San Franciscan Morality

Since before the 1906 earthquake, San Francisco has been reviled by conservative Christians as a place of hedonism. Back then it was nicknamed Frisky City, and not a few religious figures of the time interpreted the great fires that burned the city to the ground as God's retribution against the city's sinfulness, likening it to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Not a whole lot has changed. There continues to be some truth to the characterization of San Franciscans as hedonistic-- we believe in enjoying ourselves and we do. The best word I've found to describe San Franciscans is gay-- in the classic sense (in addition, of course, to the newer sense). On sunny weekend days, San Franciscans dress lightly, fashionably, and in bright colors. They eat brunch with mimosas or seek out the best bakery in town for pastries. They bring their dogs to the park or picnic with friends. San Francisco is truly a gay, happy city. It's also, truly, the most moral city I've ever called home.

San Francisco is a bastion of "radical humanism", as my friend so aptly put it. That lends itself to investing in social programs, ethically produced food and bike lanes. More personally, San Franciscans believe in doing what they enjoy and encouraging others to do the same, whether that be drinking blow-your-mind-good coffee or wearing red pants and a brilliant paisley scarf or having gay sex or smoking weed in the park or getting a sex change or... I think you get the idea.

That may sound dangerously unbounded to people from more religious parts of the country, but it is actually very simply and rigidly bounded by a second principle: not infringing on or diminishing others' happiness. The minute the crazy homeless guy shoves someone is the moment when tolerance turns to intolerance. The minute a public discussion invokes racial epithets is when the eyes of every bystander's eyes darken.

As extensive as San Franciscan acceptance is, the rules of humanism follow right along. Humanism is, after all, a moral tradition at least as venerable as Christianity, predating it by a fair margin. There is no slippery slope here. For example, orgies do happen in San Francisco. They're not commonplace but everyone knows someone who's been to an orgy. However, there is none of the Bacchanalian destructive abandon associated with Roman orgies. Real San Franciscan orgies, by every account I have heard so far, are extremely structured environments. That everyone be safe and comfortable is of primary importance. The implicit assumption is that such a thing is not worth doing if it causes harm. San Franciscan morality is outlined in black and white, just along different lines than conservative Christian morality.

San Francisco's combination of hedonism and moralism is also embodied by the kink community. The Society of Janus describes itself on its website thusly: "SOJ is a not-for-profit, all volunteer, San Francisco-based education and support organization devoted to the art of safe, consensual and non-exploitative BDSM." The society's mission is to teach people about BDSM, to share what they enjoy and likely have enjoyed for a long time. My experience reading dating profiles of people so inclined reinforces the impression that people in the kink community treat BDSM with strict sobriety and a careful eye for ethical pitfalls. Bestiality (which conservatives are so fond of mentioning in the same breath as homosexuality) is not remotely ethical, because an animal cannot give consent.

The BDSM community is only a small part of the city, but that emphasis on ethical behavior characterizes San Franciscans more broadly. Since I have moved here, many things that I have done thoughtlessly have been questioned by people around me, and discussed reasonably. The extreme moral conscientiousness of this city is remarkable, and the only people I've met of comparable moral conscientiousness are truly devout Christians. The difference is that instead of citing verses to explain why doing a given thing is wrong, San Franciscans will tell you exactly how it hurts people (or animals). Frankly, I find the moral intensity of both church groups and San Franciscans to sometimes be oppressive, but I appreciate the commitment.

San Franciscans are very familiar with how difficult it is to come out of the closet as gay. Every gay person has to deal with a feeling of non-acceptance from society at large, even those who were born and raised by accepting parents in the city itself. Being gay is far more difficult and alienating if someone comes from a conservative Christian family. Gay sons or daughters coming out of the closet to a conservative family risk disownment, but the reality for most gays is more subtle. There will be a certain distance created by the revelation and a certain sustained discomfort for both parties, because neither side can truly accept the other's viewpoint without giving up their own. Religious families are inclined to attempt to persuade their wayward sheep away from "the gay lifestyle". Even if a family resists this impulse, a certain level of frustration is an inevitable product of the rub between religious convictions and gay realities. It is a softer estrangement, but it still leaves lingering damage, damage that any gay person can tell you about (if they're comfortable doing so). Gays who grew up with strong religious convictions are forced into a crisis of faith, as they try to reconcile the teachings etched into them with their own nature, and must grapple with religiously-derived guilt. Gays, and San Franciscans more broadly, see firsthand the damage that religion can and does cause. This damage piques our San Franciscan sense of morality. When it comes to gays versus conservative Christianity, there is no question with which side this morality sides.

