It’s All About Love

June 21, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

Today a friend called back to say that she and her partner had just signed a contract for their wedding and reception site: a beautiful hotel ballroom with a view of the ocean, the Long Beach skyline, and the Queen Mary in the harbor. It sounds fantastic. Her voice practically bubbled right out of the phone.

I am really looking forward to presiding at their wedding. And right away I started writing some language that may wind up as part of the “meditation” or personal remarks I can squeeze into the ceremony. But I am also mindful that her partner’s poor health and recent emergency room visit is what prompted these women to move their wedding date forward.

If only the “religious reich” could understand the depth of love and commitment between people like them, and between me and my partner of 32 years. Two people, period. The sex or gender of the partners doesn’t make any difference, and what they’re all worked up about is that the government form which used to say “Bride” and “Groom” in the boxes now says “Partner A” and “Partner B.”

I think the fundagelicals are obsessed about sex. As if the sex of the partner is the most important thing about marriage. Or the possibility that the partners in a marriage will have ex after they are married. For such people, it’s not about people. It’s not about love. It’s not about fidelity, commitment, about richer or poor, in sickness or in health. For them, it’s about sex.

They can yammer all they want that sex is all about family (that sex belongs only in a heterosexual marriage where babies are the only permissible conclusion to the sex act), but it isn’t. There are all kinds of wonderful families that came together without anyone having sex with anyone.

And they can yammer about sex is wrong unless it’s pat of a lifelong marital commitment, but they refuse to recognize, let alone respect, our lifelong commitments, so that’s just rubbish.

The truth is that they have invented a theology of sex that says it is a reward for good behavior. If you’re good, you get to have sex. If you’re not, you don’t deserve it. And by “good” they now don’t even mean heterosexually married forever. They just mean heterosexual.

At least they won’t be able to castigate us any longer for having sex outside of marriage. We’ll be married men, or married women, and the opinions of the right wing can just be left hanging to twist in the wind, for all we care. If will only be the lesbians and the gay men, at this rate, who will stand up for the “traditional values” like love and commitment.

— Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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