The Double Bind

This morning, before going for a bike ride, I went to the store.  Along the way, I bumped into someone I hadn’t seen in a while.  She recently completed her Master of Fine Arts degree.  For her thesis, she made multi-media collages that celebrated women’s sexuality.  While she was working on it and taking her classes, she had a job in the same institution where she earned her degree.

She talked about the shame and guilt she had to overcome to do her creative work.  It occurred to me then that women still have to get past the notions that we are tainted and damned simply because we are women and have sexual desires, whatever they may be.  And people denounce us whether or not we express who we are.  Those who tell us that we’re being too conservative or dowdy are the first ones to condemn us for wearing anything that even hints at our sexuality, and those who denounce us for being “too sexy” are the ones who complain that we’re “too boring” when we “tone it down.”

I’m thinking now about Segolene Royal, who lost the French Presidential election to Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007.  She’s been voted “the best-dressed politician in Europe and, while not provocative, does not play down her physical attractiveness.  In response to those who criticized her for that, she’s said, “Who says politicians have to be ugly and boring?”

It occurs to me now that this is one of the dilemmas trans people face all the time.  Those of us who identify as women experience everything I’ve just described and, because we have lived as males, we are probably even less prepared for it than people who’ve lived their entire lives as female.  It even happens to someone like Caitlyn Jenner:  There has been the sort of praise and damnation we’ve come to expect, from the people we’ve come to expect.  But there are also people who’ve criticized her for being too glamorous or, as one female celebrity said only half in jest, “Who does she think she is, looking better than I look?”

Now I realize that this bind women, and trans people in particular, face is one of the things that exacerbated the plight of the Lost Generation of Transgenders to which I’ve alluded in other posts. After gaining some visibility—and even a little support—during the 1960’s and 1970’s, trans people were rendered visible, at best, and vilified, at worst.  As I’ve mentioned,  the more extreme aspects of Second-Wave Feminism—sparked by Janice Raymond’s Transsexual Empire and by other writers, scholars and activists like Mary Daly and Germaine Greer—helped to undo the small gains we made during the previous two decades. 

During the time when we—all right, I’ll say it—were moving with the moment of the nascent Gay Rights movement—trans people were taught to efface all signs of the gender they were assigned at birth and to, in essence, re-invent their pasts.  In brief, we got by (to the degree we did) through induced amnesia and denial.  That, of course, was not a healthy way to live, but it was better than simply being denied and negated altogether.

However, around the same time as Raymond, Daly and their ilk were saying that we were simply men who wanted to take jobs in Women’s Studies departments, there was a “conservative backlash” against whatever gains women, including trans women, made.  Ronald Reagan had been elected; while he is by no means the only cause of the backlash, he at the very least galvanized it.  Although women were becoming lawyers, professors and corporate executives, they were always “under the microscope”:  criticized when they tried to look professional and vilified when they tried to express any kind of personal style.  This actually dovetailed very neatly with Second Wave feminism:  Phyllis Schlafly and Germaine Greer were both saying that womanhood existed only within a very rigid set of boundaries.  What neither Schlafly’s Evangelical Christian conservatives nor Germaine Greer and the Second Wavers never acknowledged, however—or perhaps didn’t realize—is that they were defining womanhood in terms that were set by men long before they or their mothers or grandmothers were born.

The few (at least in comparison to the numbers who came before and after) trans people who decided to live as the people they are during that time were therefore doubly damned.  In addition, the Gay Rights movement focused its attention on the newly-developing HIV/AIDS pandemic—as they should have.  As most of those afflicted at the time were men, HIV/AIDS activism—and, with it, the gay rights movement—became  almost wholly male-centered.  Even lesbians had to subsume their interests and needs; there was almost no room, it seemed, for trans women to simply exist, let alone define ourselves, as a group and individually, and flourish. 

