Lesbian Marriage Quotes

States vote to take away my marriage rights, and even though I don't want to get married, it tends to hurt my feelings. I guess what bugs me is that it was put to a vote in the first place. If you don't want to marry a homosexual, then don't. But what gives you the right to weigh in on your neighbor's options? It's like voting whether or not redheads should be allowed to celebrate Christmas.

Love has no gender - compassion has no religion - character has no race.

Homophobia is the ignorant and arrogant assumption that copulation and reproduction is all there is to a relationship.

Love should never mean having to live in fear.

Either you are homophobic or you are a human - you cannot be both.

Being homosexual is no more abnormal than being lefthanded.

What does love mean if we would deny it to others?

The power of love is that it sees all people.

In the unification of two minds, orientation of sexuality is irrelevant.

Same-sex marriage has not created problems for religious institutions; religious institutions have created problems for same-sex marriage.

For the hundreds of thousands of Californians in gay and lesbian households who are managing their day-to-day lives, this decision affirms the full legal protections and safeguards I believe everyone deserves.

As a Black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage, there was usually some part of me guaranteed to offend everybody's comfortable prejudices of who I should be.

If heterosexual people can get married then gay and lesbian people can get married too

He who is jealous is better off not dating someone who is bisexual.

Women have married because it was necessary, in order to survive economically, in order to have children who would not suffer economic deprivation or social ostracism, in order to remain respectable, in order to do what was expected of women because coming out of "abnormal" childhoods they wanted to feel "normal," and because heterosexual romance has been represented as the great female adventure, duty, and fulfillment. We may faithfully or ambivalently have obeyed the institution, but our feelings - and our sensuality - have not been tamed or contained within it.

Most people who are would each not be in love with their partner, if they did not have the kind of genitals they have.

Homosexuals are not made, they are born.

The world could use more love. Why deny it to others?

Sometimes I look at him and I want to get on my best heels. Sometimes I look at him and I want to be a lesbian. He says that I'm too moody.

Homosexuality is immutable, irreversible and nonpathological.

Still, as a straight person, you might say, "This just isn't my fight." No, it isn't. Unless you care about the kind of society we have. Unless you want the society of which you are a part to be a just one. Unless you believe that a free society, not to mention a godly religion, should fight injustice wherever it is found. Unless your religion tells you -- as our entire Judeo-Christian heritage does -- that any society will be judged by the way it treats its most vulnerable. Unless you care about our children. Unless fairness matters to you. Unless violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people concerns you. Unless "liberty and justice for all" is something you believe applies to all our citizens.

Can you imagine, somebody telling you, your love for your dearly beloved is a sin! Can you imagine, somebody telling you, women are inferior to men, and are meant only serve the men! Can you imagine, somebody telling you, a man can have multiple wives, and yet be deemed civilized! Here that somebody is a fundamentalist ape - a theoretical pest from the stone-age, that somehow managed to survive even amidst all the rise of reasoning and intellect.

Bientôt ou dans un cycle, ce sera de nouveau son tour de me prouver la qualité de son feu. Je ne lui manquerai pas, elle ne me manquera pas--et tout sera consumé.

Come with me this morning to the church within our hearts, where the bells are always ringing, and the preacher whose name is love — shall intercede for us!

It never occurs to one to think whether she is pretty or ugly. One just surrenders to her charm.

Jesus was consistently on the side of those who were outcast by society and bore the unfair burden of disdain, discrimination, and prejudice. It is likely that he would look at modern-day lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and hold real sympathy for them and their plight. He would have understood the implications of a system set up to benefit the heterosexual majority over the homosexual minority. It is hard to imagine Jesus joining in the wholesale discrimination against LGBT people. Isn't it logical that he would be sympathetic to young gay teens who take their own lives rather than live with the stigma attached to their sexual orientation? Would he not be found speaking a word of support, encouragement, and hope to them? Would he not be seeking a change in the hearts of those who treat them as outcasts?

It was protective, on her side; sprang from a sense of being in league together, a presentiment of something that was bound to part them (they spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe), which led to this chivalry, this protective feeling which was much more on her side than Sally's.

Within the history of lesbianism from the archaic Greek poet Sappho from the Isle of Lesbos, who is the symbol of lust, passion and sensuality between women, to Sister Benedetta Carlini’s deeply erotic love affair with another nun, to the 10th century Arab erotic work, Encyclopedia of Pleasure, which gives the account of a love affair between a Christian and an Arab woman, to modern day same-sex marriages and Pride parades, there is certainly place for Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

And many attorneys and judges have come to support legal recognition for same-sex unions because they are already having to deal with the division of assets and similar issues in de facto gay and lesbian divorces.

Men's sexual freedom has depended, and still does to a large extent, upon their ownership of women's bodies. Men have bought, sold and traded women as things to be used. Women are still regularly raped in marriage, even though most Western countries have now changed their laws to recognize that wives have a right not to be raped. Women are still bought and sold in marriage in many countries, and in the vast majority of countries of the world their bodies are still legally owned by their husbands. In prostitution and pornography, the mail-order bride business and reproductive surrogacy, the international trade in women is a burgeoning industry. Men's ownership of women's bodies has been the substrate on which their idea of sexual freedom was born and given its meaning. This is why it includes the right to buy access to women, men, and children as an important way of demonstrating that freedom. At the base of men's sexual freedom agenda is the concept of the rights of the male individual. Pateman points out that women cannot gain recognition as individuals, since the very concept of the 'individual' is male.

Far from undermining marriage, gay and lesbian couples seeking marriage for themselves are perhaps the institution's best friends. At a time when marriage is seen as less desirable and less necessary for straight couples, gay and lesbian people are lining up at town halls and church doors to participate in this traditional and long-standing institution.

I oppose same-sex marriage but I would advance equal rights in employment for gay and lesbian people. I appointed a few judges who were gay and I had few people in my cabinet that I found out were gay. I never asked peoples sexual orientation.

I came of age in a culture where gay marriage went from comic impossibility to foregone conclusion to law of the land. I haven't been closeted in almost a decade. Even so I am unaccountably haunted by the specter of the lunatic lesbian. I did not want my lover to be dogged by mental illness or a personality disorder or rage issues. I did not want her to act with unflagging irrationality. I didn't want her to be jealous or cruel. Years later, if I could say anything to her, I'd say "For fuck's sake, stop making us look bad.

