California Proposition 8, Christianity, Science, and America

Today I had a long conversation with a friend from Harvey Mudd. He, like many of my friends, is excited that Barack Obama won the presidency on Tuesday. And he, like many, is dismayed that the voters in California decided to pass Proposition 8: “Eliminates Rights of Same-Sex Couples to Marry.” In our conversation, I realized that the issues surrounding whether or not same-sex couples should have the right to marry is tied to an aspect of religious belief in a way that reminds me of another area of social conflict – the fight over evolution. I thought it was time for me to share my experiences and thoughts on this other battle, and then see if I can apply the lessons inferred to this present conflict.

On April 15, former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee spoke at Cornell. I was struck by how likable he was. He was charismatic and well-spoken. I thought he made a wonderful and correct point talking about how his experiences as a minister were distinctly valuable, and very different from his fellow candidates. As a pastor, he said, he saw every form of human frailty, and spoke with men and women from all walks of life. I have been, and remain, in favor of the separation of church and state. But considering that the legal profession (as I imperfectly understand it) is focused on specificity, precedent, and argument, I believe there is something to be learned from the shepherd-leader who knows how to listen, to make those around him or her feel heard and cared for, even if there is no final resolution of the difference of opinion.

I found one brief portion of the talk particularly enlightening. Throughout his talk, he poked fun at himself and the controversy he generated—Eisenhower, Sherman, and other impressive American leaders have been very effective at the art of disarming self-deprecating humor while maintaining decisive leadership and command. When the topic of evolution came up, he relieved the potential tension with a joke. He pointed out that “he didn’t know…. He wasn’t there.”

It struck me a bit odd, and it took a few days for me to realize why that brief, rather mild joke was so important. It goes to a point Phil Muirhead at Cornell Astronomy once pointed out – that there was a world of difference between scientists, whose work depends upon trusting the results of other experiments that they did not personally conduct, and individuals for whom the threshold of truth is personal experience.

This is odd because Governor Huckabee does trust the custodianship of another set of events for which he has no personal experience—namely, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I point this out not to highlight inconsistency, but to underline a key point that is missed during the talking past one another that secular scientists and religious community members seem to have, or conservative Christians and homosexuals, or Democrats and Republicans.

There is a deep disagreement on the sources of truth, legitimacy, and authority between the great cultural divides in our society.

A good scientist will study and question the custodianship and legitimacy of the set of experimental and theoretical work that has led to modern evolutionary biology. And a good Christian will examine the ecclesiastical and temporal histories that shaped, and were shaped by, Christianity. And ideally, both are willing to study outside their areas of competence, and discover and construct a more complicated, subtle and meaningful identity for themselves than existed before.

Yet it is the nature of power to react against the threat posed by other sources of truth and legitimacy. Though human beings are complex, our limited resources often cause us to focus on specific salient aspects of ourselves. At any given moment I may be a man, an Asian, a scientist, a job seeker, a Christian, a Democrat, a writer, a son, an American citizen, and a trader. But rarely do I retain awareness of all those aspects. Even if I did, I might underweight or overweight the contributions of any one in my actions and reactions to a given situation.

Wisdom comes from knowledge and experience. Both depend upon two factors:
(1) our ability to analyze and arrive at greater truth
(2) our ability to recognize the limitations of both the processes we use and the scope of our conclusions.

By (2), I mean that we need to depend upon multiple processes for understanding our world and the truth, in both a physical and a moral sense.
As an astronomer, I used multiple wavelengths of light to infer greater knowledge about stars and planets. Were I to limit myself to the one band where I have personal experience (visible), I would be unable to detect brown dwarfs around nearby stars, unable to detect ice on the Moon, unable to track star formation in distant galaxies. Indeed, the different academic disciplines provide different lenses and different toolboxes by which we can analyze and process texts, external events and personal experiences. (This is why I support a broad liberal arts background combined with a rigorous scientific education.)
And as a Christian, I have studied not only the Bible and prominent Christian theologians, but also other major religions, the complicated relationship between temporal and ecclesiastical authority in the Roman Empire and Medieval Europe, and how the evolution and decline of mainline American denominational churches has affected poverty work.

And I have tremendously enjoyed the opportunities afforded by my limited travels, my education, and inscrutable fate to have wonderful conversations with men and women of all walks of life, of varying degrees of power, wealth, charisma, culture, faith, and political persuasion.

Our success—in all senses of the word—in this life is facilitated by a willingness to learn as much as possible from any and all sources, combined—critically so—with a temperament, character, and system of values that change less in response to direct pressure from others than our own desire to change in response to new information and insight.

I don’t know precisely why Proposition 8 appears to be on track to pass. Perhaps those who voted for it are homophobic. Perhaps they value their heterosexual marriages. Perhaps they were concerned about how it would affect what their children were introduced to in schools. Perhaps they believed that their pastors would be forced to perform marriages between gays and lesbians or face legal sanction. Perhaps their faith proscribes homosexuality. Perhaps they were concerned about the already substantial federal deficit, and the implications should homosexual couples receive the same financial benefits that heterosexual spouses enjoy. Perhaps it was a reaction to the focus on sex that often is found in discussion and expressions of homosexual identity.

At the core of the religious opposition to same-sex marriage is a presumption that Christian truth includes a component that explicitly regards same-sex marriage, or same-sex relationships as sinful and proscribed, and that this truth passes through trustworthy custodians cognizant both of the complexities of modern life, the variegated and complicated identity of being gay, and the application of Christian principles and lessons to both of these.

This belief and its implications are at loggerheads with other aspects of our collective identities to restrict or remove rights through means of constitutional amendment.

