I spoke about same-sex marriage at the church that raised me
Monday, September 15, 2008 at 8:39pm
Vote No on Proposition 8: The California same-sex marriage ban
David Liao
Adapted from the opening remarks I read at the question and answer session regarding same-sex marriage at the Chinese Church in Christ, North Valley, 399 S. Main St., Milpitas, CA 95035 on 2008 September 14. Text draws from a previous facebook note commemorating Audrey Sederberg and Colin Parker's wedding. I thank CCIC-NV for the opportunity to speak.
This summer the California Supreme Court made this State the second in the nation to validate same-sex civil marriages. This November, Proposition 8 will confront California voters. Proposition 8 proposes to remove the right of same-sex couples to enter into legal marriage. I wanted to talk to you this morning because I believe that supporting same-sex marriage equality pays the civil institution of marriage the respect it demands.
Many members of this congregation probably remember me because I grew up in the Chinese Church in Christ. For any newer faces, let me introduce myself. My name is David, and I am a doctoral student in physics in New Jersey.
As part of my studies, I travel to academic conferences, and this summer I met with other physicists in southern Germany. I enjoy talking to researchers from other countries to learn how they think, so I was lucky that an Egyptian studying in Saudi Arabia approached me one evening to talk about religion. I told him I was atheist, then he asked how Western media portrayed Islam—he assumed I held Western misconceptions, and he wanted to correct me.
I answered his question with a question: I wanted him to tell me whether Islam’s position on gay and lesbian people was as negative as the media portrayed. He confirmed that Islam holds that “homosexuality is unnatural; it’s worse than adultery.”
I told him, “I’m gay.” I told him that American psychological associations warned against “curing” gays—the professional medical community considers lesbians, gays, and bisexuals normal. I told him being gay was normal. He dismissed me saying, “I can understand growing up in a culture like that how it would seem normal.” But then he paused and admitted, “he had no personal experience from which to pass judgment because I was the first gay person he had met in real life.”
That evening was scary. I considered my safety, and I hesitated before I revealed my sexual orientation, but looking back, I was glad to let this Egyptian student meet a living example of a gay man.
Living openly is very important for me because it affects how people “pass judgment,” as this student said. That’s why I wanted to speak with everyone here today. I want you to see that I, a gay man, am a real human with real interests. I wanted especially to tell you that marriage is a real interest among lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. Let me do that by reading a note I wrote to celebrate the marriage of two of my friends from graduate school.
Dear Colin and Audrey,
I wanted to thank you for helping me to understand the meaning of marriage. I’ve supported fighting for same-sex marriage for years, but my motives were not always admirable. Fighting for equality was too often an instinctive attempt to annoy fundamentalists who said I could be “cured” of being an abomination. Sometimes I couldn’t care less about marriage itself. I felt that filling out a marriage application was invasive and insulting. It felt like petitioning government for permission to enter a relationship. Looking back I think that the sterility of my views probably resulted from lacking, on the one hand, the subjective experience of love and, on the other hand, the examples and languages with which to describe that love.
By sharing their lives with me, my "old married" friends—you know the type: the squabblers who can’t stand each other but can’t live without each other—these friends taught me a language with which I could understand love and marriage better. You, Colin and Audrey, have been among such friends, and I try to honor your recent wedding by practicing this language as art [1].
In special moments, a person feels that half of his heart is missing; in its place half of another's beats as part of his own. It feels as though a piece from each partner joins its compliment to become together a vessel collecting awareness, intents, and consequent actions that are intertwined with and at the same time distinguished from each of the two selves.
Coherent awareness, intent, and action together embrace features that demand rights and accept responsibilities, features of personhood. Personhood—personhood is a serious concept that entails civic and social consequences, and I can’t mention this magic word, personhood, without talking about the civic respect it deserves.
Government and society confer recognition, rights, and obligations in accordance with the degrees of personhood emerging from individuals and the groups they form [2]. For example, we confer upon corporations the status of so-called juristic persons: they can do business and they can appear in judicial proceedings as entities distinct from their constituting partners. If legal personhood suits a corporation, and many of us agree that it does, then I say that legal personhood suits a loving union.
But I also want to go further to say that a loving union is special. A loving union establishes and is established upon deep emotions, so a loving union is tightly and cohesively more an "individual" than a corporation is. We afford this special unit of personhood the legal and spiritual dignity and recognition that we call marriage.
As I see it, marriage licenses and marriage rites, that’s rite spelled R-I-T-E, do not request permission to form unions any more than birth certificates and christenings request permission to form children. The loving unions and children already exist by the time marriage licenses and birth certificates are granted. A marriage license notifies society of the existence of a union fit for rights and responsibilities—in other words, a union capable of a degree of citizenship. A marriage R-I-T-E rite celebrates the union's membership in a religious community, in other words the union’s capacity for spirituality.
Thank you Colin and Audrey for helping me understand. Yours truly, David Liao.
I just talked about meaning in marriage without mentioning the gender of the constituting partners. The meaning of marriage does not depend on the gender of the constituting partners, and I think that removing the right of same-sex partners to full legal marriage pays disrespect to marriage by distracting from its meaning. I will respect the meaning of marriage by voting to maintain equality in California; I am voting No on Prop. 8.
Footnotes
[1] From speaking with old marrieds, reading Wikipedia, and seeing the example of my parents, I gather that the formation of a loving union occurs through approximately three distinct phases. An infatuation brings partners together, a passionate hormonal period lasting 6 months to 3 years holds them together so that spoken and unspoken communication work out the logistics that permit the partners to survive physically and emotionally in each other's presence, and finally a family-like state emerges. As each of the first two stages hands the spotlight to the next, they leave a significant thread that integrates with the final "family" state. The union-forming process is itself interesting but lies outside the scope of this facebook note intended to focus on one of the final products of the process.
[2] Not only do I observe that society afford respect, rights, and responsibilities to entities displaying personhood--sentience, free-will, and self-control, I also think that society should afford such recognition. The ability to be aware and act coherently upon awareness allows individuals and the society they form to adapt and survive in a complicated, changing environment.
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