I think there's an unvoiced sentiment among conservative Christians that true love can only exist in a heterosexual relationship, or that romantic love in a heterosexual relationship is somehow different from romantic love in a gay relationship. We here in Frisky City know differently from experience. Of course, it's not rocket science. For every vocally happy recovering gay who has returned to the fold, there are a million vocally happy practicing gays. San Franciscans know that decisions have consequences, and further they know what decisions have what consequences, because they've tried out the options in true rational humanist fashion. We know that the only way for a gay person to find true romantic love is in a gay relationship, and that finding such love is among the most gratifying and fulfilling things in life. From the perspective of humanism, the truly immoral thing is trying to dissuade people from finding that love.

San Franciscans also know quite well what innocent fun is. This brings me, finally, to Hunky Jesus. The Hunky Jesus Competition, put on by the in-drag charity organization Nuns of Perpetual Indulgence, is innocent fun. The competition may be irreverent, but in San Francisco this is an integral part of its moral appeal. There is a need, particularly in gay San Francisco, to dance on Jesus' grave a little bit, to poke fun, to make light of the force of conservative Christianity, clearly discernible despite the distance (media carries it to us), that presses in on our little bastion of humanism with at best disapproval and at worst unabashed hostility.

That irreverence is entirely harmless unless, say, some idiot would deliberately troll and upset his conservative Catholic uncle by sending him an article about the event. Like I said, I'm not entirely in agreement with San Francisco's intense moralism, but I think I at least understand it. I hope you understand it better now too. San Francisco is a very different world from middle America, but despite both regions' best intentions, they are still one America.

If you visit me on a sunny weekend, I will suggest we get brunch in the Castro and order mimosas and eggs benedict. We can watch people go by, living their lives gaily. I promise you will enjoy it.

On Bisexuality

For reference, a baby boomer in my life said that it was ok to be gay, but that they just couldn't accept someone who was bisexual. This is among the more outlandish things they have ever said, and I felt that an explanation of bisexuality might prove informative to them and other baby boomers.

I think I should take some time to explain bisexuality to you, since I think your strong feelings about it aren't based in fact. This is something that your generation was never educated in when growing up, unlike mine. In addition to my advantage of age, I've received a decent amount of exposure to the issue because every girl I've dated since my first kiss has been bi (including the one I'm seeing tomorrow!).

Everyone lands somewhere on the Kinsey scale spectrum, from gay to straight, and everyone is a little bi. Gay men can successfully have sex with women, and the opposite is probably true for any heterosexual man. They might not enjoy it as much, but it would work and it would be at least a little enjoyable. It helps that people are turned on by people in general.

You can appreciate when a woman is pretty and I can appreciate when a guy is pretty and we can both admit that pretty people are more pleasant to look at than unpretty ones, even if they're not the gender we're sexually attracted to. You may think that's totally different from being "a little bi", but it's not really. Sexuality isn't nearly so tidy as we wish.

I guess I can see one thing potentially more subversive about bisexuality than homosexuality-- it's no longer a question of choice. Bisexual people have the choice whether or not to act bisexually, so from a Christian morality standpoint I guess you could say practicing bisexuals are the worst sinners of all. Let's be clear about what choice there is, though, because being born bisexual is just as little of a choice as being gay or straight. Acting on it is the part where bisexuals are uniquely rich in options.

Being born with a bisexual orientation can be convenient if you're, say, going to an all-girls school, and less convenient for keeping friendships uncomplicated. I've heard a couple bisexual girls say they are just attracted to people, not gender, which might help minimize that complication. I've heard a different bisexual girl say she had multiple "types" and was only into those people. I've also heard people profess that they "liked everyone". In any case, it's still a complicating factor for having platonic friends.

There are also a lot of interesting associations with being bi. People think of bi girls in completely different terms from how they think of bi guys.

Bi guys are often thought of as "gay lite" because it's pretty common for young gay guys to call themselves bi while on their way out of the closet before eventually honestly calling themselves totally gay. Even if people don't think of bi guys as being probably just gay, there is a lot more prejudice about it-- probably for the same reasons there is more prejudice about being gay and male than as a lesbian and with the added ingredient of confusion that bisexuality lends.

