The Religious Crisis, Gay Marriage, and Human Rights
A musing related to gay marriage has not been forthcoming earlier in time because some issues do no lend themselves to easy digestion. Actually, just about anything to do with sex is more feelings than rationality. It is easy enough to understand the connection between sex and procreation, but after that everything else which pertains to sex—the attitudes and emotions involved, simply become individualized, personal, and mostly inexplicable. Sex jokes are so prevalent, and so common a source of humor, precisely because sex is an aspect of life so irrational.
All of us can, but seldom do, talk about how we feel about sex, in part because it would be babble based on our own particular nuances relative to the whole subject. Somehow sex has played a meaningful role in our lives, even if we prefer abstinence, infrequency, or have a compulsive need for sex. And that is before we even talk about the kind of sex acts. On top of this, love and sex become mixed up somehow in the whole picture. Then add the relationship between sex and physical attraction and we have some sort of ultimate circus with which we all have to deal. And let’s not forget we are dealing here with emotions, not reason in any logical sense of the term. If we go on line to porn sites, there are like 50 different kinds of sex acts to choose from. 70 years ago access to pornography was difficult, even just naked pictures were not common. Today, some studies claim around 30% of high school males have seen naked pictures sent via email of naked girls in their class. Minus any required strenuous effort to get real sex, perhaps more and more young people become relatively bored with the subject, or maybe more and more become obsessed with it all.
While there may be 50 categories of sex to choose from on the internet, individuals who use the internet for pornography focus on only particular kinds of sex acts. I guess it is like music or paintings—different strokes for different folks. The point here is simply that we cannot use reason to explain why people differ so much in their interest in sex or why their interest varies so much in the kind of sex acts. In reality, our sex life is pretty much the one major area of our life which we rarely talk much about in detail, albeit our interest in other people’s sex acts is not exactly non existent. The media is well aware of that. No matter how exemplary we may live the rest of our life, if our sexual behavior is over the top, even in harmless ways (no victims), our career may well be over, especially for a politician.
All major religions have, in some form or other, tried to make sense of it all, apply moral meaning to it all, and incorporate a moral position on sex into specific dictates. However, no matter to what extent any organized religion tries to codify sexual behaviors, the percentage of people who engage in any kind of sex act is not much different regardless of their religious sect. The same is true for any political attempt to regulate sexual behavior via laws. It all just goes underground.
Given the nature of love, sex, and marriage it is a pipe dream to think we can resolve these issues via reason and logic. Churches and politicians try to do it via laws or commandments. Married couples try to do it via vows. Lower animals in the evolutionary ladder control sex via hormones. Humans still have hormones, but are saddled with a brain capable of dominating hormones to a large degree. Sex for us is more mental than hormonal. Human civilizations have been around long enough now to finally begin to understand how much of a hodge-podge we are dealing with regarding the areas of love, sex, and marriage. Most people today, to varying degrees, understand that diversity is simply a reality, that sin is not involved. Love exists, but in many forms and ways, and most of the ways are just mysterious. Ask any parent who cannot understand how one of their beloved offspring can fall in love with someone so obviously a loser. More people today accept that people change over time, and a perfect match for marriage at one age may not prove to be so perfect 20 years later. Ask most anyone why their preference for sexual acts is what it is, and they will be speechless. We all know why sex jokes are so funny——most every sexual act is hilarious for the lack of rationale to it. A child not yet with a strong sexual drive will find any explanation for most sex acts, if not funny, as on the level of Abbot and Costello, at least find it weird and/or repulsive.
Recently a solid Catholic country—Ireland, voted overwhelmingly to make gay marriage legal despite the insistence of the Catholic Church that gay sex and marriage is a sin. In short, reasoned ethics is now winning out over Church doctrines written centuries ago by humans. It is the same scenario that has played out over the historical years. If organized religious sects were ever the actual word of God, then animal and human sacrifices were once sacred aspects of life, as was slavery, serfdom, segregation of public facilities, witch trials, women having no right to vote, and so it goes. Over time, more and more citizens gained rights once held only by some of the citizens. In time, churches painfully adjusted, but each time it created doubt in the minds of parishioners as to how the church could have not gotten it wrong for so many years. Today there is so much accumulated knowledge and exposure to human diversity, that more and more people are using logic and reason to develop an innate genetic sense of ethics. In the United States 23% of adults claim no religious affiliation. In Ireland, the vast majority still say they are Catholics, but selectively choose which part of Catholic doctrine they personally believe.
