My new article on Pagan+Politics, inspired by the American Family Association’s demand to stone a killer whale and SeaWorld Orlando’s curator, deals with the issue of projecting ancient law codes into the present. You can find it here.
You can find my interview with Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation at Pagan + Politics, the blog of the Pagan Newswire Collective: http://politics.pagannewswirecollective.com/2010/02/26/an-interview-with-mikey-weinstein-of-military-religious-freedom-foundation/
I hope you will take the time to give it a read. Mr. Weinstein has a very important message to get across about a threat to our freedoms that is very real and very frightening. It is one we should all take seriously.
I would like to introduce here my very first piece for Politicus USA (www.politicususa.com), Conservatives Argue Against the Constitution When They Oppose Gay Marriage
I am excited to be part of Politicus and look forward to being a weekly contributor there. This piece I see as a logical extension of my most recent piece here regarding gender and this is an issue, along with anything related to church-state issues, that I will discuss frequently wherever I can get my voice heard.
INTRODUCTIONThe gay/lesbian rights movement has been called the civil rights issue of the new millennium. Conservative Christian groups oppose granting the gay-lesbian community the rights guaranteed them by the Constitution and they do so on the basis of a black and white moralistic dichotomy. Some Pagan groups do as well. I will argue here that opposition to gay and lesbian rights on a historical basis is misguided and – where not influenced by Judeo-Christian understanding of morality – is based on modern ideas of gender roles and categories. Homosexuality has not been universally seen as immoral; it has not even always been seen as homosexuality. As often happens, the truth is much more complex than the simple black and white model offered modern Western audiences.
We claim to live in an enlightened age yet we are trapped by our own understanding of gender roles and categories. We are brought up to believe that there are boys and there are girls. Boys have penises and girls have vaginas. And there is nothing in between and it is obvious how the pieces are supposed to go together. And no surprise: we are brought up to see the world in this way.
But it is not the only way; other cultures and other ages have different ideas and understandings. In the industrialized West we determine gender categories based on plumbing. We don’t base these categories on gender roles; instead, gender roles have for a long time been determined by gender categories: men fight and hunt; women engage in domestic duties.
Likewise, if a boy makes love to a boy, it is homosexuality. You thus have a category called “homosexual” – those who engage in same-sex sexual relations. Both participants are labeled as homosexuals.
But homosexuality, few people realize, is a modern concept. The pathology of the 19th century created the category from the male/female conceptualized as abnormal.[1] Ancient ideas about sex and sexuality are far more ambiguous.[2]
To claim therefore that modern distinctions and prejudices are simply continuances of ancient Pagan feeling on the subject is to misstate the case. As Marilyn Katz puts it, “the nineteenth-century notion of sexual pathology was unknown to antiquity.” As she goes on to say, “[T]here is a radical discontinuity between the ancient and modern discourses on sexuality.”[3]
This is a point upon which modern Pagans would do well to ponder. Will we appeal to the past, or to the present, or will we find our own way? And if we appeal to the past we must have a care that we do not impose our own prejudices on our interpretation of history. As Beate Wagner-Hasel observed in 1989, the debate over the status of women in ancient Greece “is not only an attempt to reconstruct a bygone way of life, it is also a discourse over woman’s place in modern bourgeois society which had its beginnings in the Enlightenment and has continued up until the present time.”[4]
Archaeologist Joan Breton-Connelly speaks of “presentist” assumptions – arguments based on or colored by “late twentieth -century political sensibilities.”[5] With regard to genders as “fixed” categories Breton-Connelly appeals to Judith Butler’s questioning of “woman” as a fixed category in her Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) in which she “exposes the ways in which traditional feminist constructs decontextualize individuals from their historical, political, and cultural settings and identities.”[6] The same can be said of homosexuals as a fixed category.
But what if gender was based on gender roles instead of plumbing?
Take for example my own Norse ancestors. While a boy might be born with male sex organs, that simple fact did not in itself make him a man. Gender categories were not fixed and manhood was something that had to be earned – and maintained – through the activities normally associated with that gender category. This meant that while a boy and his penis could aspire to manhood, so could a woman. By laying aside one set of gender roles and embracing another, a woman could become a man. Conversely, a man could become a woman.
