Amendment One - Work with me through this one.

I am an unapologetic social liberal BUT… I am doing my best temper that fact for the purposes of a hopefully diverse audience so that I might appeal to you all.  However, at the same time, I realize that this is not entirely realistic.  That said, let's see if we can marry our perspectives for a moment and see if we can find a common ground because this is important.  I believe in the rights of all men and all women of all races, all colors and all creeds to live their lives as they choose.  I believe in the rights of all people to be free to live and to love in the purest capacity they they possibly can.  I believe that this freedom to pursue a truth of spirit and of soul… that this is the ultimate goal for all of humanity - to be true to our most honest selves.  Many people believe in a more rigid, prescribed code that interprets this ethos differently.  It would be hypocritical for me to condemn those whose beliefs and moral codes are in opposition to mine or to try to force my world view upon them given my previous statement.  While I don't personally subscribe to an interpretation of ethics that can be boiled down to a simple right and wrong or sin and righteousness, I acknowledge that that perspective exists and I know that this chasm is great and my words are more than likely not powerful enough to bridge such a vast divide.

So this is who I am.  These are my values.  They are set in stone for me and I can not imagine a scenario in this life that could possibly change them.  There is little chance, no matter who you are or how long I've known you or what life experiences we have shared that they are exactly the same as yours.  Here's the thing;  THAT'S OKAY.  I have this belief structure and it is so important to me that I feel a soul-wrenching obligation to live a life and to raise a child who, God willing, will share and reflect these things that I hold sacred.  I fully expect and respect your right and responsibility to do the same.  Perhaps, with patience and open hearts and love  we will fortify intelligent discussion and rational arguments that will allow us to grow together to be an increasingly self-realized people.  So this is our mantle and we wear it every single day of our lives.  We do this because it is important, it is critical and it is who we are.  I acknowledge all of this.  What I don't acknowledge and what I hope will give you pause, is a need for political legislation to affirm my belief structure.

This afternoon, I spoke to a dear friend whom I love deeply.  This friend is about as conservative as conservative gets.  I typically dance on pin heads to avoid political discourse with this friend because we are so very diametrically opposed.  Going out on a limb, I said, "I hope you will vote against Amendment One" (for those of you reading not in NC, this is  a very high profile amendment that will eliminate rights of same-sex partners and all civil unions).  I braced myself.  This friend responded with something to the effect of the following "You know, this country was founded by the most brilliant minds that have ever existed and the constitution that they created, founded on Christian values of course, is the most amazing document every created.  It is perfection.   I embrace the Founding Father's ideals and I believe that they were Christian men founding a nation on Christian values and they did a damn good job of it.  I am sick to death of politicians trying to corrupt something that is so inherently pure."  

Politically, this friend and I could not have less in common and that's okay.  We agree to disagree, we have lively debate and we respect each other as intellectuals and human beings.  He lives up to his responsibility to live his life according to his beliefs and I try to do the same.  He will likely be voting against Amendment One. 

Here's my point:  I believe in the rights of human beings to love and to live in the best way they they can and advocate for those rights given any opportunity.  From my perspective, God knows this world needs all of the love it can stand, so I will do everything in my power to raise my daughter, who will grow up in an essentially theocratic state which is as conservative as it gets, to respect and hopefully share those same values; That's really all can do but I don't need legislation to tell me that's right for me; I know it in my heart and in my soul.  I don't need legislation to make me feel more secure about my beliefs and I can honestly tell you, no legislation is going to make me feel less secure or doubt what my heart tells me to be true. 

If you are opposed to same-sex couples sharing the rights of couples who have a traditional marriage, that's obviously where your world view has taken you and its unlikely that any statistic or scenario that I could throw at you is going to change that.  Its also your personal belief and not mine.  Obviously that's fine and its your responsibility to live accordingly, to raise your children accordingly, and to make sure that your actions and your contributions to our society reflect that belief structure.  I champion your right to do so.  It is your God given right to exercise your freedoms in this way.  Utilizing this freedom to further restrict the freedoms of others, however is incredibly counter-intuitive.   Trying legislate morality and legislate belief structures is a basic cry of insecurity and frankly, hysteria.  We have so many crosses to bear as human beings.  There are so many people who suffer from hate and abuse and neglect - lets focus on building each other up instead of wasting our time with personal insecurities to break each other down.  

All I ask is that you think about your own responsibility to be accountable for your own morality before you cop-out in an attempt to legislate it for those who dissent.  Minds and hearts will not change.  People will continue to live their lives as they see fit and when its all said and done all that will have been accomplished is an excess of unnecessary red tape, state legal fees, and an era of divisiveness with less and less hope of resolution and reconciliation.  Less love.  More hate.  Please think before you vote for Amendment One.  As a parting note - if you can't get over the gay marriage things, here are a few other points to ponder:   

An Appeal to the Angels of our Better Nature - A blog on the Defense of Marriage Act

The planets have officially aligned.  Its Friday afternoon, work was light, Emerson requested a late afternoon nap, and we are having a very rare Salt Lake rain shower that is seriously whetting our whistle for the impending Autumn here in the Wasatch front.  What a truly magnificent start to the weekend... and I'm about to launch into something very ... uncomfortable.

