We Are All Gay Ugandans Now

I can't sleep tonight because my heart is crying for the LGBT people in Uganda...and the other countries in Africa where homosexuality is illegal.

But tonight mostly for the people in Uganda, and their families, and the people and organizations who support them -- where the law says they are all criminals and can be put in jail or worse.

I am a white straight woman in the U.S. and I want the world to know that I care.

I care because the world watched when my family was rounded up and marched to the camps because people thought they were less than, inferior, not worthy of human rights.

I care because I am the mother of a gay man who I love with all my heart.

I care because I love so many lesbians, gay men, bisexual, transgender and queer people who enliven my life and heart.

I care because as a sexologist I know that sexual orientation is a core part of our humanity, and that who we fall in love with is not wrong.

I care because I know that the distance from the state of Arizona which is about to say that private store owners can choose not to serve gay people is not as far as we'd like to think from the legislators in Uganda...and the hate in the street in Nigeria also happens in Peoria and New York City.

I care because as a minister I know that God loves all of God's children and all of us have dignity and worth -- and that sexual diversity is a blessing from God. 

And I hurt because my little organization doesn't have the resources to do much about this...except to pray and to raise our voice.

But the White House does...and the State Department does, and they need to do more than condemn.  They need to embargo and halt funding and do whatever it is they do when a government starts to destroy its people based on who they are.  And the U.N. surely can stand up to this heinous legislation, and say, NO! Not on our watch.  And the big gay rights organizations and civil rights organizations, organize us.  Figure out where we need to march and where we need to stand and ask us to take action.

I can pray and I can write and I can tweet and Facebook.  But others of you have the resources to do more, and I implore you to stand up NOW.

Because we can't stand by and watch.  We are all gay Ugandans now.

50 Shades of Grace: Jesus' Sexuality

I wasn’t surprised to read that the Vatican has published a response to the September 18th announcement of a tiny piece of papyrus that includes a dialog where Jesus refers to “my wife.” It is, in their words, a “clumsy forgery.” I only wonder what took them so long.

As you have no doubt read, Dr. Karen King, a professor of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, released findings last week regarding a newly found original document that offers evidence suggesting Jesus was married. It was front page news and lit up social media, with some claiming that it provides support for women priests and a married Roman Catholic clergy. 

Veracity of the fragment aside, this wasn’t news to those of us who think about sexuality and the church.  More than forty years ago, William E. Phipps wrote a book entitled “The Sexuality of Jesus,” in which he postulated that Jesus would have been betrothed by his parents during his teen years as was the custom for Jewish men based on the mores of the time. With an average age of marriage of 14, Phipps argued, Jesus was in all probability married. By the time we meet Jesus again at age thirty, when the Gospel story introduces him as an adult, he was likely a widower. (Women on average died in the first century at the age of 25, most often in childbirth.)

As a Jewish Unitarian Universalist, it’s hard for me to fully understand why a married Jesus causes such dismay. Regardless of one’s beliefs about the humanity and divinity of Jesus, the embodied Jesus would surely have been sexual from birth to death as all humans are. There is nothing in the Gospels that suggests that Jesus was asexual or celibate his entire life—something that would have been so extra-ordinary that surely it would have been mentioned by their authors. Indeed, the ideal of a celibate clergy was not decided until the late seventh century: the Quinisextine Council in 691 was the first to decree that clergy couldn’t marry after ordination, although previously married men could become clergy.

Rather than decrying the idea that Jesus was married (and therefore most likely sexually active with at least one woman), perhaps the discovery of the papyrus fragment will reopen the too-often missing dialog about sexuality in those denominations that would rather wish it away. If sexuality is one of God’s gifts to us, if sexual diversity is part of God’s blessing, if people of all genders are created in God’s image—then surely there is the possibility that Jesus too enjoyed this good gift.