Critics – many of them Christian – and Western – say “you confuse gender roles with gender categories.” The answer to this claim is that such a viewpoint is ethnocentric and of little help in understanding the complex nature of gender issues both temporally and spatially.
“This is a world in which ‘masculinity’ always has a plus value, even (or perhaps especially) when it is enacted by a woman,” writes one scholar.[7] It was “a society in which being born male precisely did not confer automatic superiority, a society in which distinction had to be acquired, and constantly reacquired, by wresting it away from others.” Because women had no theoretical ceiling and men no theoretical floor, gender categories were flexible and movable.[8]
Like the Norse, the Romans and Greeks lacked a modern understanding of “homosexual” and “heterosexual.” Once again, it was not what a Roman “was” but what a Roman “did” that determined things. A Roman male was supposed to be a penetrator, the “active” partner in sexual activity. It was manly to penetrate; it was feminine to be penetrated.
The poet Horace put it thusly:
When your organ is stiff, and a servant girl
Or a young boy from the household is near at hand and you know
You can make an immediate assault, would you sooner burst with tension?
Not me. I like sex to be there and easy to get.
As one author puts it, for a free male citizen of Rome “to be sodomized was shameful, a betrayal of his masculinity. Anyone who was known to enjoy being buggered was scorned.”[9]
The Norse understood things in the same terms. “Anal penetration constructed the man who experienced it as whore, bride, mare, bitch, and the like – in whatever guise a female creature.”[10]
To put it bluntly: A hole was a hole was a hole, and quite literally, since the Roman word “vagina” (which means sword-sheath) applied equally to vagina and anus and certain Norse words served the same dual purpose.[11]
The evidence suggests that for the Norseman’s “character was not either male or female, but lay on a spectrum ranging from strong to week, aggressive to passive, powerful to powerless, winner to loser.”[12]
To be called a man was the highest compliment a man could pay a “woman,” as we see in Laxdaela Saga when Snorri of Helgafell says of Gudrun the Fair, “Now you can see what a man Gudrun is, when she gets the better of both of us.”
To be a man was to be hvatur – bold, active, and vigorous – and this was to be admired, whatever sort of plumbing you had. Likewise, to be blauður – soft and weak – was to be despised, whatever sort of plumbing you had.[13]
In our world of assumed certainty, things are far less certain than we like to pretend. As it turns out, gender roles and categories are nebulous, shifting things. In the end, they are what we say they are from age to age and culture to culture. We decide man = x and woman = y but x and y are neither fixed nor universal.
The moralizers in some ancient pre-Christian societies decided that men were penetrators and women were penetrated. The old ditty about Caesar demonstrates this, that he was “every woman’s man, and every man’s woman.” In contrast to today’s paradigm, by sodomizing another man Caesar would not be seen as effeminate; but being sodomized was another matter altogether.
Christian moralizers, following Jewish Law, presented the Western world with a new paradigm: Not only did men “insert” and women “receive,” but men could only be insertive with regards to women and women could only be recipients of men. Any toying with this equation was an abomination that had unhappy results for all concerned. And the derision of your fellows (in Pagan cultures) and a relatively quick death (in Judaism) was replaced in Christianity by an eternity of hellfire.[14]
And so it remains today.[15]
Except that these distinctions are all artificial. In mathematics numbers added to or subtracted from other numbers have certain, unchangeable results. But nature – and life – don’t work that way. There is homosexuality in the natural world outside of the human species – or at least we label it as such (we can’t possibly know how the animals involved would think of it).[16]
It is the human-imposed synthetic categories of “moral” and “immoral,” “normal” and “abnormal” that is unnatural. They are not universal; they are not constant and unchanging. They are what we say they are. And if we want, we can say they are something else. The irony is, for the West, that it is a religion that distances itself from nature that has decided for us what is and is not natural.
Some Pagan moralizers sound like conservative Christians; they like to say that homosexuality is immoral but they have forgotten to change their moral filters. For a reconstructionist religion making this determination isn’t reconstructing the past; its imposing modern prejudices on their model of the past (which had an entirely different set of prejudices).
On reconstructionist grounds alone, there is no basis for 21st century ideas about gender roles and categories; you cannot reconstruct what did not exist. It seems the pathology of the 19th century can capture those who escape the clutches of Judeo-Christian moralizing.
