gender of the Divine (the Orthodox Church, confusingly, has regarded God as genderless since the 4th century, but persists in referring to God the Father).

If Dawkins want to demolish the idea of God, he'll have to demolish all the unique and distinct ideas of the Divine in everyone's heads. The best way to demolish the idea is to replace it with something better, not just replace it with a vacuum.

Actually I don't believe in a creator; if you must have a poetic metaphor for the beginning of the universe, I prefer birth. I believe consciousness to be an emergent property of matter, and not the other way around. But if people want to refer to the Universe as divine, that is absolutely fine with me.

being 'musical'

Stephen Hough (Summerskill, 2006: 210) suggests a non-essentialist explanation for the association of gay men with the arts:

“To use ‘musical’ as a euphemism for homosexual is rather flattering when you think about it. It suggests a sensitivity, a creativity, an ability to attune to sound and beauty. … It is not an accident that music and the arts were always a tolerant environment for gay men. It was a world where appreciation for the ‘feminine’ was not seen as a weakness, and where strength did not have to manifest itself in violence and coarseness. … It was the perfect place in which to indulge a sense of the extravagant and exuberant, as well as offering ideal camouflage. A mask, a costume, an affecting melody, a graceful leap were all perfect alibis for those whose affections danced to a different tune.”

The Divine Feminine

The third wave of feminism was characterised by a decrease in emphasis upon separatist strategies and by an increased awareness of women-loving women and women of colour and the problematisation of the concept of gender (Juschka, 2001: 568). This development was reflected in theology and the study of religions by feminist scholars engaging with queer theory.

The resurgence of interest in goddesses was a significant feature of the resurgence of Paganism (Hutton, 1999) There is also a move among some Christian feminists to refer to ‘Mother God’.

Whilst it seems logical for feminists to honour the divine feminine, a goddess, or goddesses, this can be problematic if there is assumed to be one God and one Goddess (as is often the case with popular books on Wicca). A single divine essence without gender, or including all possible genders and sexualities, or an assumption that there are many deities, some of whom might be queer, is relatively unproblematic from a queer perspective; but the idea that there is one God and one Goddess excludes the possibility of their being queer, can lead to heteronormativity, and is sometimes used to justify homophobia among Pagans.

However, many lesbians find the idea of a single Goddess attractive, sometimes because they have been molested by men (Foltz, 2000), sometimes because they do not feel the need for ‘balance‘ (Rose, undated).

The divine feminine is still not widely accepted in Christianity, although it is widely considered to be a defining feature of Paganism, belief in it being one of Three Principles of the Pagan Federation. It is very important to feminists and lesbians, although some queer-identified people might prefer the androgynous divine.
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Foltz, TG (2000). Sober Witches and Goddess Practitioners: Women’s Spirituality and Sobriety. Diskus, 6: 1. [online] Available from: http://web.uni-marburg.de/religionswissenschaft/journal/diskus/foltz.html Accessed 3-5-2007

Hutton, Ronald (1999), The Triumph of the Moon: a history of modern Pagan witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Juschka, Darlene M., ed. (2001), Feminism in the Study of Religion: a Reader. London and New York: Continuum.

“Mama Rose” (undated). Why go Dianic? http://www.iit.edu/~phillips/personal/philos/dianic.html Accessed 3-5-2007

dialectics and the analysis of religion

I'm currently reading the anthology Gender, Religion and Diversity: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (eds Ursula King and Tina Beattie (2005, London & New York: Continuum, ISBN 0826488455) which has a chapter by Mary Keller pointing out that you can't have a gendered perspective independent of race (using Hegelian dialectics to support this). By extension, using Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, I would say it was impossible to exclude class and sexuality from one's analysis.

Keller uses Rita Gross's concept of women both participating in and being excluded from certain religious practices to show that women's religious experience is complex and does not entirely equate with victim status. She then uses Franz Fanon's extension of Hegel's dialectics to show that white feminists are in a peculiarly privileged position.

Hegel (1807) argued that to become a person, one must experience oneself as a subject (thesis), then experience the other (antithesis) and only by the reciprocal recognition of the other as a subject in their own right could one move to the third stage, synthesis, and become a mature person. Hegel also said that if one perceived oneself as a master and others as slaves, then one could not move to the third stage, but must constantly bolster the sense of self by objectifying the other. Fanon showed that white people in the colonial context put themselves in the position of master and black people in the position of slave. The position was further complicated for white women by the fact that they were objectified by white men, but asserted their own (ambivalent) mistress-consciousness by objectifying black people. Thus a hierarchy was set up in which white men were at the top, white women next, then black men, then black women (each perceiving all others below them on the hierarchy as the other or slave). If we introduce class into this hierarchy, you then get upper-class white men at the top, followed by upper-class white women, middle-class white men, middle-class white women, etc etc etc. And if we introduce sexuality & religion into the mix, then clearly a white male heterosexual Christian (or possibly rationalist atheist these days) is going to be top of the heap.

Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital (not mentioned by Keller) shows that if you have the right discursive equipment (e.g. the ability to assert yourself in the face of people in positions of power), you will have more choices open to you in life than if you don't - so perhaps in the Hegel / Fanon analysis, the more you partake of the master consciousness, the better you will get on in this bizarrely hierarchical culture of ours. Of course Keller acknowledges (as do I) that "race" is a social construct, but nevertheless one that has very real effects.

If you doubt that this hierarchy still exists, you only have to look at the way in which academic discourse excludes anyone who doesn't speak the lingo or kow-tow to the notion that people who study religion must adopt the outsider position, or the way in which the colonialist and imperialist agenda and discourse is still being perpetrated on the Middle East. Or the marginalisation of Pagan discourse in just about all spheres.

In order to escape from the trap of this hierarchical view of the world, Keller suggests, we have to return to Hegel's original model of synthesis, whereby we recognise the other as a subject in their own right, not merely an object. Being objectified and/or demonised as a category should make us more aware of our own projections of otherness, but all too often we merely perpetuate the hierarchy. A great deal of feminist discourse merely turns the oppressor (identified as all men) into the other, and seeks to objectify and demonise men; whereas often women participate in the oppression of the other (Keller's concept of mistress-consciousness is peculiarly apt, given that 'mistress' can mean 'concubine' as well as 'the female equivalent of master'). She gives female missionaries as an example - both objectified by their male counterparts, and objectifying the colonised peoples they sought to convert. Another example is of course women's participation in the practice of female circumcision, or the racism of the white memsahibs in the British Raj, or white feminists preaching to Third World women about how they should act.