Many issues vital to modern civilization—like human overpopulation, environmental degradation, species extinction, climate change, and disparity of wealth distribution are spinning out of control, but human attitudes about the same rights for everyone are continuing to catch up with the ethical principle of the Golden Rule. When I was young and wandering around a crowded entertainment district in a city, the blacks hung with blacks, hispanics hung with hispanics, whites with whites, the good looking with the good looking, the ugly with the ugly, the athletes with the athletes, the bookworms with the bookworms, the poor with the poor, the rich with the rich, and so on. Today it is much different in that groups of young people are far more often to be diverse. Marriage between different religions and ethnic groups has risen at a dramatic rate. I reckon soon enough that fad will fade and the young will have to find a different way to be ‘hip’ besides marrying out of their own cabal.
The specific reasons why gay marriage should be an acceptable form of marriage have been covered in great detail throughout the rapid and amazing growth of acceptance for gay marriages. When this notion of fairness finally caught on it grew exponentially, in large part because gay couples are not a large minority. If gays were 40% of couples this battle would still be raging on with explosive riots in the streets. That means, despite the claim of some that marriages would lose their sanctity, most people realize their own marriage is hardly affected at all by who someone else marries. How do we measure sanctity in any scientific way? Is sanctity of marriage even definable? What is going to be different about a marriage when this ’sanctity of marriage’ is stolen by gay people? Is the sanctity gone from all marriages, or did gay people snatch it away for themselves or what?
All of us sometimes wonder why others cannot change the way they ‘feel’ about issues which seem plenty fair and rational enough on paper. The answer as to why we are all so inflexible on some issues may be as follows: If we learn to ride a bike it is something which we have learned for a lifetime. We can get on a bike as an adult, not having ridden one for years, and it is no problem and away we go. But if we build a bike where we have to turn the steering bars in the opposite direction to get the wheels to turn as we wish, we cannot ride the bike unless we try doing it for a long period of time. That is because our brain has learned to process the nerve activity in certain ways to ride a regular bicycle.
We clearly understand that to ride the new bike we have to think differently. But we can’t, at least without learning a new way all over again. If we have learned to view gay couples as an aberrance, then every time we think about this topic, the same old neuronal pathways become initiated and we get the same old abhorrent feelings. Same with an athlete. Once we really don’t like an athlete, for whatever reason, if is hard to suddenly like the athlete no matter what reasons for changing are thrown our way. The point here is this: there is a neuronal circuit basis for why we so strongly hold our prejudices even when there is logical reason to abandon such neuronal circuitry. To accept new factual or logical reasoning on an issue we are mentally entranced in, requires shutting down established neuronal circuitry and opening up new ones. Take the recent Waco Texas biker brawl in which 9 were killed and over 1000 guns confiscated. How we feel about all this depends on our own established neuronal wiring. For example, if these had been black motorcycle gangs the perceptions and level of anger/fear for many would have risen exponentially. Suppose it had been female bikers? Or hispanic? or an elderly motorcycle gang? What happened could be identical, but how we would feel about it would change. We tend to think what we see and feel is reality. But that is not how the human mind works at all. Our brains are not like computers in which we plug in data and get a solution based solely on the input. Our brains accept input and tend to filter the input and activate circuitry the brain has already put in place. If the original circuitry is incorrect regarding justice or fairness for example, then it takes time and conscious effort to create new circuitry for the same issue. Some people are more adaptable than others. Beliefs based on a religious basis can often be strongly hard wired in our brain. It is just hard to change.
This explains why new human rights for those not currently having such rights take time to happen. It is always the younger generation who readily interpret the same input on the same issue, and yet create neuronal circuits on the issue which differ from the previous generation. The same with music from one generation to the next. The same with dress codes from one generation to the next. Dress code history is a real circus. Humans started off with wearing practically nothing then decided modesty dictated more clothing until at one point, especially women, were wrapped like in a cocoon. Then the pendulum swung the other way until now less is better or at least for those with certain shapes. It perhaps is not accidental that ward robe ‘malfunctioning’ only seems to happen to those for whom such an event will elevate their career. When is the last time we saw a member of the church choir have a wardrobe malfunction? Or a member of the back up singers? Perhaps if everyone simply wore nothing then the young would insist on clothing all over again. We may, via ingrained circuitry think all babies are cute, but there is no such luck after that, and none of us would appreciate being on an crowded airplane if no one had clothes on.