We can move to legalize same-gender civil marriage without harming any religious institution or dictating any change to the beliefs and practices of any faith. Religious opposition to civil marriage for same-gender couples irrelevant to the civil, public debate. You're opposed to gay marriage on religious grounds? Fine! Don't authorize your clergy to act as an agent of the State in any such unions. But don't deprive the rest of, who believe that such rites are good and holy, of our constitutional rights to practice our own freedom of religion. We don't live in a theocracy where some one understanding of religion and faith dictates what the State will and will not do. This religious argument against the right to marry for gay and lesbian couples is simply bogus. And unconstitutional. Religious belief should have no bearing whatsoever on the legal right to marry.

I oppose same-sex marriage and civil unions but I support domestic partnership between gay and lesbian couples. I have no problem with gay and lesbian couples adopting. I support equal benefits for same-sex couples such as hospital visitation rights

Gay men and lesbians have already opened up the question of what qualities and roles are male and female in ways that can be liberating for straight people. When they marry, the meaning of marriage is likewise opened up. No hierarchical tradition underlies their union.

I have been in a mixed-gender marriage and in a same-gender marriage. The same-gender marriage feels so much more natural to me, because there is no constant effort to bridge the gap between two genders that have been trained by our culture to love and live so differently.

In a world dominated by violent and passive-aggressive men, and by male institutions dispensing violence, it is extraordinary to note how often women are represented as the perpetrators of violence, most of all when we are simply fighting in self-defense or for our children, or when we collectively attempt to change the institutions that are making war on us and on our children. In reality, the feminist movement could be said to be trying to visualize and make way for a world in which abortion would not be necessary; a world free from poverty and rape, in which young girls would grow up with intelligent regard for and knowledge of their bodies and respect for their minds, in which the socialization of women into heterosexual romance and marriage would no longer be the primary lesson of culture; in which single women could raise children with a less crushing cost to themselves, in which female creativity might or might not choose to express itself in motherhood. Yet, when radical feminists and lesbian/feminists begin to speak of such a world, when we begin to sketch the conditions of a life we have collectively envisioned, the first charge we are likely to hear is a charge of violence: that we are “man-haters.” We hear that the women’s movement is provoking men to rape; that it has caused an increase in violent crimes by women; and when we demand the right to rear our children in circumstances where they have a chance for more than mere physical survival, we are called fetus-killers. The beating of women in homes across this country, the rape of daughters by fathers and brothers, the fear of rape that keeps old—as well as young—women off the streets, the casual male violence that can use a car to run two jogging women off a country road, the sadistic exploitation of women’s bodies to furnish a multibillion-dollar empire of pornography, the decision taken by powerful white males that one-quarter of the world’s women shall be sterilized or that certain selected women—poor and Third World—shall be used as subjects for psychosurgery and contraceptive experiments—these ordinary, everyday events inevitably must lead us to ask: who indeed hates whom, who is killing whom, whose interest is served, and whose fantasies expressed, by representing abortion as the selfish, willful, morally contagious expression of woman’s predilection for violence?

Even though it may look like the wicked is gaining ground, God is still in control. We need to pray for our nations, pray for others, pray for forgiveness and mercy over people. We need to love no matter who we are talking to, whether they are Atheist, Moslems, Lesbians, Homosexuals or Pagans. We need to love them and share the love of God with them and not judge and see if we can rebuild our broken nations.

Perhaps the most radical aspect of queer politics was its claim not only to transcend the homo/hetero boundary but to do so in such a way as to challenge the sexual regulation and repression of heterosexual desire, above all female desire. Queer politics, it was claimed, had a lot to teach those accustomed to the narrow confines of ‘male’ and ‘female’ heterosexual roles in relationships. The re-working of notions of monogamy and the send-up of marriage through queer weddings, the greater sexual adventurism, the rejection of the concept of gay men and lesbians as ‘victims’ in favour of assertiveness and redefinition, and the emphasis on the creation of more egalitarian relationships in the domestic, sexual and social spheres, were all cited as examples of how queer could contribute to a new sexual agenda of empowerment.

The journey toward legal marriage for gays and lesbians may seem at odds with what looks like a flight from marriage by heterosexuals. But in fact, they are part of the same project: a dismantling of the institution as it once existed—as a rigidly patrolled means by which one sex could exert legal, economic, and sexual power over another—and a reimagining of it as a flexible union to be entered, ideally, on equal terms.

She’s a lesbian?” Ray broke in. Gotlieb looked at him quizzically. “A what?” “You know, a woman who...uhh...likes other women…a lot.” Gotlieb’s eyes flashed in recognition. “Ah, I see you what you mean, old man. No, we don’t have a special name for anything like that. But these days, pretty much everywhere in the Alliance, you can get married to a man, woman, alien, whoever or whatever you want, as long as it’s legit. Marriage is for love.

That summer, in a small house near the beach, he began to write a book. He knew it would be the last thing he ever did, so he decided to write something advocating a crazy, preposterous idea—one so outlandish that nobody had ever written a book about it before. He was going to propose that gay people should be allowed to get married, just like straight people. He thought this would be the only way to free gay people from the self-hatred and shame that had trapped Andrew himself. It’s too late for me, he thought, but maybe it will help the people who come after me. When the book—Virtually Normal—came out a year later, Patrick died when it had only been in the bookstores for a few days, and Andrew was widely ridiculed for suggesting something so absurd as gay marriage. Andrew was attacked not just by right-wingers, but by many gay left-wingers, who said he was a sellout, a wannabe heterosexual, a freak, for believing in marriage. A group called the Lesbian Avengers turned up to protest at his events with his face in the crosshairs of a gun. Andrew looked out at the crowd and despaired. This mad idea—his last gesture before dying—was clearly going to come to nothing. When I hear people saying that the changes we need to make in order to deal with depression and anxiety can’t happen, I imagine going back in time, to the summer of 1993, to that beach house in Provincetown, and telling Andrew something: Okay, Andrew, you’re not going to believe me, but this is what’s going to happen next. Twenty-five years from now, you’ll be alive. I know; it’s amazing; but wait—that’s not the best part. This book you’ve written—it’s going to spark a movement. And this book—it’s going to be quoted in a key Supreme Court ruling declaring marriage equality for gay people. And I’m going to be with you and your future husband the day after you receive a letter from the president of the United States telling you that this fight for gay marriage that you started has succeeded in part because of you. He’s going to light up the White House like the rainbow flag that day. He’s going to invite you to have dinner there, to thank you for what you’ve done. Oh, and by the way—that president? He’s going to be black.

