Tied in Other Knots

It seems likely that what I say in this post will offend some friends and readers on either side of this issue. For many of you, the question of whether marriage should include same-sex couples is a no-brainer, and you met Friday's Supreme Court decision with either unmitigated joy or disappointment. Yet I have thought long and hard about it, and I still do not fully know what I feel or ought to think. Perhaps, lacking such moral certainty, it would be wiser for me to remain silent. Yet not to speak, in this moment of profound social change, feels too much like cowardice.

Defenders of man-woman marriage call it "traditional." Advocates of gay marriage talk endlessly of being on the "right side of history." Both the appeal to tradition and the appeal to progress hold no sway for me; they are equally fallacious. For me, this is a matter of relationships: with my God, my family, and my friends. Though I'm fully aware that I cannot always have it all ways, my purpose in writing this is to help those of you who profess certainty to understand the tension that I feel, and that I believe many others share, between our love and respect for our LGBT friends on the one hand, and our deeply held religious and political beliefs on the other. I'm a Mormon through and through, and the focus of my comments reflects that, but I'm not trying to persuade non-Mormons of anything, nor am I inviting argument. I'm just personally working through some stuff and trying to be understood in the meantime. And if you're not interested in understanding me, I get it. I will be sad, but not offended if you stop reading or even walk away from me.

I profess faith in a church which affirms that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God, and which espouses as a central doctrine that the creation of eternal families is one of the primary purposes of mortal life. I find both beauty and power in the doctrine of the complementarity of the sexes which heterosexual marriage ideally embodies, yet I freely admit being puzzled as to the nature of pre-mortal gender. My study of history and literature across many centuries demonstrates quite plainly that what we sometimes assume to be essential gender characteristics are actually socially constructed, and quite malleable. Even though I believe there are essentially feminine and masculine characteristics, I confess I do not know precisely what they are.

I have felt for some time that these doctrines must be exceedingly painful for those whose sexuality precludes the possibility of fulfilling cisnormative, heterosexual marriage, yet who deeply desire to the bonds of family which we Mormons boldly proclaim to be the crowning glory of mortal life. That it is undoubtedly painful does not preclude the possibility of its being true, of course. Many truths are painful. Regardless, I have seen sufficient evidence to persuade me that most people do not choose which gender they identify as or are sexually attracted to, and cannot change their gender identity or sexual orientation. This, too, creates a theological puzzle for me, yet a lifetime of experience has instilled in me a trust in my God, and in His prophets and scriptures, which despite my incomplete knowledge, I cannot deny. In any case, I certainly don't expect those who don't share my faith to live according to its doctrine.

Despite a great deal of study, I have not found compelling empirical reasons why a government which provides civil marriage at all, has the right to limit it according to the religious beliefs of some of its members. More specifically, I believe that civil marriage, if it exists at all, must of necessity be defined by the will of society. I have heard arguments that marriage must be defined as between a man and a woman because societies have a vested interest in nurturing the rising generation and children are better off being raised by a mom and a dad. But even if we admit there are social and developmental benefits to sexual complementarity in parenting, I believe that same-sex couples can raise happy, well-adjusted, ethical children, just as single, divorced, and widowed parents can. The stable commitment that marriage fosters can only enhance that ability, and I believe that the Supreme Court ruling will have a positive effect on families with LGBT parents.

I honestly do not know whether the Supreme Court's declaration of a constitutional right to marry is correct. I'm not sure I believe in a civil right to marry at all, and even though I do believe that governments which extend the privilege of marriage ought to do so equitably, I believe the balance of power set up in our federal government would have been safer had the issue been settled through the legislative process rather than the judicial. But that takes time, and many people I care about were tired of waiting. I can't help but feel glad for them that their wait is over.

Many on the religious right have expressed fears that the free exercise of religion will be restricted as a result of this ruling. I wish I could believe that these fears are unjustified, but the possibility is real. Nevertheless I choose to believe that we can and will enact and uphold laws and policies which do justice both to the legality of same-sex marriage and to the free exercise of religion. The right of churches to define the sacrament of marriage according to their own doctrines must remain inviolable. Nor should religious people or institutions be compelled to participate in civil marriages against their consciences, so long as their abstention does not prevent others from marrying civilly.