Thus, I think it will be some time before trans women—and women generally—will be able simply to express who we are, sexually and otherwise, and reap the fruits of our labor and talents.  In the meantime, we’re going to be damned—by some people, anyway—whether are or aren’t, can or can’t, will or won’t, do or don’t.

Does A Good Papacy Get Better With Age?

Just when we all thought Pope Francis I was going to pull the church, if a millimeter at a time, away from its homophobia, he tells a crowd this:

"Parenthood is based on the diversity of being, as indicated by the Bible, male and female. This is the 'first' and more fundamental difference, constitutive of the human being."

He added:

"Children mature seeing mom and dad's...receporicity and complementarity."

OK...We've heard this sort of thing before. But, being the good Jesuit that he is, he has to come up with a good, logical explanation:  A good marriage, he said, is "like fine wine, in which the husband and wife make the most of their gender differences."

Hmm...I know I'm no oenologist.  So perhaps I can be forgiven for not realizing that wine-making had anything to do with gender differences.  Could those tastes be a result of the interplay between female and male grapes?

He made these remarks in an address the day after Rome's Gay Pride Festival, and a few days after Italy's lower house of parliament passed a motion in support of same-sex civil unions, promising to take up the issue.





 

Karis Ann Ross: Bullying, A Sucide And A Cover-Up

Ever since Bruce Jenner "came out" as transgender in an interview with Diane Sawyer and introduced herself to the world as Caitlyn in Vanity Fair, many people have lauded her for "having the courage to be who she is".  Some commentators have been touting this time as a "new day" for trans people.  Indeed, they may be right.

However, I know from experience that once you've been praised for living as the person you are, there are people--sometimes the very same ones who praised you--who are looking to use your transition against you, or simply hold you to standards to which they would hold no one else.  And then there are those who are pure-and-simple bigots, or merely ignorant, and don't change.

Worst of all, the bullying doesn't end. Or, if you hadn't experienced it before, it will start.  A lot of people still associate bullying with kids in a schoolyard, but supposedly-educated adults can be just as vicious, perhaps even more so, to colleagues and neighbors.  Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an expiration date on hate:  I recall the time an African-American firefighter found a noose near his equipment in the Brooklyn firehouse where he was based.  And that was nearly a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation.  

Karis Ann Ross would have been 38 years old last Sunday.  She didn't reach that mark because she killed herself over the most recent Thanksgiving weekend.  Her mother has just gone public with the contents of a note Ms. Ross left, in which she named people--in particular, three aides who worked with her--who bullied the lead special education teacher in the Milwaukee German Immersion School.

All told, the bullying went on for more than a decade.  Ms. Ross and her mother, Jill Greinke, as well as other family members and friends, complained to Milwaukee Public Schools officials about the treatment she endured.  According to Ms. Greinke, those complaints were ignored, even when Ms. Ross and members of the medical community sent numerous e-mails to school officials, warning of a crisis.  The school prinicpal downplayed the situation rather than intervening in, or mediating, the conflict.

Worse, Milwaukee Public Schools made no attempt to contact her family for two weeks. The principal sent flowers and a card, but made no announcement to the school's faculty or staff. Instead, they learned of Ms. Ross's suicide from her uncle when he came to collect her belongings.

Ross's mother co-wrote an open letter to the schools superintendent with her friend, Madeleine Dietrich.  They expressed hope  the superintendent "will move forward with a renewed awareness of the grave responsibilities held by public schools in our society, not only in teaching our students, but in setting an example for our population through modeling tolerance for individual diversity and empathy for the plight of our neighbors".  

And Ms. Ross ended her suicide note with, "Love to everyone, even the rotten apples." 

 

Not Lost, Only Moved

In previous posts on my other blog, I've said that I've never regretted going on a bike ride.  I've also said that I never felt worse after a ride than I did when I started it.  Oh, I've felt tired, in pain and had other physical maladies. But they all healed, probably because riding my bike relieves me, at least for a time, of mental and emotional stresses.

