Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/gender-and-sexuality/page/3/)
About struggles to be who we are, and to love each other across the categories.
“My purpose for writing is to make you aware of the principles of restorative justice, and I hope that you and your legal team will consider this approach within the context of the allegations of rape against you.”
Americans’ stances on abortion are more complicated than the political rhetoric may lead us to believe. Our understanding of religion and reproductive rights should follow suit.
So it occurred to me that in saying that gay people, two individuals of the same sex, wanted to marry, the LGBT movement was striking at the very heart of what marriage has really been all about for millennia: dominance and control. “The Master of the House”, as it were. And mostly still is.
Looking back over the years, as LGBT visibility has increased, as our place within the culture has become somewhat more assured, much certainly has been gained, but also, something very precious has diminished. That early excitement, that desire — though by no means the ability — to fully restructure the culture, as distinguished from our mere reform, seems now to lay dormant in some sectors of our communities.
How can individuals and denominations who all claim to know the True God/Gods while apparently praying to the same God(s) be touched in such different ways and have such differing visions of divine will? Does God/Do the Gods send us mixed and often contradictory messages? Does God/Do the Gods change his/her/their mind(s) from time to time?
Faced with July 4th celebrations that are focused on militarism, ultra-nationalism, and “bombs bursting in air,” many American families who do not share those values turn July 4th into another summer holiday focused on picnics, sports and fireworks while doing their best to avoid the dominant rhetoric and bombast. We in the Network of Spiritual Progressives believe that this is a net loss.
You only have to read Justice Kennedy’s decision to see how much the opinion is written in language of spiritual progressives rather than traditional liberal values. Kennedy focuses on the ideals of love, dignity, and a spiritual connection between two people who choose to enter into the sanctity of marriage. The decision is grounded in higher values than rights (although he inevitably rules that the Constitution gives them the right to marry): it is grounded in spiritual values.
In reaction to a New York Times article, Blumenfeld struggles with whether or not he can forgive the oppressive institutions (particularly Christian) that are starting to open up discussions about alternative genders and sexual identities. Trying to balance an acknowledgment of the societal progress in LGBT rights with the fact that there is still rampant and unacceptable systematic oppression of the LGBT community leaves him on a bittersweet, yet extremely honest note.
In a piece written in honor of LGBTIQ Pride Month, Blumenfeld recalls an moment in the Gay Rights movement. In the past century, some members of the scientific community viewed people attracted to their own sex, those attracted to both males and females, and trans people as constituting distinct biological or “racial” types — those who could be distinguished from “normal” people through anatomical markers. This “medicalization” of homosexuality, bisexuality, and gender non-conformity only serves to strengthen oppression and heterosexual and cisgender privilege through its relative invisibility. Given this invisibility, issues of oppression and privilege are neither analyzed nor scrutinized, neither interrogated nor confronted by members of the dominant group.
Blumenfeld argues that the Catholic church’s reaction to Caitlyn Jenner and other trans individuals follows their pattern of using means of attempted body control (whether that’s reproductive, sex, or otherwise) to control minds. “when patriarchal social and family structures converge with patriarchal religious systems, which reinforce strictly defined gender hierarchies of male domination, women and girl’s oppression and oppression of those who transgress sexual-, sexuality-, and gender binaries and boundaries became inevitable.”