Family values for diverse families
I write this a week after the religious right’s latest foray into
the public debate over family values. This time it was Pennsylvania Senator
Rick Santorum, opining that for the Supreme Court to endorse a right to
privacy for gay individuals to consensual sex in their own homes would
be “antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.”
The religious right finds threats to the family pretty much everywhere
it finds difference. To them, “family values” are rules that
require everyone’s family to look like their families, love like
their families, and believe in the same things as their families—or
else be excluded from the definition of “family.”
As religious liberals, we have a different view. We have long worked
to expand the conversation about family values to reflect the reality
that there are many kinds of families in this country. Our values ground
us in respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and
our experience tells us that our diversity is to be celebrated rather
than feared. Our Association has intentionally affirmed the variety of
families in our faith community and made a commitment to support our congregations
in helping all of our families strengthen themselves and to grow in spirit,
love, and justice.
Unitarian Universalist ministers have been performing ceremonies of union
for gay couples since 1984. In 1996, amid the acrimonious congressional
debate over the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (which defined marriage
as a union between one man and one woman), our General Assembly affirmed
our support for legalizing gay marriage. Last November, the UUA signed
a friend of the court brief in support of seven gay and lesbian couples
in Massachusetts whose applications for marriage licenses had been rejected.
This year, a growing number of ministers in our movement, myself included,
have pledged not to sign marriage certificates until such time as gay
couples can legally marry. In the words of the Rev. David Pettee, the
UUA’s director of ministerial credentialing, this constitutes a
refusal to collude “with the state’s position to extend the
many privileges and benefits of marriage to only certain couples—heterosexual
couples.”
The religious right tries—often successfully—to create the
impression that its is the only religious voice on family values. But
most Americans believe discrimination against gays and lesbians is wrong.
A third currently favors gay marriage nationally, but those numbers are
shifting: In Massachusetts, and also in a large and predominantly working-class
and Catholic county in New Jersey where another major gay marriage case
is being heard, majorities now favor legalizing gay marriage; many more
favor civil unions.
As religious liberals, we are called to speak and act out of our principles
and purposes. When we raise our voices and act from this ground, we can
be extraordinarily effective in strengthening the liberal religious voice
for justice.
That is why I am making family values and family matters central to my
public witness work over the next three years. The furor that followed
Senator Santorum’s April remarks suggests that our convictions about
the rights of bisexual, gay, lesbian, and transgender persons are shared
by a growing segment of the American public. Gay marriage is now legal
in Belgium and in the Netherlands, and was upheld in late April by the
Court of Appeals in British Columbia, Canada.
There is much promise, but there is work to be done. We cannot let the
Religious Right act as if they speak for all persons of faith when they
denounce love between persons of the same sex as somehow threatening to
the rest of the culture. We know it isn’t so. But we will have to
keep standing up in the public square and voicing, consistently and clearly,
our commitment to the inherent worth and dignity of every person.
In faith,
WILLIAM G. SINKFORD
President, Unitarian Universalist Association
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