Although I've never wished I hadn't gone on a ride or felt less happy than I was before I took the ride, that's not to say that I don't experience things that make me sad.  I've gone to favorite cafes, bookstores and even bike shops, only to find they'd closed. I've also ridden to some place or another only to find that a lovely, or simply tranquil, piece of land has been turned into a shopping mall or tract housing, or that some other place has been changed beyond recognition.

Of course, some changes--like the closure of a deli or restaurant--are inevitable.  Actually, in the grand scheme of things, change is the only thing you can count on.  As Lao Tsu wrote, "Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes.  Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow."

Well, while riding late this afternoon, I saw a change that I simply can't resist.  It's something that's been done, and there's no turning back.  So, according to Lao, I won't create sorrow.  But I'm feeling some now.

That change involves something that was as important to my childhood as the places in which we lived.  I was pedaling up and down residential streets in Queens and Brooklyn, in and out of neighborhoods where hipsters and Hasidim and Hispanics--and people with all sorts of other identities--live.  I skirted the edges of the neighborhoods--Borough Park and Bensonhurst--in which I grew up.  I found myself on Ditmas Avenue, at East Fourth Street, where I saw this:

If you've been in that part of Brooklyn, you might think it looks like any number of catering or event halls.  As a matter of fact, that's what that building was--before I entered it.  Long before I entered it, in fact.  

By the time my family moved to Dahill Road, about half a dozen blocks away, that building had become a place where I would spend almost as much time as I spent in the house or in school.  In fact, during the summer, I would spend hours there that, during the rest of the year, I would have passed in school.

It was the Kensington Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.  Everyone knew how much I loved to read, but in my family (immediate and extended) there weren't many books nor much money for them.  (Also, I think that the strains of blue-collar jobs and child-rearing didn't leave my parents, or other adults in our circle, with much energy for reading, to themselves or with kids.)  But that library, it seemed, had an endless supply.  And the librarians were happy to see a kid whose reading didn't consist only of school assignments.

Plus, going to the library was one thing neither my mother nor anyone else questioned.  If I wanted to go anywhere else, I had to say what I planned to do there, who would be there and who would go with me.  When I went to the library, she said only, "Just be home for supper."

Usually, I would take a few books--story or poetry collections, histories or books about exotic and faraway places--and browse them at one of the tables.  Most days, I succeeded in getting a seat at the table by the center window:

Now, from that window, one could see only up and down Ditmas Avenue, East Fourth Street and a few nearby streets--and over the rows of houses.  But I could see far enough that all of those things eventually faded into a scrim of cirrus clouds, a wall of rain or a vista of twilight.  The world opened out in front of that window, just as world opened with the books I took from the shelves of the Kensington Branch.

Seeing it closed, I feared the worst, since the library budget seems not to have increased since the days when I was using that branch.  But, in riding along, I found out that the Kensington Branch had merely moved to another location, about the same distance--though in another direction--from the house in which I lived.  In other words, I could have walked there just as easily.  And my mother probably would have told me just to remember to be home in time for supper.

A New Thai Uniform Policy

We in the US often forget that students--even at the university level--all over the world still wear uniforms.  

I wore a uniform to Catholic School. That was more years ago than I care to admit.  Some Catholic schools still require them, and there are some public and charter schools that have adopted them. But, for the most part, American students can wear whatever they want to school.

That is, as long as what they're wearing conforms to the accepted gender norms of their community.  Speaking of which:  While some parents say that uniforms are a "leveler" (If all kids are wearing the same outfit, none is "cooler" than the others), they also are a way of enforcing accepted gender norms.  Typically, males wear black (or other dark-colored) trousers and a white shirt with a plaid tie in the school's colors, while females wear a  skirt in that plaid with a white blouse.


In very few countries are transgenders more visible than they are in Thailand.  But even in the country that does more sex-reassignment surgeries than any other and whose Miss Tiffany transgender beauty contest is a national event, students are expected to wear the uniform that conforms to the gender on their national ID cards, which is all but impossible to change, even after transition and surgery.