People who think that queer life consists of sex without intimacy are usually seeing only a tiny part of the picture, and seeing it through homophobic stereotype. The most fleeting sexual encounter is, in its way intimate. And in the way many gay men and lesbians live, quite casual sexual relations can develop into powerful and enduring friendships. Friendships, in turn, can cross into sexual relations and back. Because gay social life is not as ritualized and institutionalized as straight life, each relation is an adventure in nearly un-charted territory—whether it is between two gay men, or two lesbians, or a gay man and a lesbian, or among three or more queers, or between gay men and the straight women whose commitment to queer culture brings them the punishment of the "fag hag" label. There are almost as many kinds of relationship as there are people in combination. Where there are -patterns, we learn them from other queers, not from our-parents or schools or the state. Between tricks and lovers and exes and friends and fuckbuddies and bar friends and bar friends' tricks and tricks' bar friends and gal pals and companions "in the life," queers have an astonishing range of intimacies. Most have no labels. Most receive no public recognition. Many of these relations are difficult because the rules have to be invented as we go along. Often desire and unease add to their intensity, and their unpredictability. They can be complex and bewildering, in a way that arouses fear among many gay people, and tremendous resistance and resentment from many straight people. Who among us would give them up? Try standing at a party of queer friends and charting all the histories, sexual and nonsexual, among the people in the room. (In some circles this is a common party sport already.) You will realize that only a fine and rapidly shifting line separates sexual culture from many other relations of durability and care. The impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should be either husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations. Straight culture has much to learn from it, and in many ways has already begun to learn from it. Queers should be insisting on teaching these lessons. Instead, the marriage issue, as currently framed, seems to be a way of denying recognition to these relations, of streamlining queer relations into the much less troubling division of couples from friends.

The fear Jackson refers to is not fear of lesbianism—or, at least, not only fear of lesbianism. It is the fear of what lesbianism represented to her, something that on one level she fervently desired even as she feared it: a life undefined by marriage, on her own terms. Constance and Merricat are indeed “two halves of the same person,” together forming one identity, just as a man and a woman are traditionally supposed to do in marriage. Not finding that wholeness in marriage, Jackson sought it elsewhere: first with Jeanne Beatty, and later with her friend Barbara Karmiller, also younger, who came back into her life shortly after she finished Castle. Indeed, the novel, in its final version, is not about “two women murdering a man.” It is about two women who metaphorically murder male society and its expectations for them by insisting on living separate from it, governed only by themselves.

It seems to me, then, that vulnerability and and self-disclosure are at the heart of what we understand about the nature of God. And the reason I believe gay and lesbian people are spiritual people is that we too have participated in vulnerability and self-disclosure, especially in the process of coming-out. When someone shares with you who they really, really are, it is a special offering. To do so when it risks rejection is a profound, holy gift.

They argue that opposition to same-sex marriage is a deeply held religious belief, and withdrawing support, whether it’s by declining to photograph a gay wedding or refusing to hire a married lesbian woman, is a rightful expression of their faith. But the logic doesn’t extend beyond the LGBTQ issue: evangelicals aren’t out pushing for the right to discriminate against divorced couples, unrepentant gossips, or gluttons, all people in blatant violation of Christian tenets.

I came of age in a culture where gay marriage went from comic impossibility to foregone conclusion to law of the land. I haven’t been closeted in almost a decade. Even so I am unaccountably haunted by the specter of the lunatic lesbian. I did not want my lover to be dogged by mental illness or a personality disorder or rage issues. I did not want her to act with unflagging irrationality. I didn’t want her to be jealous or cruel. Years later, if I could say anything to her, I’d say, “For fuck’s sake, stop making us look bad.

Capable, clever and with a natural gift for land and estate management, Anne had been the natural choice to take on the huge task of running Shibden. Not only had she impressed Uncle James with her abilities to deal with the renewal of leases and misbehaving tenants, he also knew that she would never marry and therefore the estate would not be broken up. In their conversations together, Anne had left him under no illusion that her emotional and sexual feelings for other women precluded the possibility of her ever entering into a marriage with a man, in which she stood to lose all that was hers. It was another four decades, on the passing of the Married Women’s Property Act in 1870 (thirty years after Anne’s death), before women would be able to keep hold of and inherit property following marriage. So, remarkable as it may seem to us now, it was Anne Lister’s lesbian sexuality (then with no name or legal recognition), which played a crucial role in helping her to keep control of her wealth at a time when it was thought that it was impossible for a woman to do so. That Uncle James, in 1826, seemed to understand and recognise this is even more extraordinary.

I think that the contemporary model of Christian marriage is a good one for heterosexual people: one man and one woman should marry for life and, if they choose, bear and care for children. This model is not found in Genesis, however. Moreover, it took Western society many centuries to come to it,91 and even so, half of the heterosexual people in American society do not follow it. On the other hand, many Christian gay and lesbian people have committed themselves to one lifelong partner. Many care for children, and some that I know have adopted children with special needs. They seem to have gotten the point of the contemporary Christian model of marriage and are living it out.

There is no question that taking such an advocacy role in seeking compassion, fair treatment in the society, and the happiness and legal status of marriage for gay and lesbian people will get such advocates in trouble. Going against the prevailing culture almost always does. But we are in good company. Jesus teaches us in the Sermon on the Mount, "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you" (Matthew 5:10-12).

In regard to justice, one might also ask: What of same-sex, heterosexual couples who live with and cherish each other, but who do not engage in homosexual acts? Are they less worthy of marriage? If the only thing that distinguishes them from homosexual couples is sodomitical behavior, and if only homosexual couples are to be extended the privilege of marriage, then something of special merit must obtain precisely to the act of sodomy itself. Why should sodomy be privileged in this way? Otherwise, why would marriage not be appropriate for chaste or heterosexual same-sex friendship? The tax advantages obtaining to an estate left by one spouse to another are great. Should they be only for lesbian and homosexual couples and not, say, for brothers, sisters, or others who may love each other and live together?

