It’s been almost a week now, but I’m still internalizing the seismic change taking place in Minnesota. Love is the Law! It all began at midnight on August 1…
Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak presided over forty six weddings at City Hall in the wee hours of Thursday, August 1, beginning at 12:01 AM. By turns laughing and crying, he said over and over that these couples were now lawfully married. Watching those weddings of total strangers, I cried several times myself, and laughed a good bit too.
I didn’t burst into tears (as I feared I would) at the legalization of a longstanding partnership that I officiated on August 2, but I did later, driving on a suburban street, when I remembered the moment. What joy to look out at the faces of two women who have stood by each other for a quarter of a century and say, “I now pronounce you legally wed.” What joy in the faces of their relatives and friends gathered by the banks of the beautiful Mississippi in a small informal ceremony in Red Wing, Minnesota. (Here’s a short video piece of that moment, excerpted from a longer video of the wedding by Helen’s brother, Chaunce Stanton:)
Of course, it’s never that simple. Every wedding brings with it the ghosts of those who are not there, whether they are deceased or simply absent. For Nia and Helen, there were large gaps in the family fabric, perhaps not surprising considering that Helen’s stepsister is the aggressively homophobic Rep. Michelle Bachmann. This made the wedding planning both joyful and sorrowful. In our preparatory meetings, as with the other lesbian couples I’m working with on weddings this month, we talked about invitations sadly not issued, or refusals sadly received.
As Helen’s brother Mike said in a toast, Nia and Helen have been models of restraint and respect through this entire battle for equality in Minnesota. It was out of respect for Helen that wedding guests at my table did not lift up a loud toast to Michelle, stating that without her we never would have reached this day.
And yet, that’s pretty accurate. Before heading off for the nation’s capitol, Minnesota State Rep. Michelle Bachmann repeatedly spearheaded the addition of a constitutional amendment defining marriage as solely between a man and a woman. The amendment never got on the ballot when the DFL was the majority, but as soon as Republicans controlled the legislature, after Michelle had moved on to bigger things, they moved forward quickly with it. And, while previously the DFL had held both houses, they were always hesitant and nervous when approached by GLBT advocates to move much of anything forward that was supportive of domestic partnership. Marriage equality would have been out of the question.
Then came the 18 month campaign, based in honest conversations with 27,000 regular Minnesotans involved. Minnesotans defeated the Constitutional amendment, and brought the DFL back into leadership of both houses. After that, DFL leaders were willing to move ahead with marriage equality. Eventually, a few brave Republicans crossed over, and both houses voted yes. And now, here we are, one of the 13 states where folks like Nia and Helen can quit worrying about caring for each other in their old age, and having access for hospital visits, and creating wills that try to assert that they are in fact related. Folks can get on with life! Hopefully we can move on with progressive movement in other arenas—jobs , housing, good education for all.
Which brings me to the one funeral I attended last week, also on August 1. It was for Ron McKinley, a prominent Native American philanthropist, educator, and activist. Hundreds of people of every conceivable culture, race, religion, age, ability, gender, and sexual orientation gazed out over Como Lake Thursday morning, some of us bleary eyed from watching weddings in the wee hours of the morn. I knew Ron only tangentially but know and love some of his family well. We heard testimonies and stories of joy, love, commitment, and wisdom in a life cut tragically short in a motorcycle accident. Several of the speakers commented on how much Ron would have loved the event, and how much the gathered crowd was in fact his legacy. It was an awe-inspiring legacy to me.
If weddings cause all present to re-examine our own relationships, funerals prod those of us outside the most intense sphere of grief to reflect on how well we are living out our life’s purpose. Ron’s memorial service certainly did that for me. As much as the weddings celebrate love and commitment, so I hope do our lives beyond that intimate partner.
So here is my toast: May marriage equality be one more step on our path towards a world where every person, no matter what, is equally valued, supported, and loved, until death do us part.
At 7:44am, one year ago today, our Little Bean finally came out into the world, with what felt distinctly like a “plop!”
From that moment on, things have felt like they are both, at one-and-the-same-time, in slow motion, and speeding by.
The first six months sometimes included what felt like the longest days I have ever known. I remember watching the clock, breaking up the hours in my mind into half hour segments until my partner and co-Mama would get home, and only allowing myself to think about getting through the next half hour. The baby would fall asleep in my lap and would wake up if I moved, so I didn’t move, sometimes for 2 hours or more. I remember being hungry, famished actually, and just being still and waiting. I remember having to go to the bathroom but not strategically being able to figure out a way to do that that would be safe for the baby. Our Little Bean was colicky and probably also reacting to our cross-country move when she was six weeks old—who can blame her for being fussy-pants? And, still, there were days that felt absolutely interminable, nights when she was crying at 2 a.m. or 4 a.m., or both, when I literally thought “how are we going to keep doing this?” At times I felt incredibly angry that no one had sat me down and really spelled out how incredibly hard those first six months can be, how absolutely soul-draining.
