Well, hooray for Connecticut. As I'm sure you've heard already, the Nutmegger's Supreme Court ruled today that banning gay and lesbian couples from the legal estate of marriage was unconstitutional. Right on cue, the Right Reverend Mortimer Snerd issued a pissy statement about how awful this was and Won't Somebody Please Think Of The Children?

I've stopped believing that there is such a person as "James Dobson," actually. I think that's a pseudonym for a robot Focus on the Family uses to churn out press releases and twisted little nuggets of wisdom pertaining to how to keep your feet on the necks of those ungodly little whelps who have taken over your house. His real name is MORALIZER3000, and I heard his Bible is made of nails and iron spikes.

Cybernetic moralists aside, the Connecticut Supremes applied a commonsense standard to the case. AdamB passes on one take on the problem the court had before it:

as the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund stated in its amicus brief (cited favorably by the Court): ‘‘Any married couple [reasonably] would feel that they had lost something precious and irreplaceable if the government were to tell them that they no longer were ‘married’ and instead were in a ‘civil union.’ The sense of being ‘married’ -- what this conveys to a couple and their community, and the security of having others clearly understand the fact of their marriage and all it signifies -- would be taken from them. These losses are part of what same sex couples are denied when government assigns them a ‘civil union’ status. If the tables were turned, very few heterosexuals would countenance being told that they could enter only civil unions and that marriage is reserved for lesbian and gay couples. Surely there is [a] constitutional injury when the majority imposes on the minority that which it would not accept for itself.’’

And here's where the problem comes in. As perhaps nowhere else in Western culture, the institution of marriage is a mix of the sacred and the secular. The court very sensibly ruled that secular government has no legitimate interest in enforcing the arbitrary sacred definitions of private parties. The state couldn't come up with a better reason to keep marriage limited to one man and one woman than "that's the way we've always done it," and that obviously wasn't good enough.

But it's those very sacred definitions that give marriage its special status in the first place. There's a reason that most people, even many avowedly secular people, seek out a religious representative or at the very least someone special to them to serve the priestly role in blessing their partnership. They want it to be extra-ordinary. They want to be holy in some not-necessarily-theistic sense of the word. To make a long story short, then, in arguing against a "separate but equal" establishment of marriage and civil partnerships, the Connecticut justices set themselves a trap. Without recognizing the privileged place that religious belief has played in defining marriage, they can't demonstrate discrimination in how it's been defined.

So on the one hand - following Lambda's logic to its natural conclusion - "marriage" is a desirable term because it is at least in part defined as such by religious belief. But on the other hand, that religious belief cannot be used to define the term in a legal sense.

Doesn't that make "marriage" philosophically valueless even if it is legally meaningful?

More seriously, the Connecticut ruling demonstrates why marital equality will live on for a good long while in the fevered fund-raising pitches generated by MORALIZER3000. It's not just that he's a cynical, pitiless monster, though he is that.  But this ruling, as with many in the "culture war," offers the two things that lies closest to the cold, twisted mass of wires and diodes that passes for his heart: an implicit recognition that religion defines the value of social institutions, and an explicit recognition that the legal valuation of those same institutions is often far different than the religious.

Because if there's anything MORALIZER3000 loves better than ramming his cold, stainless steel values down your throat, it's the opportunity to play victim while he does it. Robots have feelings too, you know. It's just that they're all about what you're doing. And while today's ruling may be good law, it hasn't done anything to change that fact, as far as I can see.

Hi!  Don't get too close, I am still sick.  I just can't seem to bounce back.  It is a gorgeous fall afternoon, so feel free to hang out on the porch and watch the sun set.  It looks like it will be a pretty one with the leaves at their peak color.  It is a long weekend for most of us--what are you up to?  Any plans?  I just need to work on feeling better.  What are you eating and drinking?  Come and chat for a while!!!

Isaiah 25:1-9 & Matthew 22:1-14

Now look, friends. If you take today's reading from the book of Isaiah and combine it with today's reading from the Gospel of Matthew, you get a lesson that is pretty easy to understand. Uncomfortable, yes, but not hard to get hold of.