One night he said abruptly: Stephen won't marry—I don't want her to marry; it would only mean disaster.' And at this Anna broke out in angry protest. Why shouldn't Stephen marry? She wished her to marry. Was he mad? And what did he mean by disaster? No woman was ever complete without marriage—what on earth did he mean by disaster He frowned and refused to answer her question. Stephen, he said, must go up to Oxford. He had set his heart on a good education for the child, who might some day become a fine writer. Marriage wasn't the only career for a woman. Look at Puddle, for instance; she'd been at Oxford—a most admirable, well-balanced, sensible creature. Next year he was going to send Stephen to Oxford. Anna scoffed: 'Yes, indeed, he might well look at Puddle! She was what came of this higher education—a lonely, unfulfilled, middle-aged spinster. Anna didn't want that kind of life for her daughter.

Buxton says that when one partner in a marriage comes out as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, about a third of the couples break up right away, a third break up after about two years, and a third stay married indefinitely.3 We don’t know a whole lot about that last third—the more than 30 percent of mixed-orientation marriages that remain intact. From the research I’ve read, many of them are negotiating open relationships, but few consider themselves polyamorous or identify with or seek out a nonmonogamous community. As a result, they are left out of significant discussions about nonmonogamy. Research and writing on this topic (including Buxton’s) makes a point of distinguishing between partners who come out as gay or lesbian and partners who come out as bisexual. Those are individual identity choices; I am less concerned with how a person identifies and more interested in the relationship between the straight spouse and the nonstraight spouse, because that ultimately determines what style of open relationship will work for them. Some couples remain primary partners and continue to have a sexual relationship, while others end the sexual element of their partnership.

being gay is not about what we do; it’s about who we are. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this and the degree to which heterosexual people don’t understand it. The word “homosexual” seems to define us solely in terms of the gender of the person we’re sexually intimate with. There is much more to us than our sexuality. And besides, many gay and lesbian people—some very young, and some very old—have never been sexually intimate with anyone of the same gender, yet they know and understand themselves as gay. It’s more about the lens through which we see the world. It’s about our history of being an oppressed and discriminated-against minority. It’s about the culture that colludes to make us feel unworthy, immoral, and dirty. Every person, gay or straight, encounters the world in a particular body, with a particular sexual orientation. It affects every interaction, whether with the same or the opposite gender. That orientation affects every relationship, every encounter with another person, even if the relationship is not romantic or sexual in any way. It affects the chemistry of a relationship and the nature of the human interaction. And that is true whether or not a person has ever “acted on” the same-sex attractions he or she has felt.

Buxton says that when one partner in a marriage comes out as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, about a third of the couples break up right away, a third break up after about two years, and a third stay married indefinitely.3 We don’t know a whole lot about that last third—the more than 30 percent of mixed-orientation marriages that remain intact. From the research I’ve read, many of them are negotiating open relationships, but few consider themselves polyamorous or identify with or seek out a nonmonogamous community. As a result, they are left out of significant discussions about nonmonogamy. Research and writing on this topic (including Buxton’s) makes a point of distinguishing between partners who come out as gay or lesbian and partners who come out as bisexual. Those are individual identity choices; I am less concerned with how a person identifies and more interested in the relationship between the straight spouse and the nonstraight spouse, because that ultimately determines what style of open relationship will work for them. Some couples remain primary partners and continue to have a sexual relationship, while others end the sexual element of their partnership. In one of Buxton’s studies, the straight husband of a bisexual woman wrote: “I compare my wife and me to a glove with fingers that fit absolutely perfect. It’s the thumb that is just wrong. The more we struggle to make the thumb fit, the worse off we make the fingers. If we free ourselves to adjust the gloves for our thumbs, then the fingers return to their old wonderful fit.”4

She would think with a kind of despair: What am I, in God's name—some kind of abomination?' And this thought would fill her with a very great anguish, because, loving much, her love seemed to her sacred. She could not endure that the slur of those words should come anywhere near her love. So now night after night she must pace up and down, beating her mind against a blind problem, beating her spirit against a blank wall—the impregnable wall of non-comprehension: 'Why am I as I am—and what am I?' Her mind would recoil while her spirit grew faint. A great darkness would seem to descend on her spirit—there would be no light wherewith to lighten that darkness. She would think of Martin, for now surely she loved just as he had loved—it all seemed like madness. She would think of her father, of his comfortable words: 'Don't be foolish, there's nothing strange about you.' Oh, but he must have been pitifully mistaken—he had died still very pitifully mistaken. She would think yet again of her curious childhood, going over each detail in an effort to remember. But after a little her thoughts must plunge forward once more, right into her grievous present. With a shock she would realize how completely this coming of love had blinded her vision; she had stared at the glory of it so long that not until now had she seen its black shadow. Then would come the most poignant suffering of all, the deepest, the final humiliation. Protection—she could never offer protection to the creature she loved: 'Could you marry me, Stephen?' She could neither protect nor defend nor honour by loving; her hands were completely empty. She who would gladly have given her life, must go empty-handed to love, like a beggar. She could only debase what she longed to exalt, defile what she longed to keep pure and untarnished.

While the overall systems of heterosexism and ableism are still with us, they have adapted in limited ways. These adaptations are held up as reassurance to those who fought long and hard for a particular change that equality has now been achieved. These milestones—such as the recognition of same-sex marriage, the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Title 9, the election of Barack Obama—are, of course, significant and worthy of celebration. But systems of oppression are deeply rooted and not overcome with the simple passage of legislation. Advances are also tenuous, as we can see in recent challenges to the rights of LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, and intersex) people. Systems of oppression are not completely inflexible. But they are far less flexible than popular ideology would acknowledge, and the collective impact of the inequitable distribution of resources continues across history. COLOR-BLIND RACISM What is termed color-blind racism is an example of racism’s ability to adapt to cultural changes.3 According to this ideology, if we pretend not to notice race, then there can be no racism. The idea is based on a line from the famous “I Have a Dream” speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King in 1963 during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. At the time of King’s speech, it was much more socially acceptable for white people to admit to their racial prejudices and belief in white racial superiority. But many white people had never witnessed the kind of violence to which blacks were subjected. Because the struggle for civil rights was televised, whites across the nation watched in horror as black men, women, and children were attacked by police dogs and fire hoses during peaceful protests and beaten and dragged away from lunch counters.