Just as religious liberties must be respected, so must human dignity. Jesus declared that the second great commandment is to "love thy neighbor as thyself." He made no exceptions based on race, gender, or sexual orientation. The legalization of gay marriage does not one whit diminish our duty to care for the poor, the sick, the outcast and the marginalized. Furthermore, regardless of religious affiliation (or non-affiliation) or marital status, all of us do have a vested interest in protecting, nurturing, and strengthening families so that new generations can grow up healthy and wise. On these issues, we ought all to be allies.

Image source: Flickr user Wheelz24 . CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. 

Note: I have turned off comments for this post.

Gravitational Lensing and Celestial Urim and Thummim

I just started reading this book, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life among the Stars. It's by a science journalist, Lee Billings. It's beautifully fascinating, so far, and I'm only halfway through chapter 2. Anyway, he's describing this conversation with Frank Drake, the father of SETI. Here is an excerpt:

Beginning in the late 1980s, Drake had begun exploring an idea that made a lunar far side dotted with telescopes seem like child's play.... He wanted to create a telescope that would surpass all others, one with a magnifying lens nearly a million and a half kilometers in diameter. Drake had found a way to transform the Sun itself into the ultimate telescope.  

A consequence of the Sun's immense mass is that it acts as a star-size "gravitational lens," bending and amplifying light that grazes its surface. This effect, first measured during a solar eclipse in 1919 by the astronomer Arthur Eddington, was one of the key pieces of evidence that validated Einstein's theory of general relativity. Simple math and physics, judiciously applied, show that our star bends light into a narrow beam aligned with the center of the Sun and the center of any far-distant light source.... There are as many focal points and Sun-magnified beams as there are luminous objects in the sky--imagine a great sphere surrounding our star, its surface painted with amplified, high-resolution projected images of the heavens....  

If, for instance, we wished to examine a potentially habitable planet orbiting one of the two Sun-like stars in Alpha Centauri, the Sun's nearest neighboring stellar system, a 10-meter telescope aligned with the Sun-Alpha Centauri gravitational focus could resolve surface features such as rivers, forests, and city lights.... 

"One of the beauties of gravitational lenses is that since the lensing object bends space, all light traveling through is equally affected," Drake said, squinting into the sunlight beneath one of his lemon trees. "Gravitational lenses are achromatic--they work the same for optical light, infrared, everything. I like to think of what they could do for radio.... You look at the numbers, and at first it seems totally insane, but this is real. You could transmit, let's see, high-bandwidth signals from here to Alpha Centauri using only one watt of power....  

"That's the transmitting power of a cell phone," he finished. (pages 35-36)

Illustration of a gravitational lens. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain

So, as I'm reading this, you know what pops into my head (I mean besides a steady chorus of "holy cow that's amazing" with full orchestral accompaniment)?

D&C 130:6-8

6 The angels do not reside on a planet like this earth;
7 But they reside in the presence of God, on a globe like a sea of glass and fire, where all things for their glory are manifest, past, present, and future, and are continually before the Lord.
8 The place where God resides is a great Urim and Thummim.

And I'm thinking about how we interpret John's descriptions of what he saw in Revelation as being a pre-industrial man's interpretation of modern or futuristic technology in language his contemporary audience could understand. And I'm thinking that Joseph Smith was, technologically speaking, closer to John than he was to us, and that like John, Joseph's revelations are full of poetry. And who knows, maybe that joke Mormons like to tell these days about the white stones in Revelation 2:17/D&C 130:10 being iPhones aren't actually that far from the truth.

To my mind, that's one of the awesome things about Mormonism. For us, there is no such thing as the supernatural. Miracles, including revelation, are not the result of a suspension of natural laws, but of God's complete mastery over their workings. Now, lest by some chance a reader stumbles upon my blog who isn't familiar with Mormon doctrine, I must make clear that our God is not just some kind of advanced alien but indeed our Heavenly Father, and however much it might reveal to us about the nature and workings of the universe, no amount of scientific study or technological advancement can reconcile fallen humanity to Him or indeed to each other; only the atonement of Jesus Christ can do that. But I believe nevertheless that science is a source of truth and light and that, when used righteously, it is good in God's sight.