I do not know for certain whether the state of California, or any other state, has enacted constitutional amendments that restrict or remove the rights of any individual or group. As far as I know, the United States Constitution has only one: the 18th amendment on the prohibition of alcohol, which was enacted in 1917 and repealed by the 21st Amendment in 1933. (I do not count the 22nd Amendment, which limits a president to two elected terms.) All other amendments seek to extend or confirm the rights of its citizens, or to clarify procedural issues.

Let's take a step back. One could easily argue that Caracalla’s extension of Roman citizenship to all free men within the Empire in 212 C.E. was prompted more by necessity as progressivism. The same can be said for the Magna Carta, signed by King John I of England in 1215, which placed limits on the power of the sovereign, or the 1688 Bill of Rights, which created in England a constitutional monarchy. But it is undeniable that all represented steps toward the modern liberal democracy that we enjoy today, which we would regard as superior to the times when none, or one, or the few, were free.

We can look to our own, more recent history, to the liberty, and the enfranchisement, of African-Americans and women, of the removal of restrictions on property ownership by Asian immigrants, and the Miranda Rights. The trend and trajectory of the progress of human civilization is toward greater, not lesser, individual freedom, limited by the harm principle, guided by a state that is, ideally, strong enough to enforce the law, free enough to provide the greatest possible individual and collective liberty, and wise enough not to attempt to legislate tolerance or morality.

It has been a slow path, an undulating, halting journey toward universal liberty, one that perhaps can only poorly described as progress. I have cherry-picked history, glossed over humanity’s recidivist tendencies toward conquest and oppression, the temptation to construct conflict and corrupt the blessing of distinct identities to divide and rule. Who among us is here who cannot look back into our ancestral past, and find a lineage unscathed by our own Trail of Tears?

Proposition 8 is bad on a number of counts. It sets a precedent for constitutional amendment that is low, that will encourage others to codify their vision of how the world should operate in what should be a very difficult document to modify.

It creates the ground for retroactive implementation of the amendment to nullify existing marriages to same-sex couples, further damaging both the letter and the spirit of the legislative process.

Yet perhaps most destructive is the corrosiveness that the bitter electoral battle has created between the different camps.

I note that the Constitution, the Holy Bible, and the Origin of Species are all, in it of themselves, pieces of paper. They contain information and knowledge. Yet they are absolutely worthless in it of themselves. They retain power and influence only insofar as individual humans are able to read and interpret these documents, apply them to their own lives, and attempt, with varying levels of care and wisdom, to shape the course of human progress by the knowledge and wisdom so created by our collective thoughts and actions. We ultimately must judge the success and merits of Christianity, of science, and of America by its living legacy, by those who represent and promote each.

By this metric, I believe this proposition damages this living legacy of extending rights and the Christian values of love and inclusiveness.

Our future depends upon our ability to recognize the merits of our ideas and values, new and old, resolving conflicts where they exist, as best we can, and occasionally subordinating the desire for consistency in one realm with adherence to a broader one. I do not yet know if this means that I must choose between Leviticus or On Liberty—thus far, I feel I have navigated, however imperfectly, the margins of identity of Christianity, science, and American citizen. What I do know is that the greatest burden, and the greatest virtue, is to be honest with the demands of each.

And the demands of what I feel Christianity to be truly about – faith in a benevolent higher power, hope in the potential for humanity to improve itself, and love for the “other” – and what I feel America is about, and what I feel the pursuit of knowledge is about, all indicate that it is damaging to use the authority of the state to eliminate the rights of a minority simply because the majority wishes it so.

Christ’s message of love and inclusiveness, especially for individuals at the margins of society, is at odds with the metaphorical interpretation of the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah. Yet I cannot conclude that the existence of the latter invalidates the former—just as we recognize the precedence of federal law over state statutes, I recognize the supremacy of the spirit of Christianity can, and in this case does, trump the letter of Christian law as interpreted from Genesis 19. (In fact, I tend to agree with the Jewish interpretation that hostility to the “stranger”, and not homosexual relations, is the real sin that is proscribed in the story.)

Each of us is ultimately responsible for the choice of belief and action. We are the heirs of the historical legacy that enables us to live as we do today. But we are not the final heirs. With our limitations, but also our greatest possible ability, we must look to the lessons of the past and the realities of the present. And we must live, lead, and govern with an eye to the world we wish to leave to those who come after us, those who are yet innocent of the conflict and hatred that poison and destroy all it consumes.

As a man who had no father at home, a father who lacked the mental stability to be a father or a husband, I have this to say about the issue of same-sex adoption.

I am far more fortunate than the number of children who enter the sex industry, or are abused by their parents, or have lost their parents to war, famine, or disease. I have seen the triumph of individuals who grew up without support at home, but always in spite of, not because of, their absence of parental leadership and love. I have also worked with, lived with, and laughed with many gay men and women whom I think will be excellent parents.

I have met gay men who were more of a father to me than my biological father. And I will never forget their contribution to my life, to my character, to my conviction that we are far, far more than the simple atomistic identities we frequently apply to others, and ourselves.

If you are worried about what your children will learn, or what it means to have a gay parent living next door, I would encourage you to examine your fears, examine the availability of good parents in society, and consider whether those children deserve the chance to have a parent, of any sex, of any orientation, who cares and loves them. And I would encourage you to focus not just on educating your children in the particulars of right and wrong as you see it, but to give them the character and temperament to live and lead a world of the many, and not the few.

I believe this is how we best serve our God, our nation, our profession, and our future.

I welcome disagreement, and would love to have a dialogue with anyone who agrees, disagrees, or is curious how I came to this conclusion. I will promise to not have the goal of convincing anyone, but rather to listen and learn, as I hope those who read this also learn, if not about themselves, about me and what I believe.