This week, in particular, I've been thinking a lot about people.  And culture.  I've been extremely disturbed by recent political developments in my home state of North Carolina this week.  NC passed legislation that brings the state that much closer to passing the Defense of Marriage Act, which, as I'm sure you know, specifically defines marriage as an institution between exclusively one man and one woman.  As I'm sure you also know, this legislation aims to bar many of our neighbors, friends and loved ones from legally entering into the one of the most basic and true expressions of human love and partnership: Marriage - which  is ideally a loving partnership of two consenting adults who want to spend their lives together loving and growing in unity (and all of the institutional benefits (and drawbacks as the case may be)) that go along with it.  

While, I fear that my feelings on this issue are so impassioned that I will not be able to adequately articulate them on the page, I need to throw this out. I've struggled with whether or not this blog is a waste of time and breath but someone was kind enough to point out to me yesterday that even if it falls on deaf ears, we have a responsibility to check in and be present when we feel things are going off course.  So I write this if for no other reason then, I feel I have a responsibility as a mother, an advocate, and a member of the human race to do so.

The way I see this, the issue breaks down into three pieces - legality, religiosity, morality.  Let's ease into this:

Legality

In its most basic essence, a marriage certificate issued by the State, is binding legal contract between two individuals.  The contract is not signed or sanctioned by the church any more any other legal document -  a birth certificate, death certificate, or for that matter, a state tax return.  I find it interesting that the symbol of our justice system is a blind fold.  When it comes to basic contractual law, on which I am admittedly no expert, morality, religious doctrine, sex, or social status, play no roll.  I'd love to expound on this point but the truth is, from a purely technical perspective, its pretty simplistic.   Questions of personal religion and personal ethics have no place in a legal contract issued by a non-theocratic state and to introduce them corrupts the very necessary black and white (gasp!) protection and responsibility that a contract is designed to provide.

Now the hard stuff:
Religiosity
As much as we'd like to say the bible is clear on homosexuality, the truth is - its really not.  As I am so passionate about this issue, I've spent a lot of time researching this.  Yes, there are two Old Testament passages about homosexuality being unclean: one in Corinthians I 6: 9-10 and one in Leviticus.  The Corinthians passage simultaneously calls out idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, drunkards, slanderers, and swindlers in addition to homosexuals.  Last time I checked idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, drunkards, slanderers and swindlers can all still get married, bless their poor spouses... I'll be honest while I haven't encountered any male prostitutes, I can name pretty much someone in every other category that is legally married in the eyes of the state.  The Leviticus passage (20: 13) simply calls for a man who lies with a man to be put to death.  I ask with a mild attempt at hyperbole, "while we're at, it where do you draw the line at your literal interpretation of the scripture?" 

In the new testament, Paul also mentions the sin of homosexuality in his letter to the Romans.  I could go into the context of Paul's letter to the Romans and explain my understanding of how the politics, audience and circumstance of the time in which he was writing shaped his message, but that's another blog.  The real point is, Jesus Christ, in whom most of the people driving this legislation profess their faith, never mentions the issue of homosexuality in his teachings.  Ever.  Not one time.  He does, however, have quite a bit to say about loving one another, and about treating each other with fairness, and kindness, and humility.  In fact, he built his ministry on these teachings.  He talks about all of  humanity being equal in the eyes of God from the lowliest among us to the most fortunate - the lowliest, in fact, being more favorable in the eyes of God. He talks about forgiveness and not casting stones.  He gives us one of the most simple and one of the most challenging directives ever issued to human kind- Love thy neighbor.   

I understand that faith and religion are very personal things and there are probably no two people on the planet who have the exact same interpretation of their faith.  I understand that people believe what they believe and I respect that very much.  What I don't respect is when others try to force their personal interpretation of what is holy and what is not upon the general population.  What I view as an abomination is people who use faith and religion as a weapon to create hate, to create an "other", and to punish their fellow man. 

Morality:  
There's a fine line between religiosity and morality.  When I say morality I am specifically referring to the argument that homosexuality is a "choice" or that it can be "cured" like a disease.  To be honest, I don't really understand how this argument is the slightest bit relevant.  I quite frankly view it as a cop-out and a distraction that people hide behind so that they don't have to address more difficult questions.  I disagree with these perceptions of homosexuality (as does science) but I also always come back to the question of "does it matter?"  In a free society, whether an individual chooses to share their life and love with someone of the same sex or of a different sex should not make them more or less entitled to the same rights as every other citizen in the United States.

So there's my 2 cents, my soap box if you want to call it that.  I know that it might not line up with the ideals of 100% of my readership, but I hope you will respect my need to speak out on an issue that is incredibly important to me and I hope that you will take the time to consider a different perspective on this divisive issue that, in one way or another, effects our human conscience.  Whenever I think about this issue, I always hear the below quotation from one of history's most admirable leaders spoken in another time but a time also wrought with difficult questions of unity and freedom and equality:

"I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stre[t]ching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." 