I have chosen to use the terms lesbian existence and lesbian continuum because the word lesbianism has a clinical and limiting ring Lesbian existence suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience; not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman. If we expand it to embrace many more forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support; if we can also hear in it such associations as marriage resistance and the ‘haggard’ behavior identified by Mary Daly (obsolete meanings ‘intractable,’ ‘willful,’ ‘wanton,’ and ‘unchaste’ a woman reluctant to yield to wooing’)—we begin to grasp breadths of female history and psychology that have lain out of reach as a consequence of limited, mostly clinical, definitions of ‘lesbianism.’ Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life It is also a direct or indirect attack on male right of access to women But it is more than these, although we may first begin to perceive it as a form of nay-saying to patriarchy, an act or resistance It has of course included role playing, self-hatred, breakdown, alcoholism, suicide, and intrawoman violence; we romanticize at our peril what it means to love and act against the grain, and under heavy penalties; and lesbian existence has been lived (unlike, say, Jewish or Catholic existence) without access to any knowledge of a tradition, a continuity, a social underpinning The destruction of records and memorabilia and letters documenting the realities of lesbian existence must be taken very seriously as a means of keeping heterosexuality compulsory for women, since what has been kept from our knowledge is joy, sensuality, courage, and community, as well as guilt, self-betrayal, and pain.

If we consider the possibility that all women–from the infant suckling her mother’s breast, to the grown woman experiencing orgasmic sensations while suckling her own child, perhaps recalling her mother’s milk-smell in her own; to two women, like Virginia Woolf’s Chloe and Olivia, who share a laboratory; to the woman dying at ninety, touched and handled by women–exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not. It allows us to connect aspects of woman-identification as diverse as the impudent, intimate girl-friendships of eight- or nine-year-olds and the banding together of those women of the twelfth and fifteenth centuries known as Beguines who “shared houses, rented to one another, bequeathed houses to their room-mates … in cheap subdivided houses in the artisans’ area of town,” who “practiced Christian virtue on their own, dressing and living simply and not associating with men,” who earned their livings as spinners, bakers, nurses, or ran schools for young girls, and who managed–until the Church forced them to disperse–to live independent both of marriage and of conventual restrictions. It allows us to connect these women with the more celebrated “Lesbians” of the women’s school around Sappho of the seventh century B.C.; with the secret sororities and economic networks reported among African women; and with the Chinese marriage resistance sisterhoods–communities of women who refused marriage, or who if married often refused to consummate their marriages and soon left their husbands–the only women in China who were not footbound and who, Agnes Smedley tells us, welcomed the births of daughters and organized successful women’s strikes in the silk mills. It allows us to connect and compare disparate individual instances of marriage resistance: for example, the type of autonomy claimed by Emily Dickinson, a nineteenth-century white woman genius, with the strategies available to Zora Neale Hurston, a twentieth-century black woman genius. Dickinson never married, had tenuous intellectual friendships with men, lived self-convented in her genteel father’s house, and wrote a lifetime of passionate letters to her sister-in-law Sue Gilbert and a smaller group of such letters to her friend Kate Scott Anthon. Hurston married twice but soon left each husband, scrambled her way from Florida to Harlem to Columbia University to Haiti and finally back to Florida, moved in and out of white patronage and poverty, professional success and failure; her survival relationships were all with women, beginning with her mother. Both of these women in their vastly different circumstances were marriage resisters, committed to their own work and selfhood, and were later characterized as “apolitical ”. Both were drawn to men of intellectual quality; for both of them women provided the ongoing fascination and sustenance of life.

The Justice of the Lord has already entered into Creation. All these souls must cross each other! Therefore, these inferior souls must mate together and thereby eliminate themselves as result. That is the cause of the gay and lesbian marriages that is much extolled, and the so-called developed nations are championing it in the name of human rights.

This book is a compilation of the stories of eight gay and lesbian people that left straight marriages and came out as gay. Six of the eight have children. Each story is different. I wrote the book to help those people going through this difficult transition to help them realize they are not alone and that their lives will be much better once they are true to themselves and their families.

It’s also a shame because I didn’t have John McEnroe pegged as an idiot. He seems bright, funny and quite liberated. Only a couple of weeks ago, he posted a great vlog about equal marriage in reply to some dodgy comments about lesbians by Margaret Court.

Peter Elers, one of the first openly gay vicars in the Church of England, who blessed a lesbian ‘marriage’ in 1976 on the understanding that, if the Church blessed battleships and budgerigars, it ought to find it in its heart to bless men and women in love.

Heterosexuals are at least given the option of marriage and thus the possibility of having their sexual urges satisfied. For gay Christians in traditional churches, there is no such possibility. Unless our orientation is reversed—unless, in other words, we become heterosexual—gay and lesbian Christians are offered no hope that we will ever be able to fulfill our deepest sexual longings.

Kate Millett: Marxist, feminist, advocate for gay rights, for new sexuality, for new spousal relationships, and on and on. She channeled her revolutionary energies into a campaign to take down marriage and family, the backbone of American society. And she practiced what she preached. Though she was married, she practiced lesbianism, becoming bisexual. She had started that lifestyle at Columbia while writing Sexual Politics. This would, predictably, end her marriage to her husband, who found the trashing of these norms unnatural and detrimental to the health of their marriage. Of course, to many in our brave new world, this makes Kate a heroine. Today, the bio for Kate Millett at the “GLBTQ” website hails her as a “groundbreaking” “bisexual feminist literary and social critic.

London is five hours ahead of Washington, DC, except when it comes to gay marriage. In that case, it’s two years and five hours ahead, which was news to me. “Really?” I said, on meeting two lesbian wives from Wolverhampton. “You can do that here?

Kieran Rose, chair and co-founder of the Gay & Lesbian Equality Network, accuses the protesters of practising ‘more radical than thou’ politics. ‘I don’t see disability or refugee groups calling for a boycott,’ he says. ‘It’s an immature kind of politics, as if nobody else has opinions on immigration. You must engage with the democratically elected government. The only way not to be criticised is to do nothing. We think it’s entirely appropriate to invite the minister to a festival around the theme of “family values”. The festival has a right to invite him and there’s no connection between sexual orientation and politics. Your social class has more to do with it.’ On the face of it, there is no particular reason why gays should be on the left. In other countries, particularly in the US, many have seen their interests as being more closely aligned with the libertarian right and with neo-liberalism, agrees Sheehan. ‘Lesbians and gays don’t fit into any particular political group,’ he says. ‘Maybe activism has tended to be of the left, but there are also many people who identify socially but not politically with the community. But a lesbian and gay film festival will always be a political event when a gay couple can’t walk down a Dublin street hand in hand.