Bi girls, on the other hand, make a lot of people immediately think of threesomes. Apparently they get a lot more junk mail on OKCupid than pretty much anyone else. Of course, most bi girls are about as interested in threesomes as most straight girls, which is to say not really.

I admit I have a positive association with bi girls. Being out as bisexual means they've put some thought into their sexuality, which is an indication that they are open minded and comfortable with themselves (though it is no guarantee). It also means that there's the distinct possibility that I can talk with them about boobs or about how hot an actress on TV is. In short, bi girls have some of the perks of heterosexual guys while still being into guys. I'm no more concerned that a bi girl would cheat on me than that a straight one would-- being bi doesnt make someone fickle or flighty or even more sexual.

There's a good chance I will end up with a bi girl, so I'd like you to think long and hard about your problem with bisexuality. I cheerfully hope that you will no longer have that problem by the time I'm ready to marry somebody, whether or not that person is bi.

Cheers and love

How to Vote Like a Christian

Voting morally is an essential duty of every true Christian. If your church's congress or Pope or local Priest/Minister make suggestions it's easy, but if they don't provide sufficiently extensive guidance or if you want to figure out for yourself how to best carry out God's will, you may find yourself in a quandary.

For all the lip service that is lent to the Ten Commandments being the foundation of good law and for all the tablets and inscriptions of those commandments in American houses of law, you may be shocked to learn that only two of the commandments are written into law: thou shalt not steal and thou shalt not kill. Considering that America is an overwhelmingly Christian nation, it seems puzzling that we enforce only the two commandments that every nation on earth, Christian and heathen alike, enforce.

There are a few famous examples of Christian-run governments that attempted to enforce God's law to a more thorough extent, but unfortunately they were infamously harsh and/or authoritarian (Geneva circa the Reformation comes to mind). Let us dispense with past mistakes and begin anew.

Unfortunately, modern American law only partially encourages observance of God's commandment "thou shalt not kill". We should do everything in our power to make abortion illegal once again, but that's just the beginning of voting according to God's law.

Just as Jesus stayed an entire crowd's hands by saying "He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her", so too should we depart from the institution of capital punishment, as the blood of those criminals is on all of our hands, as voters.

We should also vote against unnecessary warfare. It is one thing to protect ourselves from a genuine invasion and quite another to bomb vast countrysides on the other side of the world, killing tens of thousands of innocents, for some theoretical insulation from a repeat of 9/11, which killed a relatively paltry two thousand. This sort of violence is appalling and decidedly unChristian.

As taxpayers are currently footing the bill for the massive killing machine that is our military and this military facilitates an aggressive attitude toward international politics, we should also downsize our military to one reflective of an attitude of self-defense, not of aggressive enforcement of worldwide dominance. This will also promote a greater sense of humility across our nation. Our international actions this past decade have frequently been grounded in pride, selfish fear and an insufficient love of our neighbors. Downsizing our military budget by an order of magnitude would go a long way towards stifling those American sins.

Sodomy and all manner of sexual perversions should of course be prohibited. Until these things can be outlawed, nothing resembling acceptance or tolerance of such behavior should ever be passed into law. This behavior is never okay and we as Christians should make this holy truth clear with our votes.

Even more important for protecting our country's social fabric, though, is preventing divorce and sex before marriage-- the two biggest contributors to social fragmentation and destruction of the family unit. The legalization of "no fault" divorce across states in the early 1970's had an appalling affect on the social fabric of America. One of the most important steps to bringing that fabric back together is going to be reversing that legislation and forcing married couples to work things out.

The problem of sex before marriage is a more difficult snarl to untangle. Abstinence-only sex education has done little or nothing to stem the rising tide of babies born out of wedlock. There is a deeper root cause at work here: young people are waiting until very late in their lives to marry and have children intentionally, and they are succumbing to temptation in the meantime. This is a result of a shifting economy, but Mormons have demonstrated that marrying early and having children within wedlock is feasible. Mormons consequently have a much lower rate of out-of-wedlock births. We should start by prohibiting sex before marriage and then institute a program to encourage marrying early, perhaps just out of high school as was typical in the 1950's.