Also, trans females are still referred to as "ladyboys" and trans males as "tomboys", which represents a different view from those in the West regarding transgenderism, not to mention an underlying male bias.

So it is significant that Bangkok university has changed its uniform policy to accommodate trans students.

A "ladyboy" can wear either of the uniforms shown above.  On the left is the female uniform; on the right is a modified male uniform with the trousers cut tighter than the ones males wear.

A "tomboy" can wear the modified female uniform shown on the right or a male uniform with the trousers cut a little looser than the ones biological males wear.

Hmm...Do you think Catholic schools will follow suit (pun intended)?  Prep schools?
 

The Third Law In The Third World

In previous posts, I've said that something like a corollary of Newton's Third Law of Motion seems to operate in the realm of transgender acceptance and equality.

Briefly, Newton's Third Law says that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.  We see a parallel to it whenever some jurisdiction passes a law to protect us from discrimination or every time there's some favorable image of one of us in the media:  The bigots double down their ignorance, hatred  and violence against us.  

Backwater preachers and Neanderthal politicians (and others) come up with ever-more ridiculous ways of rationalizing their bigotry.  And, unfortunately, the level of violence against us is ramped up:  The beatings, stabbings and shootings become more frequent and gruesome. 

It also seems that as acceptance of us grows in secular Western societies--as seems to have happened in the wake of Bruce Jenner becoming Caitlyn--conservative societies become even more repressive and brutal.  Such is the case in Egypt where, according to at least one report, trans people (especially women) have been targeted.  During the past year, 150 trans women have been arrested in Cairo alone.

Now, while Egypt is a predominantly Muslim country, it's not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. Still, the old ideas about gender and sexuality prevail:  It's very difficult to change one's name, let alone gender, on official documentation, and many Egyptians continue to see trans women as gay men who have rejected their masculinity.

One result of their difficulty in getting IDs that reflect their true identity is that trans people have a hard time getting jobs.  To be fair, it's difficult for anyone to get a job in Egypt right now, but being trans only exacerbates that problem.  So--you guessed it--many trans people turn to sex work in order to survive.  That further stigmatizes them, in both legal and social senses, as Egypt's laws (like the laws in most places) criminalize the sex worker rather than his or her client and sex workers are seen as people "nobody will miss" if they're killed or disappeared.

So, as I've said earlier, it's great that more people are accepting us as we are.  But that also means we must be careful, as those who don't accept us will become more adamant in their hatred.

The AMA Says There's No Reason To Keep Trans People Out Of Uniform

The American Medical Association isn't usually seen as a paragon of progressivisim, let alone a left-wing hotbed.  

So it's particularly noteworthy when they make pronouncements like this:  

RESOLVED. That our American Medical Association affirm that there is no medically valid reason to exclude transgender issues from service in the US Military

Wait--there's more:

and be it further RESOLVED. That our AMA affirm that transgender service members be provided care as determined by patient and physician according to the same medical standards that apply to non-transgender persons. 

That statement came at the end of a resolution drafted at their annual meeting in Chicago this past weekend.  There, four former US Surgeon Generals--Drs. Joycelyn Elders, David Satcher, Regina Benjamin and Kenneth Moritsugo--issued a statement urging the AMA to take a stand.    

The resolution stating that there's no medically valid reason to exclude transgenders from military service was unanimously approved by the AMA's policy-making House of Delegates.

As I've said in earlier posts, the bigots, haters and other ignorant people are running out of excuses!  

Bruce To Caitlyn, In Pictures

Since I don't want to steal Caitlyn Jenner's thunder (as if I could), I won't say much today.  Instead, I'll direct you to a really good article that includes a slideshow documenting her transformation from Bruce over nearly four decades.  Just click here.
 