The monolithic and universal category of male/female is a myth, the determinants differing for every culture and/or religion. For one group to say “our way is the True way” is not only arrogant but wrong-minded. Just as every ethnic group or culture has a religion that is true for it (true because it works) so every culture has gender roles that work for it. We may not approve of them, but then, who are we to say that we are right and they are wrong? Put the shoe on the other foot and see how you feel about it.
Once we start imposing our particular views, once we start categorizing our local views as universal, we open ourselves up to a world where might makes right, where the dominant culture (which in recent centuries has been Western and Christian) determines in a blatantly ethnocentric manner what is right for everyone: this is what a woman is, this is what a man is. These are the rules permissible for men and women; conform or die.
But ancient Church Councils aside, universal truths are not attainable by popular vote. One book, developing out of one culture and society (and religion) no matter how popular, cannot dictate for everyone what determines gender roles and categories. Such an understanding is only one out of many thousands of possibilities.
If we are going to come to a new understanding of these matters, we have to set aside our arrogance and our ethnocentrism; we need a new paradigm…and a new discussion.
[2] See Ray Laurence, Roman Passions: A History of Pleasure in Imperial Rome (Continuum, 2009), 84-86 for a discussion of views of “homosexuality”in the Roman world.
[3] Katz (1992), 92.
[4] Beate Wagner-Hasel, “Frauenleben in orientalischer Abgeschlossenheit? Zur Geschichte und Nutzanwendung eines Topos,” Der Altsprachliche Unterricht 2 (1989), 19.
[5] Joan Breton-Connelly, Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece (Princeton University Press, 2007), 19-20.
[6] Breton-Connelly (2007), 22.
[7] Carol Clover, “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe,” Speculum 68 (1993), 372.
[8] Clover (1993), 380.
[9] Anthony Everitt, Augustus (Random House, 2006), 149.
[10] Clover (1993), 375.
[11] Clover (1993), 378.
[12] Nancy Marie Brown, The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman (Harcourt, 2007), 74.
[13] Brown (2007), 74.
[14] And in Uganda, with the support of extremist American Evangelicals, we are seeing the return of the death penalty for homosexuality. See “Human Rights Impact Assessment of Uganda’s Anti-homosexuality Bill,” The Zeleza Post, January 17, 2010 http://www.moveon.org/r?r=86439&id=18903-6770804-EYlalox&t=5
[15] See the discussion at ReligiousTolerance.org: http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_legis.htm
[16] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/5550488/Homosexual-behaviour-widespread-in-animals-according-to-new-study.html
If the United States was founded by Christian Europeans, the government established in the wake of the Revolution was secular. This was not only a protection of belief (or lack of belief) but a protection of government. The religious wars of the Old World were a recent memory for those people and they knew firsthand the dangers of government sponsored religion.
More than two centuries later, we live in the most pluralistic society in the world. There are not only Christians (protestant, catholic and denominations too numerous to count), but Buddhists, Hindus, Scientologists, atheists, pagans, and others. Every possible viewpoint is represented as never before in history in a single culture.
It is not always easy getting along. Christianity still dominates American culture. Christians are still a majority, though even defining what makes a person Christian is as difficult as it was in the first Christian century. The process of syncretism, which affects every religion, has had some positive effects. There are Christians who accept that there are other paths to “salvation” and who embrace more New Age viewpoints, such as reincarnation and past lives.
On the other hand, there have been some negative effects. There are those who do not want to lose their “dominant culture” status, who feel threatened by the loss of status in society, who ever more stridently insist that the United States was founded as a Christian Nation and who claim that atheists, feminists, pagans and secular humanists are to blame for all the ills of society, and not only that, but a danger to the country itself.
This argument is right out of the Old Testament. And for non-Christians of every stripe, it smells of rank superstition – a petulant, jealous, childishly angry deity punishing those who dare think for themselves. The Hurricane Katrina disaster is laid at the door of this angry god (punishing the sinful people of New Orleans) as is the recent quake in Haiti. This is what YHWH did to the people of Israel who “whored after foreign gods” we are told.
The irony is that those foreign gods were actually ethnic gods of the Jewish (Canaanite) people and YHWH himself was the foreign god – a god out of NW Arabia (Sinai) brought into the country most likely by Midianite merchants. But conservative Christians have built up a mythical past to which they can appeal at need, one which, while taking little cognizance of history, makes history conform to a system. This is not good history, but as Kierkegaard said, Christianity is belief in the absurd and it is certainly absurd to refuge to acknowledge the facts as they lay plainly before you.