LINDA CULLEN: I am a lesbian feminist [and] didn’t necessarily want to get involved with the institution that is marriage. So that for me was the most interesting thing about this whole journey to marriage equality for all. That thing of kind of understanding myself that actually I do want to have this, not necessarily that I’m going to do it, but oh dear God, of course we should have it. That it was an issue of equality, and access. That actually took quite a while for myself even to come around to thinking. Well, it didn’t – it took one really good conversation actually! With Denise Charlton. We were talking about the KAL case, so presumably it was around 2004 – the KAL case was a huge motivator around those conversations. And it was that thing of, ‘Oh God, would you want to get married?’ I presume it was Denise who said, ‘But it is just an issue of equality, isn’t it?’ And I said, ‘Well, of course it is. I’m not saying I would want it, but I have the right to have it.

SUZY BYRNE: I think it’s interesting to watch GLEN emerge from an organisation which was not interested in civil partnership to one that became interested in civil partnership ‘but let’s not talk about marriage’, to then going, ‘Woohoo! Marriage! And children!’ That was actually really interesting. GLEN didn’t want to talk about kids at the time when they were starting the civil partnership issues. And that’s where a lot of women were very critical. At the KAL lunch, GLEN put little notices out. They were trying to find lesbians to go on the board because there weren’t any lesbians on the board. We called it ‘Rent-a-Dyke’ at the time.

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It seems to me, then, that vulnerability and self-disclosure are at the heart of what we understand about the nature of God. And the reason I believe gay and lesbian people are spiritual people is that we too have participated in vulnerability and self-disclosure, especially in the process of coming-out. When someone shares with you who they really, really are, it is a special offering. To do so when it risks rejection is a profound, holy gift.

Among supporters of same-sex marriage in 2013, fully 28% said they were once opponents. Asked why they changed their minds, no one cited changing attitudes about marriage. Instead, the most common response was that familiarity had led to acceptance. Nearly 9 in 10 Americans (87%) now say they know someone who is gay or lesbian, up from 61% in 1993, and about half (49%) say a close friend or family member is gay or lesbian.

I love you, but I hate your overeating" doesn’t help a marriage. It's not helpful because hatred is a powerful emotion (a posture, really) that is not easy to wield or maintain carefully. Hatred is more a bludgeon than a scalpel. Our ability to distinguish sin from sinner, especially in others, is so limited, so vulnerable to our own unexamined subjectivity.

The rejection of all homosexual acts is rooted in a desire to uphold what is understood to be the meaning of the prohibitive Scriptures and the tradition of heterosexual marriage. It is an attempt to be careful to walk in faithfulness to God. The rejection of exclusionary practices aimed at gay and lesbian people is rooted in a desire to uphold Scripture by seeking to carefully understand its meaning in the original historical context and to apply Scripture's teaching carefully. It is an attempt to uphold Scripture's caution against religious zeal that unintentionally accepts harm of the neighbor or fails to love the neighbor well. Both positions are principled positions seeking to uphold important goods.

Virtually every church tradition, by theology, interpretive strategies, or pastoral practice, makes accommodations for divorced people who seek to remarry. These accommodations permit divorced people to enter unions that are outside the rule laid down in the Bible. But we can't have it both ways. We can't apply a strict "biblical marriage" rule to gay people and not apply it to those who are divorced and remarried.

Today we have gay people whose relationships, until just recently, have been branded by society as extraordinarily shameful, as uniquely perverse—worse than incest. The cultural heritage of this view had the effect of driving them all underground, where sex is practiced surreptitiously, secretively, for fear of social ostracism, not to mention physical harm. And now, tired of the highway rest stops, tired of the back rooms in gay bars, many in that community have a longing to attempt what can only be regarded as modern marvel regardless of gender: two people willing to attempt lifelong fidelity to each other, come what may. This doesn't seem to me to be a "slippery slope." It seems to me that it might actually be instead, a redemptive trajectory.

And so, if you want to understand why a straight person might want to become an advocate for gay and lesbian people, get to know us. Get to know at least one of us well. Listen to our stories, believe our truth. It may not be your truth, but believe it’s our truth. Get to know our families. Get close enough to see us at work as faithful partners, loving parents, and contributing members of society. Ask us about our faith. Inquire as to how we seem to have put together our faith and our sexuality. Ask how we have withstood the hatred and prejudice—religious and secular—against us. And then believe us.

[W]hether it is debates over men sharing housework and child-rearing, the ‘crisis’ of marriage and behind that the broader crisis of male-female relationships in adjusting to social change, or the increased sympathy for (or at least tolerance of) lesbian and gay demands for equal legal rights, all these developments in heterosexuality are usually approached and conceptualised in piecemeal form and rarely provoke any debate about the changing nature of heterosexuality itself.

Nothing in Scripture or orthodox theology precludes our opening the institution of marriage to same-gender couples. Those who oppose marriage equality for gay or lesbian couples, pleading for us not to “redefine” marriage, do not understand that gay marriage only builds up the traditional meaning of marriage. We are not changing its meaning but merely revising the list of those to whom it is available. Not unlike the rather recent opening of legal marriage to interracial couples, the legal marriage of two same-gender people retains the traditional meaning of marriage while expanding the number of people whom it may benefit.

Still, as a straight person, you might say, “This just isn’t my fight.” No, it isn’t. Unless you care about the kind of society we have. Unless you want the society of which you are a part to be a just one. Unless you believe that a free society, not to mention a godly religion, should fight injustice wherever it is found. Unless your religion tells you—as our entire Judeo-Christian heritage does—that any society will be judged by the way it treats its most vulnerable. Unless you care about our children. Unless fairness matters to you. Unless violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people concerns you. Unless “liberty and justice for all” is something you believe applies to all our citizens.

The fact is, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people will never be a majority. We are a natural minority within the population. We will never garner enough votes to single-handedly bring about the change we seek. We need heterosexual people to stand with us, vote with us, and be a voice for us where we are not yet welcome.

Happiness can be a confusing concept for Christians. On one hand, if we serve a good God who promises us a full and abundant life, shouldn't we be happy? On the other hand, any careful reading of the life and way of Jesus reveals a life open to suffering and self-denial. The very message of the gospel confronts the shortcuts humans take to happiness and calls those who follow Christ to a new way of life. This apparent tension has commonly become a weapon in the shouting matches between gay-affirming voices and traditional voices. The affirming voices call for the unimpeded opportunity for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) people to experience self-fulfillment through sexual intimacy, relationship, marriage, equal status, and so on. The traditional voices point to a path of self-denial and suffering as the way to live out God's standards. For a gay Christian, when happiness and suffering are pitted against one another, this dilemma can disintegrate into a no-win situation and a source of shame.

