Mark Oppenheimer's exclusive at Salon today trying to figure out what makes Maggie Gallagher tick is a must-read article. Oppenheimer succeeds in humanizing a person whose seemingly unlimited need to place some fellow human beings in categories designed to stigmatize them and thwart their lives puzzles many of us. Why spend one's life seeking to limit the humanity and possibilities of other human beings?
Oppenheimer suggests that Maggie Gallagher's quasi-messianic understanding of her mission to save America from gay marriage is rooted in her own life history--and, specifically, in her experience of becoming pregnant in college, as a young unmarried Catholic woman actively involved in her campus's conservative political movements. Gallagher is, according to friends and acquaintances who speak to Oppenheimer, a singularly focused woman for whom the world falls into distinct shades of black and white.
It has rules, and rules count. They must count, or where will the world end up when people are permitted to skirt the rules? And so her crusade against gay marriage, reflecting her own painful personal experience of falling very short of her own rules: Oppenheimer writes,
The great trauma of Gallagher’s youth, her unplanned pregnancy and subsequent alienation from the father of her child, was rooted in failing to understand that sex and procreation are connected. It is understandable that, having grasped the truth, she is intent on emphasizing its importance. So it follows that gay marriage and, above all, gay parenthood, more than gay people themselves, presents a real challenge to her belief system. Same-sex marriage advocates offend her hard-won wisdom in two ways. First, they imply that sex and love can in fact be separate from procreation, and no less valid for it. Second, and perhaps more troubling for Gallagher, the increasingly visible column of attentive, loving gay parents — gay male parents in particular — mocks her own romantic choices. It mocks her own son’s good-for-nothing father. There must be something wrong with these gay dads, something contrary to the natural order, such that even when they appear to be splendid dads themselves, their agenda is the cause of poor parenting in others.
As an explanatory narrative, this passage makes sense to me, since I've known other people (including one of Steve's own close relatives) who have walked on a path similar to this. An early, unplanned premarital pregnancy; a strongly rule-bound Catholic upbringing; a rule-bound Catholic upbringing shot through with strong patriarchal assumptions that cannot be questioned unless one is willing to pay a steep price for rebelling: out of these elements, a life mission is born.
The mission is a mission to save the world, to make it conform to the rules--and, in particular, the patriarchal rules. Since one has discovered that one's own heart and soul can be flawed. And so the mission becomes a mission to save the world in a quite specific way--a way that is intrinsically connected to the particularities of one's own saga of sin and redemption.
It sometimes turns out otherwise, in these narratives. As the story of Saul/Paul in the Christian scriptures suggests, one can experience the movement from a rule-bound religious worldview in which one always confronts one's imperfection as a movement to grace, instead. A movement from rules and the harsh religion of the dictatorial father to a worldview in which one knows that one is loved no matter how far short of the mark one continuously falls.
And when grace is what our story turns out to be about, that story actively impels us to spread grace around--to open up doors of new possibility and love for others. Since how can our own experience of grace be meaningful if we do not accord the same grace that we have experienced to others?
There's a constant, tragic tension within many of the religious systems of the world between these two worldviews--the one centered on rules dictated by the unforgiving father, the other stressing grace freely dispensed by a God whose approach to the rules is closer to that of the all-embracing mother. When our life history causes us to choose between these two polarities in various religious traditions, that choice can be fateful for others--if we succeed in obtaining power in the world.
Since there's a tremendous difference in how we choose to treat others when we imagine ourselves as the enforcer of the father's rules, and when we see ourselves as the exemplar of the unmerited love the divine mother bestows freely on us.
(And as I search for a graphic for this posting: isn't it interesting that, though Ms. Gallagher lavishes such constant attention on the families of gay couples--families she's really trying to drive out of business--one can almost never find any pictures of her with her own family, her husband and children?)
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