 

It Isn't Really Rape If Your Son Does It

Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address warned us about the dangers of the "military-industrial complex".

John F. Kennedy offered this challenge:  "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."

And what memorable oratory did Bill Clinton leave for us?   "I did not have sex with that woman!"  Or, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

It seems that Jim Bob Duggar is taking lessons on semantics from our forty-second President.  That is ironic, in a way, because about the only thing he seems to have in common with Clinton is Arkansas roots. 

But it seems that for a self-professed Christian, he's doing everything he can to emulate Bill from Hope's respect for the truth.  Now, I can't fault him for defending his son:  Most parents would do the same for their kids, even after those kids have done the most unspeakable things.  Still, I have a hard time hearing a defense, whoever may make it, of someone who takes advantage of someone else sexually.

He says that when his son Josh molested his sisters, who were adopted, "it was nothing like rape."  Rather, he insists it was "just inappropriate touching over the clothes" while the girls "were sleeping".  According to Duggar the Elder, the girls weren't even aware of what he had done.  In contrast, the police reports state that at least one of the girls woke up during the incident.

Now, almost anyone would agree that touching a child's private areas--whether or not there is clothing or anything else between the toucher's hand and the child's privates--constitutes sexual molestation.  In fact, most people--including most clinicians--would agree that it's molestation if the person, of whatever age, being touched can't or doesn't consent.

And, whatever we might say about the State of Arkansas, it defines sexual molestation  as rape. 

As  a transgender woman and someone who survived childhood sexual molestation and sexual assault as a young adult, I find Jim Bob Duggar's dissembling particularly offensive.  You see, he and his wife have been propagating the lie that all transgenders are pedophiles as part of their campaign against transgender equality.

I wonder how they define "transgender" and "pedophilia".

What Caitlyn Has Clarified

Caitlyn Jenner's "coming out" has been good for us (trans people) as well as the general public in all sorts of ways. 

Not the least of those ways is that many people are realizing, for the first time, that gender identity is completely separate from sexual orientation.

Infographic by Heather Walter, inspired by information from Sam Killermann's blog.

Defending Wendy Williams, Sort Of

Today I am going to do something I never imagined I would do:  I am going to defend Wendy Williams.  Sort of.

All of the fans of hers I've met are--how can I put this?--the sorts of straight men who think that anything with 42DD cups can do no wrong.  All right, I don't know WW's bra size, but you get the idea.

The few times I've ever seen her show--which were purely by chance--she struck me as vulgar, obnoxious and ignorant.  And that's when she wasn't making transphobic or homophobic comments. 

Lest you think I am not being fair to her, I will now disabuse you of that notion--at least somewhat.  I don't know exactly what she said about Caitlyn Jenner and, honestly, don't care to know.  But after the Vanity Fair photo of Caitlyn appeared all over the Internet even before the issue of the magazine saw the light of day, someone used it to treat WW in a way nobody deserves:


I am Walter.  Now, if she were "coming out" as a man--as she has been rumored to be--why would she wear that dress?  Why would she wear her hair that way?  I don't think she's an attractive woman (What do I know?), but a woman she is unless she tells us otherwise.  

Some might say, "She had it coming to her."  No.  As tempting as it is to give a hater "a taste of her own medicine", it doesn't solve anything.  It certainly doesn't do anything to vindicate what Snoop Dogg and other transphobes said about Caitlyn, or any other trans woman.  It also doesn't bring back any trans woman--or man--who was murdered simply for being.  

More to the point, whatever one thinks of Wendy Williams (and I think I've made it abundantly clear that I don't think much of her!), she has the same rights as anybody else. One of those rights is to not be slandered or demeaned.  Or to have assumptions made about her identity.  

Laughing On His Way To The Dustbin Of History

In 1975, Minneapolis became the first US jurisdiction to ban discrimination "based on having or projecting a self-image not associated with one's biological maleness or one's biological femaleness."