And I understand, as a wise grandmother said to me recently, that when someone shares the news that they’re expecting a child, “it’s hard to know what to say.” So we say “Congratulations,” and we send gifts and make meals, and we hope they’ll be okay. That they’ll make it through those first rough weeks and months.
And then, at some point between five and six months, things eased. Some combination of the following had occurred: we’d adjusted to our new reality, Little Bean was becoming more and more delightful, and we started having a babysitter come help for a few hours a few times a week. Now, finally a year later, there are a whole host of things I have a new appreciation for. One is just the combined set of feelings a parent can have about a child’s birthday that, before becoming a parent, I had no awareness of. I feel this sense of relief, gratitude, accomplishment and celebration, all mixed up together. We got her through the first year, the year of not yet eating “regular” food, the year of moving across country, this first year with its particular first-year-worries like SIDS and initial reactions to vaccines and solid foods and basic growth-and-development stuff and all of that.
I also feel truly amazed at what occurs in a human child in one year. In 365 days, she goes from being a “plop” to being a little person with a feisty spark and touching gentleness about whom another mom at the National Building Museum today observed: “she has such a sweet personality.” She most definitely knows who her Mamas are, she knows that as much as she’d like to, there are a great many things she should not put in her mouth so she looks at us first to check, she knows that she loves drumming and she knows how to press “play” on the CD player (over-and-over again; she’s still learning to press “play” once and then step back and enjoy the music). She knows that she loves bananas and avocados and she is eager to try whatever it is we are eating. She knows how to fall asleep on her own and most of the time she knows how to scootch on-and-off the bed safely. She knows the baby signs for “more,” “all done,” and “swimming” and she loves to wave “bye-bye” and “hello” to just about anyone and everyone especially if we don’t tell or ask her to, first. She knows when she’s at home. She knows her name.
There are so many things that have happened in this first year that I understand now why people say “it flies by.” It’s truly astonishing how much changes just from week-to-week and month-to-month. I’ve taken probably thousands of pictures and I probably haven’t taken enough, because there is so much that is uncapturable. She is growing up so quickly. In fifteen years now, she can get a learner’s permit — or, wait, fourteen years? That can’t be right.
But perhaps it is. Right. Right that our children would grow up just fast enough to take our breath away and make us want to pay close attention to them, every day. And right that those first six months don’t go on forever. As my partner and co-Mama says now: “what’s five months of hell?” I understand now why people say “it’s worth it.” I understand why people say that when you have a baby “everything changes.” Yep, and yep, and…wow.
Human religions have always been built upon foundations of the best available science of the time. Sometimes that science said that the middle earth sat in a large tree. Sometimes science said the earth sat on a turtle’s back. Ezekiel knew that the earth had four corners and was held up by pillars–heavens above, Sheol below. Upon these foundations, human beings built views of how the world worked.
An important reason that I became a Unitarian Universalist many years ago was the movement’s tradition of incorporating reason and science into religious understanding. When science finds that the earth moves, Unitarian Universalists don’t have to deny science. We say, “Hmmm. That’s interesting!” That’s why I’m a humanist and religious naturalist, standing in awe inside the great cosmic show.
Nowadays we know that our fate lies within the unfolding of the Big Bang. We still don’t know whether that fate lies in a universe that will expand forever, eventually succumbing to heat death, or if there might be a Big Crunch in our future, one that might even lead to another Big Bang. Whichever way the future may pan out, our ultimate fate is sealed in forces considerably larger than primate consciousness.
Similarly, carbon-based creatures have a predictable trajectory, from our constituent elements created in the explosion of stars, to the momentary cohesion that we call life, to our decomposition, and, eventually, that aforesaid fate at the end of the Big Bang.
So, what of this consciousness we experience now, in this fleeting moment we call human life? What better way to spend those brief moments than in awe and gratitude?
Is there free will or fate? Whether or not there’s a deity that has the hairs of our heads numbered, bad things keep happening to very good people. Observation indicates that a lot of chance is involved. After all, for each of us, our genetic material has more immediate and local origins than that birth in the explosions of stars. We arise as individuals in hemispheres, nations, regions, tribes, genders, and economic situations, all at specific times, all with measures of power within us and over us.
For example, a recent study shows that where I was born, in the Southern United States, only four percent of people become professionals. Four out of one hundred. That’s fate . . . Created not by the gods, but by very human decisions. (Don’t get me started on the sequester!)
Is there free will? Yes–it’s all up to us. Except when it’s not. A fact of our realities is that the fate of each of us belongs not only to you or me, but ALL of us. All of us.
That’s why I’m a humanist. In this very human world, it’s all up to us. We create problems; we can solve them, if we work at it. That’s the beauty . . . and the challenge . . . of how it is, according to science and reason.
It’s just how it goes in the backwash of that really Big Bang . . .
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