Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/gender-and-sexuality/page/4/)
About struggles to be who we are, and to love each other across the categories.
This challenge is certainly not reserved for the Catholic Church. Many — perhaps most — organized religions and denominations struggle with LGBTQ rights. How is anyone who feels drawn to a place of worship to resolve this disconnect? How can a message of love be heard when it is delivered in an envelope of “not for all”?
It’s true that commercial hip-hop is often sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, and violent. The same is true of contemporary cinema, television, sports, and wider American culture. This is precisely why we should create spaces for our students to critique these messages.
Though the Catholic Church has scratched, tarnished, and clouded the stone that is the Emerald Isle with its wheel of oppression, the people have spoken loudly and clearly, and by so doing, have dismantled some of the spokes on that wheel and have polished the stone to brilliance once again. In what can only be seen as an historic vote, for the first time anywhere in the world, the people of the Republic of Ireland voted overwhelmingly, by a majority of 62 percent to 38 percent, to sanction marriage for same-sex couples with all the legal benefits and responsibilities already granted to different-sex couples (thereby dismantling a spoke on the wheel of Catholic oppression). An estimated 60.5 percent of the eligible 3.2 million registered voters turned out to the polls. Though the Irish government passed civil partnership legislation in 2010, which could have been rescinded by future legislative actions, this popular referendum now constitutionally codifies the legal standing of same-sex couples. In another clear defiance of the doctrines and warnings of the very powerful Catholic Church, a similar referendum was taken in 1993, which for the first time in that country decriminalized same-sex sexuality (dismantling another spoke), and in 1995, legalized divorce (dismantling yet another spoke).
The reinforcing messages sent from “breastaurants” like Twin Peaks and Hooters are quite clear”: inscribed gender roles and promotion of socially constructed norms of female beauty, which are exclusionary hegemonic ideologies in terms of body size and shape and standards for skin and hair type. These establishments endorse a consumeristic colonization of women’s bodies for the edification of the objectifying male gaze.
What kinds of messages are we sending our youth? Do we truly understand our own complicity in the bullying we see in our schools? Unless and until we grapple with the ways in which our society promotes and gives justification to such bullying, we will never truly solve these problems.
The GOP’s philosophy of an unrestricted free market system increases the size and magnitude of mega global corporations that gobble up small and emerging entrepreneurs. It attempts to deny basic human and civil rights to LGBT people, rights that are routinely accorded to heterosexual people. How is this a “pro-life” party?
Love is the power with which we can do more than we can even imagine. Whether we reflect on federal marriage rights today, or civil rights in Baltimore, consider that all holy texts hold love as a supreme value.
Marriage equality for same-sex couples is indeed a federal issue. If such judicial waypoints as the Emancipation Proclamation and the decisions of Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade were not reached by the Supreme Court, American society today would remain indefensibly worse.
There is a misconception that Trans women are performing femininity; they are feminine in their minds and bodies. “There are big women, small women, tall women, short women and trans women; it’s just different,’’ says Minerva, who identified as a female from the beginning. “It just felt right, we have to respect each other’s feelings, no?”
How can you believe in a religion that doesn’t accept or tolerate your lifestyle? Isolated LGBTQ people of faith have found blogs and social media to be effective ways to contend with the messages they encounter within religious discourse.