In other words, four decades have passed since that language was added to the city's human-rights laws.  In the meantime, hundreds of other municipalities and thirty-two states (as well as the District of Columbia) have passed similar legislation.  Moreover, same-sex marriage is now legal in three dozen states; in 2003, none allowed it.

I like to think that these facts indicate a sea-change in attitudes about LGBT people.  I also would like to believe that they show--as the reversal of Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial discrimination, and the appearance of black faces on prime-time television, courtrooms, executive offices and operating rooms showed us--the homophobes and transpohobes, as well as racists and other haters, are losing the battle.  

Their time is running out and they know it. I read somewhere that within twenty years from now, non-white Hispanics will no longer be the majority in this country.  By that time, we will also have a generation of children raised by same-sex parents and, I hope, LGBT people in places in roles where they've never been before.  And most people will find same-sex couples and trans people no more noteworthy than a white American marrying an Hispanic, or a black to an Asian.

The prospect of such things, of course, infuriates the haters.  But, as I said, they know, deep down, they're losing the battle.  So they're becoming desperate--which makes them say ever-more ridiculous, stupid, disgusting and mean things.

Case in point: Mike Huckabee.  This Neanderthal Faux, I mean, Fox News commentator wants to be President.  So, not long ago, he said something very, very Presidential: If there were more transgender acceptance when he was in high school, he joked, "I'm pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, "Coach, I think I'd rather shower with girls today".  

Ha, ha, ha.  One day the joke will be on him--and such luminaries as Ann Coulter and Matt Walsh--when they are relegated to the dustbin of history.

OSHA Lets Us Do Our Business

I am an optimist.  I have always known that sooner or later, we wouldn't have to worry about where or whether we could go to the bathroom while we were on our jobs.

What I could not have foreseen, however, is how that would happen. 

Yesterday, the US Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued guidelines for employers. A Guide To Restroom Access for Transgender Workers acknowledges that some employers have already implemented policies to ensure that all employees, including transgender ones, have "prompt access to appropriate sanitary facilities".  What such policies, and all new policies, should have in common is "a core belief" that "all employees should be permitted to use the facilities that correspond with their gender identity." 

In addition to allowing those who identify as women to use women's restrooms and those who identify as men to use men's facilities, employers have other options, according to the OSHA guidelines. They include single-occupancy gender-neutral (unisex) facilities or multi-occupancy, gender-neutral bathrooms with lockable singe-occupant stalls.

Now all we need is equal access to those workplaces!

 

Caitlyn Jenner Enters The World

By now, you’ve heard that celebrity photographer Annie Liebowitz is taking shots of the most famous person currently undergoing a gender transition.  Her work is scheduled to appear in Vanity Fair.

I guess I am like almost everyone else in wanting to see what Caitlyn Jenner looks like.  But more to the point, at least for me, I want to see this next stage in her coming out into the world after spending 65 years living as a boy and man named Bruce. 

What I find interesting is that every news account I’ve seen and heard so far refers to her with feminine pronouns.  Until now, they had been using masculine ones.  It’s not a surprise, really, because when she announced that she was embarking upon life as a woman, she didn’t reveal her name.  She was still Bruce Jenner when Diane Sawyer was interviewing her just a few weeks ago.  It’s hard to call someone named Bruce “she”.

More to the point, she said that she still preferred, at that point, to be referred to as a man named Bruce.  I will not speculate on what her reasons might have been, but I know that all of us who have transitioned, or are transitioning, know that there is a moment when we are ready to come out into the world as the people we truly are.  For some that happens fairly quickly. I guess I am in that category, as I started living as Justine less than a year after I started taking hormones and about two years after I started counseling and therapy.  I’ve met others who lived years or decades longer than I did with the names and genders they were assigned at birth, for a variety of reasons.  Sometimes those reasons have to do with jobs, careers, marriages , family or other social relations.  Others simply have to become more comfortable with themselves in their new identities.