Gay rights is logically a no-brainer. Contraceptive devices are a no-brainer. That a child can be raised successfully by a single parent is a modern day no-brainer. That the earth is now suffering from human overpopulation is a modern day no-brainer. That climate changed by human activity is upon us is a modern day no-brainer, that modern day disparity of wealth distribution will lead to domestic implosion is a no-brainer. No-brainer is, of course, a silly term. We all have functioning brains, but when they get wired from input in the past these brains are not easily rewired based on new input. No logical person is ever going to claim everyone is safer if everyone is walking around packing assault weapons. I know some individuals who are inherently, by nature and personality, uncomfortable with guns, yet because they associate strongly with conservative Republican leaders, they simply cannot process any negative feelings about everyone owning guns. After all, this seems to be a requirement for being a Republican just as gay marriage being a sin is a requirement for being a good Catholic. Reason and logic become irrelevant.
While justice and equal rights for all citizens has made tremendous progress in most parts of the civilized industrial countries, those countries in which religious sects have a firm grip on government lag far behind any justice and equal rights for all citizens. Organized religion has never in history been a force to promote peace or justice for all. Look what organized religion and politics has done to all of Africa, most of South America, the Middle East, and the American Indians. History sort of dictates that when missionaries of any ilk arrive, run like hell or drive them out immediately. We now have an Africa whose borders were decided by others with no respect to rival tribes, and no understanding that the seasonal climate changes often require humans and animals to migrate with the seasons. Now there are nation boundaries so humans are forced to stay and suffer droughts and monsoons at their own peril. No more migrating with the weather.
It is uplifting, at least for many, to see more people gain rights and justice. I always prefer to see all kinds of people happy and able to earn a good living and diversity be appreciated. Unfortunately, all this progress regarding justice and equal rights is being overshadowed across the globe by human overpopulation and a rapid rise in those unemployed or earning less than a living wage. Two figures loom large in a depressing way regarding the global future. In the U.S. 43% of the adult population does not earn enough money to be eligible to pay federal income taxes. Of course that means they don’t have enough money to buy enough items to keep the economy healthy either. Worldwide, 75% of adults do not have a permanent job. This means total implosion not too far down the road. Without living minimum wages, more and more people need to work two jobs, more married couples need both work, and all this means there are not enough jobs now for everyone to have a job, and increased population just exponentially exasperates the problem. With so many competing for the few jobs, wages go down and without minimum wages being tied to increases in the cost of living, more and more people are forced to wallow in poverty. Then, when not enough people are paying taxes, government services become unaffordable and government employment gets cut back which puts even more people out of work and into poverty, and they also stop spending, and the economy spirals even further into the ditch. It is positive feedback everywhere we turn.
I watch all these groups finally get long denied human rights and more equal justice, and it makes me happy for them. The sad aspect is that they are getting all these rights and justices at a time when economic forces are rapidly making more and more citizens in every country poorer and poorer. All the rights and more justice will not stop human overpopulation, or global wage and benefit reductions, with the subsequent poverty on a massive level. The short term looks bleak, societies will implode, and as history shows the have-nots will topple the haves, and turmoil will set in for everyone. The Middle East mentality of intolerance and revenge will become the norm everywhere. But Mother Nature, as always, via God’s laws which govern the evolutionary process, now millions of years old, will force the proper corrections—not on human time, but evolutionary time (measured in eons) and progress, no matter now long the corrections lasts, will emerge, as it always has, to evolve into more complex and advanced global forms of life.
The real clunker here, from an overall vantage point is this; Those who have strong emotional objections to others getting the same rights they already have, or the same kind of justice others already have, or the same kind of health care, schools, benefits, tax shenanigans they already have, vote on these hot button issues with the 2-5 percenters who have the power and money to control elections and via that, stack the Supreme Court so that the means to retain their wealth and even accumulate more will stay in place. The 3-5 percenters could care less, for the most part, about these hot button issues, but without these issues they could not possibly win any elections.
While gay marriage is clearly here to stay, marriage is a stressful and complicated lifestyle. Half of marriages don’t even last. As usual, be careful of what you wish for, you may actually receive it.
I went to a gay parade maybe two years ago. It was celebratory bedlam, crowded, no room on buses or trains, the parade lasted 5 hours (not for me, like with most things, enough is enough), but all kinds of people, most not gay, were just festive, in good spirits, friendly, and this kind of atmosphere probably did as much as anything else to break down the persecution of harmless enough people. Live and let live is good tonic for our souls as well as enable us to live a more contented life.