Part one of this lesson: God is powerful.

The first Amazon review of Dispatches From The Religious Left:

Fred Clarkson has been active in supporting liberal issues apparently for most of his life. In this group of essays he is aiming at inspiring others on our side of the political fence to get off our arses and play ball. Where are the ministerial lions of old who used their pulpits to support civil rights, nonviolence, love, hope and charity among their congregants. Oh, I know there are a few still showing their long and sharp teeth, but most preachers and ministers on the religious left seem to have been defanged and had their claws torn out. As the prize winning poet, William Butler Yeats once wrote, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity!"

Well, Yeats wasn't writing about Clarkson or his essayists, or about my friend Lowell Grisham, a native of Oxford Mississippi and now the passionate minister of St Paul's Episcopal Church in my little home town. He has joyfully taken on "the worst" here in Fayetteville sicne arriving here several years ago. And Fredrick does, too.

If you are one of the silent religious liberals in our land, read these essays. See if they strick a spark to your tinder.

...In which Gil goes for the DemCommieFascist look:

It is a glorious day here and I have to get to work pronto--well, I have to get dressed first!  ACK!!!!  Feeling a little better, still really tired.  Maybe they will send me home early!!!  What are you up to?  Any plans?  Do you have tomorrow off???  Grab some coffee, take a look at our leaves at their peak--see you later!

Shai Sachs takes on my contribution to Dispatches from the Religious Left over at MyDD:

PastorDan echoes Brueggemann's argument that the Religious Left must offer a "counterscript" to this dominant ideology.  He doesn't so much spell out what that progressive political theology is, but suggests, in a somewhat roundabout fashion, a way to get there.  The key idea is that the Religious Left should be "questioning assumptions, imagining new possibilities, keeping an eye on the human bottom line of public policy."  This process suggests an honest examination of conflicted feelings on issues ranging from sexual diversity to social welfare programs, and to use that examination to probe long-held assumptions more deeply.  For example, PastorDan suggests that conflicted feelings about safety in the age of terrorism could lead to an examination of the assumptions embedded in our national security state, and from there to a productive re-imagination of the transformation of that apparatus.

This process is not the stuff of winning electoral politics, exactly, and PastorDan is quick to admit that he is not calling for the development of a robust political machine which can answer the Religious Right, dollar-for-dollar and demagogue-for-demagogue.  Indeed, he argues that while the role of the Religious Right has always been to provide clear answers, that of the Religious Left should be to ask questions, to be "astronauts of inner space".

I'll try to avoid getting defensive about Shai's review, but I will allow that I disagree with one or two of his points. For one thing, Fred assigned me an overview chapter: what Religious Left is, and what it could be in the future. That necessarily called for some abstraction. Other authors took a much more nuts-and-bolts approach, as intended.

More seriously, I don't posit a dichotomy between asking questions and answering them. At least, I didn't intend to do so. Rather, I was attempting to highlight structural differences in how religious voices work on the right and the left. For conservatives, religion is a binding social framework; they look to faith to provide them with bedrock beliefs upon which they can build their ideology. Cut and dry answers are essential to that project.

But for liberals, it works a little differently. We are more "ethical," not in the sense of being morally superior, but generally more interested in competing visions of the good life. Liberals, then, are called to accountability not by comparison to pre-certified answers, but through reflection on their ethical commitments. Questioning in that process isn't necessarily open-ended or obscure. As anyone who's been on the receiving end of some of my questions can testify, they can be very pointed and very direct. (And anybody who says that religious progressives like myself aren't clear about right and wrong hasn't read this site in a while.)

Shai is correct, however, to say that asking questions isn't as useful in partisan politics as providing answers. I happen to think that the Religious Left I know is less interested in partisanship than its mirror image on the right. I may be wrong about that, and certainly Fred has set out to show how religious liberals can be politically effective without becoming a wholesale subsidiary of the Democratic party.

I think he's done a pretty good job of it, too. But from my perspective, the kind of short-run effectiveness Shai is looking for isn't the most important thing believers have to offer. It's an important offering, but not the singlemost. As always, people are free to disagree with me on that.