The rest of us are trapped in this mythical world. And not only is ancient history mythologized but so is American history – the myth of a Christian Nation. And as rapidly as events happen in the real world, they are mythologized – re-interpreted to fit, to conform to the system. It is becoming difficult for the real world – and us – to keep up with the spin.
How does the majority of the population get along with a vocal, vitriolic minority who refuse to live in the same evidence based world in which we live? Though pagans and atheists and Buddhists and Hindus have many differences between them, it is far easier for these groups to coexist (along with more moderate Christians) than it is for any of them, singly or collectively, to get along with the extremist minority (whether we identify them as Evangelicals, Fundamentalists – or more pointedly, Talibangelicals).
The forces of reaction demand adherence to their myth. When we decline to play along, when we insist on our freedom of choice in these matters, we are told we are turning away from God. During the Bush Administration it was worse (if that’s possible): we were told that since God chose Bush (he apparently didn’t choose Obama?) if you opposed Bush you opposed God. Similarly, God chose the USA to continue Rome’s work in bringing people together (they’re easier to hammer into submission if you get them all into one place?) so if you oppose American policy you…yes, you see how this works now…you turn against God.
And you know what happens when you turn against God – hurricanes and earthquakes, Sodom and Gomorrah.
And for disagreeing, for embracing choice, we are accused of making war on Christianity, of persecuting them. If universal tolerance is a logical impossibility, we can still try to get along, can’t we? But how do you include somebody who sets themselves apart, who refuses to be included?
Look at it from the perspective of a little child (we’ll call him Tommy) who says, “I won’t play with you!” or “I’ll only play with you if you play by MY rules!” and who then says, when his demands are rejected, “They’re persecuting me!”?
But nobody is telling little Tommy who isolates himself in the corner that he can’t do what he wants. Tommy’s real problem is that Tommy insists the other children do what he wants. Tommy has the right to live and play as he chooses with like-minded children. He does not have the right to dictate to other children.
In the end, Tommy’s claims of persecution ring hollow. Nobody is persecuting Tommy. The other children are not insisting Tommy live and play like they do. They are just insisting he behave when in their company.
The Constitution is set up to deal with this. We do not have a true democracy; Madison understood that in a true democracy that the rights of minorities are trampled by majorities. The Constitution prohibits (in theory – but not in California?) such blatant abuses, which were thought of as the “excesses of democracy.” The rights of all are to be protected. The majority of the children and Tommy too. Each is free to seek happiness. None of them are free to dictate to the other. All are equal. None are privileged.
Tommy claims that his rights are being ignored, or trampled. But they’re not. And Tommy does not really want equal rights. He wants his views to be privileged. But for Tommy, not being free to dictate to the other children is an abridgment of what he sees as his rights – his right to dictate to others. Religiously, Tommy may feel he has that right, but those perceived rights must, in a pluralistic society (as ours is) take second place to equal rights for all. Because if one group has the right to dictate to the other groups, then only one group has rights. And you will find no support for Tommy’s position in the Constitution. None at all.
Believe what you want, live how you want, we are told, but extend that same right to others. Ironically enough, this very attitude is enshrined in the Bible Tommy holds so dear: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
But when you don’t live in an evidence-based world, you can ignore pesky little inconvenient facts like that, can’t you?
In the end, the rest of us – the majority as it happens – must insist on our rights; our Constitutional Rights. Our right to believe or disbelieve as we choose. As Jefferson said, “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” And he is right. It doesn’t. Tommy might be offended that the rest of us refuse to believe him when he says his god will punish us (and him) when we refuse to play by his rules, but the Constitution says (for very good reasons – grounded in centuries of religious conflict and terror) that Tommy doesn’t have the right to impose his rules on us, and that the government also lacks that power.
We have to insist on those rights, and insist loudly, as Tommy and others like him insist on making history – and us – conform to his system. It’s bad parenting, after all, to give into a child’s temper tantrum, and that is what this amounts to.
KALLISTI: An Apple in Pandemonium
Upstream from Lethe
The Executive Pagan
Little Heathen Fox
The Lost Viking
The Rational Heathen
Hearth of Northern Wights
Henadology
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