~Abraham Lincoln

We've done it before and I hope as a nation we can again find the strength and courage to appeal to the better angels of our nature.

Awakening

Hey there!  First of all, welcome to any new readers who stumbled up on Shades of Gray via Casual  Kitchen and Cheap Healthy Good.  My blog on breaking the cycle and raising a daughter with a healthy body image is definitely one of the most intimate and poignant pieces I have written in a long time and it moves me deeply to see that it resonates with so many others.  It sounds like more and more people are working diligently towards adjusting their mentality on this issue.  My hope is that if we stay committed, we can be a generation of healthy women raising a generation of healthy daughters, emotionally and physically.  Thank you for sharing your stories and struggles with me, you are beautiful and thank you for stopping by.

There has been so much on my mind these past few weeks since Emerson was born that I need a few days alone with a coffee pot and a keyboard to make sense out of it all.  Unfortunately, those days are a little more difficult to come by lately.  Most days, by 3:00 p.m. Em and I have both grown a little weary of the rattles and bells so we load up in the car and take off for a driving exploration of Salt Lake City.  We put on some Iron and Wine, Em finally succumbs to a nap that has been waiting in the wings for hours and I drive aimlessly, acquainting myself with the hills of Deseret and writing blogs in my head.

I have found since having Emerson that my tolerance for Cable News has gone from minuscule to non-existent and yet I spend hours, upon hours picking and choosing my way through the New York Times on my blackberry in the dark of night and wee hours of the morning... kind of the equivalent of poking one toe at a time into the water until you think you can handle the temperature.  Its been a completely new experience to have the combination of immobility (while nursing Em) and seemingly endless amounts of time, darkness and silence with which to digest this world in which I have actively chosen to raise a daughter.  However, at the same time, cradled in the safety of our rocking chair, shielded by our lullabies, the madness of this very same, often broken world seems so very removed and far away.

It started with the oil spill.  I believe Emerson was born on day 5 of the spill.  I'll be honest, we had other things on our mind and had no concept of the magnitude.  Who did?  When we came home, while we fiercely cradled our own little tiny, fragile miracle in our arms, the news in Salt Lake was consumed locally by the tragic and brutal death of a 4 year old little boy.  I couldn't handle it.  I was forcibly banned from all news outlets for several days. Then, the oil wasn't going away and the Dow dropped below 10,000 for the first time since February.  Then the oil was getting worse.  Then.... facebook changed its privacy settings.  Facebook changed its privacy settings and the world stopped and wrote about it.  This was when I started to tune back in.  My "blog in my head", as I was tooling around the grocery store to kill time with a sleeping baby, consisted of:

 (abridged), "Hey!  DISCRETION!!!!!!!!  If you're not comfortable with your parents, grandparents, teachers, or bosses reading it, don't send it out into the ether.  Put some clothes on, expand your vocabulary, and if you must talk about last Saturday's debauchery, either pick up the phone or, if that's too much human contact for you, send an email to your 20 closest friends."  I was irritated and I don't think it was hormones.

So, my frustration with facebook's privacy policy dominating the news cycle during a period that seems to be of "Darling, you were born on day 5 of the worst man-made disaster our planet has ever known significance" got me thinking (though, yes, I was following the story on facebook... privately):   At some point we must come out of the bubble.  To really seal the deal, there was an oil spill of 500+ barrels about 2 miles from my home that has poisoned every natural water source in my immediate vicinity (you might not have heard about it, but that's over 25,000 gallons of oil in my little creeks and rivers).  For lack of better terminology, the chickens have come home to roost.

The pelicans and geese are dying, people hurt children, families fear about putting food on their tables and this morning, the state that I now call home, paid 5 individuals to shoot a man to death for crimes committed over a quarter of a century ago.

Here we go again, what do we do.  Do we pace the nursery, wringing our hands?  Do we talk over coffee about how distraught we are about the fact that our babies might never sit for hours in the tidal pools of southern shores watching the tide magically bury their little legs with sand?  Do we sleep even less; agonizing over injustices, terrified in quiet places of our minds of faceless, invincible enemies?  Yeah, a little.  I don't know.  What else is there?

I think step one is to pop the bubble and keep singing but stop hiding behind the lullabies... try to find a way to balance functionality and awareness?  Autonomy and activism?

It's a process.... it will take some time, at least for me at this juncture in my life.  That said, I think I can start by opening my eyes, talking... educating... writing... initiating a dialog and amongst us, maybe we can change something, do something.  I'll be honest, I truly believe that together, you and I, the two of us,  WE really can change the perspective from passively reactive to passionately proactive., and if nothing else modify the generation that we are raising to simply be better than... to be greater than....

All that said, let's start by opening our eyes, then our minds, then our mouths, then our hearts.  One day at a time.

So very much love,

Julie