pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ALIENS AMONG US, OR, WAS JESUS AN LGBT-FRIENDLY CAPRICORN? People on campus are funny today. This vacillation between gorgeous spring weather and tit-freezing days must be getting to us all! First, an editor whispered to me as we walked through the rotunda, "Hey, have you ever seen the same student in here twice? Me either. I think they are all really aliens." Then, as I was waiting in line to pay for my snack, someone behind me said "Excuse me," and his friend replied, "Excuse you? I can't even explain you." And all this before noon! Meanwhile, I am making carpooling arrangements for Saturday, when I will attend a statewide LGBT leadership planning session. I recently became active in this LGBT leadership group and attended a planning session as a representative of the board of our local rabble-rousing community chorus. I'm not singing with the chorus this semester though because our concert theme is Love and Marriage and, well, those are painful topics for me right now. For the most part, I don't view marriage and its ownership implications as something our community should emulate. Nevertheless, it pisses me off that a country founded on democracy extends over one thousand benefits to one group of citizens who fall in love and want to get married while withholding them from another group of citizens who fall in love and want to get married. And I am glad that our chorus is giving the issue a platform, particularly now that there is a so-called state marriage protection bill on the floor. We have a chorus board meeting tonight, and I'll attend. And I stay very busy creating chorus graphics (and, in fact, possibly created a hullabaloo by altering a picture from my/the Ginger's wedding to use in our chorus ad. It won't be obvious to people who weren't at the ceremony, thanks to the magic of Photoshop, but the Ginger will definitely recognize it if she sees the ad. So, about our wedding cake. We asked a local domestic artist who provides social commentary through works of art made out of, oh, cake or chocolate or icing or vacuum cleaner parts to make a funky cake for us. We told her what flavor we wanted (vanilla almond), showed her the cake-topper we had custom made in our images (right down to our silver nose rings), and told her to just be creative, go hog wild. And that's what she did. She made a fabulous, funky bright green cake with silver Jordan almonds, curlique icing, and sequins climbing up our cake-topper legs. And wow does it look great as the chorus's ad. But I digress. . . . One thing I learned at the LGBT leadership planning session is that Pastor Wilma from the local LGBT MCC (christian) church and other likeminded religious leaders have formed a religious coalition for marriage equality. Pastor Wilma says the coalition came about because leaders in our state understand that effective movements in the South require religious, political, and legal components. The group currently includes more than 250 pastors and other church leaders, many of whom are straight and all of whom believe that "the most fundamental human right, after the necessities of food, clothing and shelter, is the right to affection and the supportive love of other human beings." They oppose "the use of sacred texts and religious traditions to deny legal equity to same-gender couples" and are using straight white preachers for media spots. Wow. In the South. Whodathunkit? I still have trouble fathoming the fact that I live in a southern metropolitan area where at least a few Baptist churches are LGBT friendly. I mean, just ponder that reality for a minute. The Southern Baptist church in South Carolina in which I was raised is so rabid that I still get eye tics when fundamentalists mention Gawd to me. And I've told more than one such person to take it somewhere else because I am allergic to their Gawd. The fact of the matter is, though, I am allergic to their narrow monochromatic version of what I think of as a universal god and I get annoyed as all get-out by the fact that these people presume to have the right to tell me what narrow little judgmental piece of their truth I am supposed to believe. My father is an enigma to me in many ways, but one blessing is that he was a philosophical free thinker in a community that was nearly devoid of philosophical variation, and I was the child born with my father's philosophical bent. He spent much of his free time reading philosophy and talking about it with me, so, even as a child, I believed that the Christians got it all wrong. God is a verb, not a noun. And she always has been. Learning about personification only cemented this view in my mind. Jesus is an idea, an ideal, a whispered message reminding us of the importance of recognizing and maintaining a common vibe, our world community, our universal connection. No more highs or lows; we're all in the soup together, including us LGBT folks who frighten the straight-and-narrow Christians so. Jesus's message, to me, is about nurturing connections, about respecting each other and tearing down the artificial walls that divide our common family. This makes much more sense to me than some white-bearded old patriarch sitting up on a cloud somewhere just waiting to bust us for masturbating. But about those eye tics: My version of the Bible was not popular in my small Southern town. My father taught me to stand up for what I believe in even if I'm the only one who believes it though, and I was an obedient little soldier who shared my unpopular beliefs far and wide. This frustrated more than a few Sunday School and GAs and Training Union and Vacation Bible School and Backyard Bible School teachers and Baptist camp counselors, whom I like to believe are still pondering how to reconcile those two separate creation stories. And now, since I'm rambling, I'll end with this description. The chorus sang at Pastor Wilma's MCC church last year, so I had no choice but to listen to her sermon entitled "Time to Firm Your Flabby Soul."
Yep, she used workout metaphors throughout it. 12:09 p.m. - 2005-03-02 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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