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One of the most annoying things about hearings the refrain “same-sex marriage” over and over again is that I don't know many - if any - queers who think of their desire’s main feature as being “same-sex.” It's true that a lot of lesbian sex writing from the ‘70s was about being turned on, and even politically transformed, by an encounter with sameness. This encounter was, is, can be, important, as it has to do with seeing reflected that which has been reviled, with exchanging alienation or internalized revulsion for desire and care. To devote yourself to someone else's pussy can be a means of devoting yourself to your own. But whatever sameness I’ve noted. In my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, It is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy.

COLM O’GORMAN: I feel very, very strongly from my own professional perspective that if any organisation is seeking to advance the human rights of any group of individuals or population, it’s incredibly important that their positions are fully informed by an engagement with that population and with those people. So rights holders’ participation, and active rights holders’ participation, is incredibly important. And ensuring that your campaign and your calls are representative, and reflect what that rights-holder group actually want, as opposed to your assessment of it, even if you’re a member of that group, is absolutely vital. I think it’s fair to say that there was a disconnect between the case that was presented for civil partnership and the lived reality for LGBT people. Now, I don’t know if that was GLEN’s fault or even their responsibility – GLEN are GLEN, you know, they were an organisation doing a piece of work, and their structure is their structure, and their constitution is the way that they’re constituted, but I do think that there needed to be more of a considered engagement with the LGBT community in all of its diversity, you know? And it’s not white, middle-class, male, single, with concerns about pensions and inheritance and income tax and property. Those are very real concerns for people, but they’re very limited. They deny the reality of huge numbers of people. Absolutely women, and men who aren’t concerned with that. Again, it’s been really interesting in the context of the whole debate that we’ve had on prejudice [in early 2014] that you know one of the things that I think was most valuable about what Rory was certainly saying, and it’s something I feel very strongly too – prejudice is nobody’s dominion. Look at this community. Look at how this community treated lesbians. Look at the view of lesbians in this community. Or transgender people particularly. There’s no point in imagining or pretending that the LGBT community would be very different from wider society, and that power and influence wouldn’t be almost automatically in the hands of educated, middle-class, middle-aged men. That’s the way the world has been. And it’s changing thankfully, but it’s the way the world has been.

MICHAEL CRONIN: My three main concerns can, I suppose, be summed up as follows: (1) How can we find a space in the current public conversation for a perspective that is critical of the marriage campaign but from a queer, gay-affirmative and anti-homophobic perspective? As Pantigate demonstrates, once the referendum campaign gets going, that will become even more difficult, probably impossible. (2) How can we manage to engage in a political discussion while acknowledging that this is an issue in which people are so deeply invested emotionally and affectively? For instance, I find it very uncomfortable and challenging to express my opposition publicly as someone who, firstly, is a potential beneficiary of the change, and, secondly, am opposing something that is deeply important to individuals who I respect and love, and opposing subcultural organisations that were very important to my own formation. (3) How can we develop a perspective on this that acknowledges that this is simultaneously a victory and a defeat? It is a progressive development that will make our society more inclusive, tolerant and affirmative of loving relationships and different families. But it will also entrench inequality – between the married and the unmarried, the secure and the precarious – and is another indication of how the utopian hopes of 1970s gay liberation and lesbian feminism have been thoroughly defeated.

SUZY BYRNE: I remember being at Lesbian Lives in the early 2000s where people were criticising the way in which the debate was taking place, who was leading it, that it was very male, and that it didn’t look at the diversity of relationships within the community. There was a narrative of what I would have identified as ‘the Good Gay’ … gay and lesbian couples that are monogamous, buy houses and fit in with everybody else. It became very conservative. I’m firmly in favour of marriage equality, but I want to see other forms of relationships recognised. But there’s an awful lot of conservatism and tut-tutting – not just in Ireland, it’s happening internationally, where everybody now sees marriage equality as the thing to go for because it fits into a model of the family. And I very naively maybe thought we would have a range of relationship formations recognised. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties produced a document that Fiona de Londras, Marie Mulholland and people in the ICCL worked on, which had a range of relationship recognition options in it. We don’t talk about those things anymore.

BERNARDINE QUINN: We’re calling marriage equality ‘equality’ as if the day that there’s a bill stamped saying lesbian and gay people can get married that we’ll have full equality. Yet in Meath, there isn’t one single support service for a young lesbian or gay person to attend; there isn’t one qualified full-time youth worker to work with young LGBT people; there is absolutely zero trans services, where the trans services in Dublin are mediocre at best. There’s something about ‘marriage equality’ – that we’ll all be equal when marriage comes in, when a kid in west Kerry doesn’t even have a telephone number of a helpline that he can ring for support. This was raised by our young people to Mairead McGuinness and to Mary Lou McDonald when they were here, just to say, thinking that your work around marriage equality – that that’s not all. The allocation of finances to LGBT work in this country is tiny compared to what is given to most other services. There’s something about calling it ‘equality’. It’s another step on the ladder and it’s a hugely important step … But it isn’t all. There’s another battle after that, and that is to get services to west Donegal, to Mayo, into the Midlands, to get real, solid support in these areas so that a young LGBT person has something in every county, trained qualified people to talk to. In some areas where those services aren’t available, where there isn’t training for schools, where there’s nobody that a kid can talk to, to say that they think they’re transgender – I don’t want to sound negative – I think marriage equality is going to be fantastic for a lot of lesbian and gay people. I think if you were 14 and coming out today, your story is going to be so much more different than when I was 14. The prospects of you considering yourself what every other young person considers themselves of 14 when you think about your future and what you’re going to do: you’re going to meet the person that you love, you’re going to get married, going to have kids, going to have the house and the picket fence. That will be an option for a kid. When I came out, those dreams were put very firmly away. I was never going to get married, I was never going to have children, I was never going to make my family proud, my dad was never going to walk me up the aisle. All of those kinds of things were not even an option when I came out. As a matter of fact, there was a better chance that I was going to have to go to London, I was going to bring huge shame on my family, I probably would end up not speaking to half my siblings and my parents, having to go away and fend for myself. That was my option. I think that option has dramatically changed. People can live in their home towns easier now … Anything that makes a young person’s life easier, and gives them more opportunities, is fantastic. I think that a young person, 14, 15, only starting to discover themselves, they’ve got a whole other suite of options. They can talk about, ‘I’ll eventually marry my partner.’ I think I’m only after saying that for the first time in my life, that there will be an option to marry my partner.

