Kicking the Dog

By William Blaine-Wallace

[Editor's Note: The following article is adapted from a sermon delivered on June 27, 2004, at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Boston, Mass., centered on the gospel reading of Luke 9:51-62.]

In a June 2004 letter to our diocesan bishop, Tom Shaw, about my decision to disobey the ban on priests solemnizing same-sex unions, I emphasized the pastoral basis of my defiance. I mentioned that the two marriages I solemnized involved couples that had been in the Emmanuel Episcopal Church community for many years. I stated that their relationships, prior to legal marriage, had been blessed in and by Emmanuel. Prior to their blessings, each couple had completed Emmanuel's intensive pre-marital counseling program. I wrote that the solemnization of their legal marriages was the natural completion of my long-standing priestly relation with them. I assured Tom that I was not interested in going on a prophetic marrying spree on behalf of gay and lesbian couples who want to tie the knot.

Still, there is a prophetic dimension to my pastoral acts. The prophetic dimension of my insubordination is a repudiation of the discrimination against a visible and vital community within the Episcopal Church. Our diocese's genuinely heart-wrenching decision not to offer the sacrament of marriage to gays and lesbians in Massachusetts after May 16, 2004 is like the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia's pallid, ingenuous invitation to blacks to sit in the back of their sanctuaries after July 1, 1964. It is about first and second-class membership in the church.

What, you may ask, does the solemnization of same-sex marriage have to do with the war in Iraq? The church comfortably, routinely, calmly tolerates an ill-conceived war and is fitfully, constantly, fanatically intolerant of homosexuals.

Yet, the prophetic dimension of my decision is more than a protest against religious discrimination. It is a small voice of religious dissent against the religious support for war. What, you may ask, does the solemnization of same-sex marriage have to do with the war in Iraq? The church comfortably, routinely, calmly tolerates an ill-conceived war and is fitfully, constantly, fanatically intolerant of homosexuals. Our tolerance of war and intolerance of homosexuality are chips off the same old cultural block.

America loves war as much or more than other first world nations. According to James Hillman, in his new and significant book, The Terrible Love of War , Americans, in a little more than 200 years, have fought the American Indians, the English, the Mexicans, the Spanish, the Germans, the Germans again, the Japanese, Italians, Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Salvadorians, Nicaraguans, Granadans, Iraqis, and Iraqis again. We fought ourselves in one of the bloodiest civil wars ever enacted. We are the “gunsmith of the world,” the largest manufacturer and exporter of weaponry. Our soldiers are fired upon by American-made killing instruments (see Allen Bisbor, Our Terrible War . Fairfield Country Weekly, June 10, 2004).

America hates homosexuals as much or more than other first world nations. We dispassionately suggested and sometimes passionately proclaimed that one of history's worst epidemics was an act of God against queers. We are getting ready to try to edit one of history's greatest documents of equality for all people by including an amendment that will bar the rights of some people. A friend of mine, when he was 14, was repeatedly kicked, for sport, under the bleachers of a local high school football field in Tennessee because he was “sissy.” Those southerners! Another friend, when he was 30, while walking around the progressive Fenway [neighborhood] in liberal Boston, had his brains beat out for being gay.

There is a fundamental connection between our nation's love of war and hatred of homosexuality. War, over the course of history, has accentuated and ensured dominance of the strong over the weak. Peace, at best, has been something like sleeping with one eye open and both hands on the rifle.

Heterosexual marriage originally was established to solemnize a contract of the presumed stronger male over the presumed weaker woman. The institutionalizing of homosexuality through same-sex marriage takes lordship out of the original, many millenniums long legal arrangement.

War and heterosexual marriage are icons of the same power imbalance. Peace, homosexuality, and, by extension, same-sex marriage, shake the foundations of patriarchy. Fear reigns. Fear is seized upon and capitalized on by those sentinels of tradition who have the most to lose.

America's war is not working at the same time that America rants that her most beloved institution, marriage, is endangered. Not a coincidence. In both cases, the power base of the privileged race, gender and sexual orientation is at stake. Two long established, interdependent traditions at the epicenter of our frontier nation are unraveling. In a military industrial state, it is much easier to fret and fume over what is happening at the marriage altar than dismantle and redirect a violence-based economy.

America has been having a particularly bad day on the battlefield. Our response is, as they say, to kick the dog.

In a world brought much closer together through technology, dominance of one nation over other nations by means of might is proving to be a weak and reckless strategy. Mutuality between and cooperation among nations are proving to be the real pillars of strength. The growing exposure of the crippling ineptness of our way-too-phallic reliance leaves America in a panic.

I wonder if America's pre-emptive ejaculations of violence in the globe's most volatile neighborhood interwoven with America's obsessive insistence that boy meets girl are the unison gasps of a dying national identity. I hope so. If so, I hope the death rattle stops soon.

I wonder if America's pre-emptive ejaculations of violence in the globe's most volatile neighborhood interwoven with America's obsessive insistence that boy meets girl are the unison gasps of a dying national identity. I hope so. If so, I hope the death rattle stops soon. In the meantime, we must protect those ravaged by it. The church's solemnizing of same-sex marriage is one, small means of protection.

There is another, more costly measure of protection, such as that practiced by the one we profess as Lord.

In the Gospel of Luke (chapter 9) we read: When the days drew near for [Jesus] to be received up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. And he sent messengers ahead of him, who went and entered a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him; but the people would not receive him, because his face was set towards Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to bid fire come down from heaven and consume them?” But [Jesus] turned and rebuked them.

James and John, those whom the writer of Mark's gospel called “the sons of thunder,” drew the axis of evil down the center of a foreign village because they did not receive the Middle East hospitality they needed and expected.   Jesus would have none if it, either then or later when another disciple cut off the ear of Rome in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Jesus was always and expressly against war. Jesus was, at best, lukewarm regarding heterosexual marriage, never against homosexuals, not concerned that they might marry. Because Jesus was against dominance and for mutuality, we are precluded from prospering Jesus as one for war and against same-sex marriage.

Could we please get over and beyond this marriage issue? There is a much larger and closely related fish to fry: WAR .

The cost of frying the much bigger fish is high. The work is sacrificial. In today's gospel, three times the disciples flinched, asking if they might take care of their unfinished business before heading to the seats of power imbalance in Jerusalem. Each time, Jesus said that the time was at hand . . . now.

Support the church's solemnization of same-sex marriage and you are considered by many to be un-Anglican, whatever that means, and by more to be un-Christian, for what it's worth. Stand up against war and you are denigrated as un-American, unpatriotic. Those to the right of the NASCAR dads will hate you more than the enemies our sons and daughters are fighting.

Let us continue our struggle for the right of gays and lesbians to partake of the sacrament of marriage. And, let us understand the struggle as a reflection, a manifestation of the larger, more consequential struggle against war and for peace.

The Rev. William Blaine-Wallace is rector of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Boston, Mass. He may be reached by email at bb-w@emmanuel-boston.org .