An important topic of the Lord's teachings that we also need to take into consideration at the voting booth is that of poverty and wealth. Jesus said "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." He also suggested to his apostles, "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven." Between these two quotes I think we have a clear God-given mandate for how to structure our government's tax and entitlement systems.

First of all, American government should take money from the rich until they are no longer rich, and in so doing save their souls. We should then take this wealth and distribute it to the poor and save America's soul. It is very simple and it is very much in keeping with the gospel. The fact that America, as the most God-fearing of first world countries, does the least redistribution of wealth in this most moral of directions quite frankly boggles my mind.

These are the first and foremost things we need to vote for to save our souls and the soul of our nation. There are many further things we could do, such as formally recognizing America as a Christian nation and enforcing all ten of the commandments, but those must wait until America is ready for our holy vision. Baby steps, my fellow Christians, baby steps.

For those of you who enjoyed this dose of common sense, I recommend checking out my friend Rob's Reasonable Person's Guide to the Bible.

Gay Marriage Part 2: After Reason

I have tried approaching this topic reasonably. I attempted to craft a logical, facts-based argument in favor of gay marriage. The impact was unfortunately negligible. My mistake was in treating gay marriage as an issue for which reason plays any role. Living in San Francisco has also changed my attitude towards the issue. I had spent a lot of energy trying to understand the conservative viewpoint, but it turned out I didn't adequately understand the liberal viewpoint. The following is an adapted version of a letter I wrote to my uncle. Pierre, I apologize for singling you out when you are no more guilty than anyone on your side, you were just the catalyst.

I know it's surprising and potentially upsetting to think that so many Catholics are ignoring the Pope, but excluding Hispanics from the statistics in the article wasn't actually that disingenuous. The second article I sent says, "For all the opposition by leaders in the Catholic Church, their flock isn’t following. 'Nearly six-in-ten white non-Hispanic Catholics (59%) favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry,' Pew reports, 'as do 57% of Hispanic Catholics.' This shouldn’t come as too surprising. Catholics have been leading the way on same-sex marriage for some time now."

I agree that the emphasis on white Catholics of the first article raises an eyebrow, but at a 2% difference it's hardly something to get up in arms about. Considering that both Hispanic Catholics and non-Hispanic Catholics are roughly 10% more in favor than the national average of 48% from the same report, it doesn't seem far-fetched to generalize that Catholics as a group are a major demographic leading the charge on gay marriage.

As to the question of whether or not these are "real" Catholics, the pollsters do their best, but it would be much more difficult/expensive to parse an additional variable for cross-control (ie. churchgoing rates of respondents). By the flip side of the coin, are you really so interested in disowning the vast majority of those who call themselves Catholic? "You're not a real Catholic unless you single-issue-vote for theocracy, have had sex the same number of times you've had children and flagellate yourself every morning before coffee."

The argument that legalizing gay marriage represents a slippery slope or opens a Pandora's box is absurd. California or New York would sooner pass Jim Crow laws than legalize first cousins marrying (both are cut from the same Southern cloth, in our minds). There is no other "rights" group looking for an expansion of marriage law with even a trace of the sincerity, fervor or political legitimacy of the gay rights movement.

Based on your own very technical definition of "deviant", I will disagree that gay marriage is "merely an attempt to make themselves non-deviant." By your definition, they will never be "non-deviant", but they can be treated like first-class citizens and granted rights that cost the rest of us nothing. Gays are looking for their (theoretically secular) government to acknowledge that they exist in the most sensible legal way available. Don't tell me extensive legal documents or civil unions are the same thing. They are clumsy workarounds to a glaring hole in contemporary law. The hole is one generated by a social reality that's at least 40 years old: gay people act remarkably like heterosexual people. They find someone they want to spend their lives with, they own houses together, they adopt children, etcetera. The elegant solution staring us in the face is legal marriage-- but that's not the argument to endorse it. The real argument to endorse it is that to willfully ignore and actively lobby against that elegant solution is insulting. You're telling people, "fuck you, this may be a secular government, but it's a democracy and you will play your charade of open, legally-recognized homosexuality over my dead body and every other REAL christian this country can muster."