That last sentence might seem paradoxical to some of you.  No matter how early in life we realize we aren’t the gender we’re assigned at birth, and no matter how much we dream about living as our true selves, it still takes time to adjust to our new lives.  For some of us, the discomfort and self-loathing we felt in our old lives has shaped so much about our lives that it takes time—and sometimes brings us pain—to live without those things.  Also, those of us whose bodies don’t conform to our genders tend to be sensitive and vulnerable people.  Shedding our “boy skin” or “girl skin”, as it were, makes us even more prone to being hurt as well as experiencing joy.  Some, I believe, know they’re not ready for the intensity of the love and hate, the embraces and rejections, and the losses as well as the things we find and regain as we enter the world as our own selves, with our own names.

Whether she is experiencing all, some or none of what I’ve described, I am eager to see Caitlyn Jenner enter the world, and hope her passage is safe and joyous.

R.I.P. "Beau" Biden

Yesterday we lost one of our champions:  Joseph Robinette "Beau" Biden III lost his battle with brain cancer.

Two years ago, as the Attorney General of the State of Delaware, he joined Governor Jack Markell in supporting same-sex marriage legislation, which passed soon thereafter.  Thus did Delaware become the eleventh state--and the twelfth jurisdiction--in the US to legalize gay marriage.  

One month later, he urged state lawmakers to pass legislation that would establish legal protections based on gender identity.  Only fifteen days later, Governor Markell signed that bill into law.

So, within the space of just over two months, Biden managed to bring both same-sex marriage and gender equality to his state.  How many other public officials have such a record?

While his commitment to human rights was palpable, he's an example of how "an apple doesn't fall far from the tree".  If his last name looks familiar to you, it's because his father is Joe Biden--yes, that one, the Vice-President of the United States.  It was Biden pere who, in essence, cornered President Obama into supporting same-sex marriage, something he had opposed while campaigning for office.

 

Gay Marriage In Ireland. Where Next?

Over the past few days, I’ve been reading and hearing a lot about the gay-marriage votein Ireland.  Several commentators mentioned that homosexual relations were illegal there as recently as 1993; abortion still is.  This state of affairs has generated discussion of how there has been a sea-change in the Emerald Isle within a generation—often from the very same people who talk about the “grip” Roman Catholic bishops still have on the politics of that country.

I think both of those notions are true.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, young Irish people—many of whom have gone abroad to go to school and work—have developed very different attitudes from their parents and grandparents about many issues.  At the same time, nearly all of those who still adhere to any sort of religious practice are still Roman Catholics. (There is a small but visible community of Muslims, most of whom have emigrated to Ireland recently.)  However, from what I’m hearing from people who have relatives or other connections to Ireland, those who adhere to their faith are doing so with a more independent mindset, as Catholics have done in other European countries in much of the Americas.  (They are the sort of people one Cardinal decried as “cafeteria Catholics".) So, while they might go to church and otherwise profess their faith in God and allegiance to the church, they do not think in lockstep with the Church hierarchy.

It’s hard not to believe that such people are feeling encouraged by the current Pope.  While he hasn’t endorsed same-sex marriage (and I don’t think it’s realistic to expect him or any Pope in the next couple of centuries to do so), he hasn’t spent any time denouncing it, or the Irish vote.  He has said that his priorities are—and the Church’s should be—helping the poor and otherwise disenfranchised.  I’d say he’s putting his money where his mouth is.

What all of this means, I believe, is that we might see same-sex marriage or civil unions legalized in places where we might not expect.  I’m not thinking now about countries like Germany and Italy:  I think they’ll eventually allow gay marriage if for no other reason than most of the other European Union countries, including France and England, have it.  I’m thinking about other countries with young, educated people whose attitudes are changing as a result of their exposure to the rest of the world, whether in person or online.  I won’t “name names”, so to speak.  But, as I say, they will come as much as a surprise to many people as Ireland did with its vote.