BRODEN GIAMBRONE: The struggle for marriage equality affects all LGBT people … However, that said, it is clear that across the globe the marriage equality movement has monopolised the discussion on LGBT rights and often distilled it to marriage as the defining feature of the movement. In many countries, these movements are led by privileged gay men and lesbians who promote it as the last vestige of inequality. This is mirrored back to us in the quote from US VP Joe Biden, ‘[marriage equality] It’s the civil rights of our day. It’s the issue of our day.’ Or the quote by Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore, ‘[Gay marriage] is the civil rights issue of our generation.’ When marriage equality is positioned as the last stronghold of inequality and the great leveller of the rights of LGBT people in society, there is a failure to acknowledge other significant issues within the LGBT community … From my point of view, marriage equality is an undeniably pressing issue for the LGBT community and a fundamental right that we must all get behind in achieving. However, it is not the defining civil rights issue of our time. It is one of many that we face as a society that must be fought for and won. By positioning marriage equality as the last vestige of LGBT inequality we run the risk of depoliticisation of the LGBT community once it’s been achieved. As in, we’ve won, we’re done, let’s go home. It’s clear that the trans community must stand with the LGB community on this issue but there must be a recognition that trans rights are also human rights and must be supported, promoted and financed. Marriage equality should be seen as part of a struggle on many fronts and not the sum total of what we need to be free and equal.

DAVID NORRIS: But my God, as I said years ago, they’ve blessed bombs, agricultural implements and goldfish. And how do they know the goldfish aren’t lesbians? With goldfish it’s impossible to tell! … I think it’s terribly mean. Why couldn’t they give some kind of blessing to two people who love each other? If they’re prepared to bless bombs that blow people apart, and goldfish – whose sexuality is questionable – and tractors? Jesus! It’s so stupid.

Though bachelorhood, it must be noted, is not necessarily an indicator of homosexuality, it took considerable resilience to remain single in an era when marriage bestowed manhood. For lesbians the social pressure was less intense since “maiden ladies” living together drew little scrutiny. In America, these alliances between women were sometimes known as “Boston marriages,” a term coined from Henry James’s 1886 novel The Bostonians, which described two “new women” living together in a marriage-like relationship.

Summing Up The context and overall language of Scripture suggests that the one-flesh bond spoken of in Genesis 2: 24 is essentially a lifelong kinship bond. The prophetic tradition in the Old Testament deepens the Bible’s understanding of this bond by speaking of God’s faithfulness to Israel as a marriage bond, emphasizing grace and lifelong faithfulness. This emphasis on kinship and bonding is reflected in each New Testament text that refers back to Genesis 2: 24. The biblical usage suggests that this emphasis on bonding (“ one flesh”) constitutes the essence of marriage, even where the procreative meaning of marriage cannot be fulfilled. This focus on the bonding implicit in becoming one flesh is the basis for the Bible’s categorical rejection of all forms of sexual promiscuity. People are not to say with their bodies what they cannot or will not say with the whole of their lives. It is clear that Scripture assumes that this one-flesh bond only takes place between a man and a woman. Yet there is nothing inherent in the biblical usage that would necessarily exclude committed gay or lesbian unions from consideration as one-flesh unions, when the essential characteristics of one-flesh unions as kinship bonds are held clearly in view. Therefore, what is normal in the biblical witness may not necessarily be normative in different cultural settings that are not envisioned by the biblical writers.

Summing Up In contrast to the Roman Catholic Church, whose official teaching states that procreation defines the essential purpose of marriage, most Protestant churches emphasize instead that the unitive meaning of marriage defines its essence. Therefore, though procreation always assumes and requires the context of marriage in Christian ethics, marriage does not require procreation in order to be valid, and the inability to bear children is never a sufficient reason to dissolve a marriage. Society’s interest in supporting marriage is based in part on its desire to provide for the care of children, but this does not by any means make up the only reason why marriage receives legal benefits in modern societies. Society benefits in a wide variety of ways when people live together in long-term committed unions. If this is true, then the lack of procreative capacity cannot of itself be a sufficient reason to deny the legitimacy of stable gay or lesbian marriages or marriagelike relationships.

Summing Up While the Old Testament envisions occasional short-term avoidance of sex for the purposes of holiness, it does not envision celibacy as a lifelong calling. The ancient world generally tended to view the question of whether to marry or remain single as a pragmatic matter. Marriage was considered primarily in terms of the responsibilities and duties required to sustain a household. Cynics and Stoics differed on the relative importance of marriage for the fulfilled life. Jesus, in his commendation of those who have “made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19: 12), recognized that God calls some, but not all, to a single life. Paul addresses this question extensively in 1 Corinthians 7 in a carefully balanced way, recognizing some circumstances under which married people might avoid sex for brief periods of time, but discouraging married people from avoiding sex altogether. Paul invites single people to remain unmarried, but clearly recognizes that not all people are gifted with lifelong celibacy. The modern awareness of the persistence of sexual orientation thus raises an important question: Are all gay and lesbian Christians whose sexual orientation is not subject to change necessarily called to a celibate life? If so, then this stands in some tension with the affirmation—of both Jesus and Paul—that lifelong celibacy is a gift for some but not for all.

It all started when World Vision, a humanitarian organization I had long supported and even traveled with, announced a change to its hiring policy allowing people in same-sex marriages to work in its US offices. In response, conservative evangelicals rallied in protest, and within seventy-two hours, more than ten thousand children had lost their financial support from cancelled World Vision sponsorships. Ten thousand children. To try and stem some of the bleeding, I joined with several other World Vision bloggers to encourage my readers to sponsor children or make one-time donations to the organization, which was reeling as church after church called to cut off funding. We had raised several thousand dollars and multiple sponsorships when the CEO of World Vision announced the charity would reverse its decision and return to its old policy against gay and lesbian employees. It had worked. Using needy kids as bargaining chips in the culture war had actually worked.

What happy and successful single people are threatening is not the institution of marriage but the cultural consensus on its special value. Same-sex marriage does not threaten the institution of marriage, either. The sticking point (or at least one of them) is that large numbers of Americans remain unconvinced that gay men and lesbians are the moral equivalent of straight people. To them, keeping marriage pure and sacred means keeping same-sex partners out.