Do you have any idea how ugly your side is? Do you have any idea how many people hate Middle America, the Pope, Jesus because of people like you? I have heard so many people in this city speak fervently about how ugly religion is and, coming from my background, I didn't understand at first. Living here for awhile you realize that nobody cares if a person gay. People don't play guessing games, they don't gawk, they don't ask, they just don't care. That is true non-judgement, not the silly mainline christian charade of "hate the sin, love the sinner". Do you have any idea how liberating, how utopian that feels, even to someone who isn't gay? It becomes very easy to understand why people here think of Middle America as a hell pit of judgement and scorn. I've seen it from both sides and I know your heart is in the right place, but I understand people here when they wrinkle their nose at the idea of living in Louisiana-- too much racism and religious zealots and judgement, they say-- and it's true! Isn't judgement for the afterlife? When did Jesus say that good people should tell other people how to live with their words and, when that becomes socially uncouth, with their votes? Y'know, I don't even care what Jesus said, because that wouldn't make it less ugly.

Law and Marriage

As riveting as the prospect of two well-qualified presidential candidates may be, the most exciting decision to be made remains California Proposition 8, the state constitutional amendment to define marriage as heterosexual and thereby reverse the California Supreme Court ruling that allowed gay marriage. While this will certainly not reverse the fact that thousands of legally binding same-sex marriage contracts have already been issued or that plenty of other states now offer same-sex marriage, the fact remains that California is a big deal and both sides are approaching it with the urgency of a nuclear bomb threat.

I'm here to weigh in on the American legal system and its relevance to the institution of marriage as well as the battle for America's soul. Just as with prostitution, fireworks or most famously abortion, the American legal system was devised to promote a permissive society. Before Roe v. Wade, abortion was legal in several states and to anyone willing to travel to those states abortion was effectively legal across the country. Such is the nature of our system that it makes it difficult to legislate morality (and fire safety). The Constitution does not prohibit values voting, it merely stacks the deck against it.

It is important to consider that marriage is something of two distinct but overlapping definitions, legal and religious. Marriage has had legal ramifications and thus civil definition since law itself came into existence and religious definition likely since religion came into existence. This means that while the religious definition probably predates the civil one, Christian matrimony is certainly predated by civil marriage. While in countries with state religions the two were nearly inseparable, in a country of religious pluralism marriage is ultimately defined by the state. Consequently, many sects only recognize marriages they themselves have officiated and refuse to recognize civil divorces, including Mormonism and Catholicism.

The religious argument for discouraging homosexuality is fairly sound and I won't dispute it here, but we should remember that in a country of many faiths the government should act as the common denominator rather than a tool of one faith against another (I speak here of Christian sects whose Biblical interpretation allows for gay marriage). In a permissive society such as ours, the side granting personal rights is never the aggressor.

We can only conclude that the present point of contention is one of the formal acceptance of homosexuality and societal definition rather than religion per say. Though the California Supreme Court holds otherwise, extending marriage rights to same-sex couples is not necessarily intuitive. Polygamy flouts traditional Western marriage to the same degree as gay marriage (an expansion of numbers rather than gender) and actually has more anthropological precedent. What makes something “intuitive” is inevitably culturally dependent, so it was not the court's place to decide our state's policy. It is the court's place to interpret law.

Of course, there is hardly any practical argument against gay marriage. The state's recognition of marriage is founded in the binding power of monogamy. It grants rights to same-sex couples that have been sorely needed to reduce legal disputes and psychological strain. In addition to the talked-about hospital visitation rights and divisions of estate, gay marriage provides the stability required for raising families. I hear that this is being used to rally the religious right, but let us consider it for a moment. Personally, I love the idea of converting statistically promiscuous, otherwise non-breeding gays into family people. I think it's tragic that orientation obfuscates the joys of parenthood and that society allows perfectly good potential parents to provide nothing more to our country than workforce.

Before you conservatives jump on me for this, consider that children raised by gays are no more likely to be gay than children from liberal families. It illustrates that in liberal America, acceptance of homosexuality is such that roughly one hundred percent of individuals with homosexual impulses come out of the closet. That is to say, the Christian Right might as well prohibit marriage of secular couples if the goal is to discourage children from growing up gay. Homosexuality is only something that “multiplies” in sexually repressed hardcore Christian circles. That is, only among people resisting homosexual impulses is it possible for gayness to act like a contagion and “turn” people gay.

So the argument remains one of permissivity vs. cultural conservatism, and I would urge both sides to refrain from lies and name-calling. Schools don't teach marriage nor does the first amendment allow government to tell people/churches whom to marry and supporting Proposition 8 does not make one a bigot, a hick or a hypocrite.