Topical and brilliant

[liv]

Everybody's been writing stuff using only the 1000 most common words according the slightly strange corpus that XCKD used in the famous Up-goer5 poster. This one beats them all into a cocked hat, and I can't for the life of me remember where I saw the link:
firecat rewrites a Shakespeare sonnet in Up-goer 5, while preserving the metre.

And everybody in my social circle is talking about the recent vote in the UK House of Commons accepting the bill which will allow recognition of marriages between same-sex couples (as opposed to restricting them to civil partnerships which are exactly identical to marriage except with a different name). This is a pretty big symbolic victory, though there are still massive gaping holes in terms of equal provision for trans and non-binary people. Anyway, in the course of the ensuing discussion, someone (again, I've forgotten who it was, sorry) linked to a really thoughtful piece by Masorti rabbi R Jeremy Gordon:
What should a gay Jew do?

Writing like R Gordon's gives me some hope that I don't need to just give up on religious denominations that consider a scriptural prohibition on homosexual relationships to be valid. I fully accept that even the narrowest interpretation of such laws can be extremely hurtful to gay people, and I don't want to diminish that. However, there's a big difference between compassionate, nuanced views like R Gordon's who insists on a sense of proportion and wants to support and honour same-sex relationships even if he believes a particular sex act is Biblically forbidden, versus various church leaders recently who have been going around saying that same-sex marriage is the worst thing in the world ever. I'm lucky in some ways that I don't have to choose between my religion and caring about LGBT+ rights; the UK Reform Movement sat on the fence for far too long, but eventually did follow Liberal Judaism in accepting Jewish same-sex marriages and indeed added themselves to political calls for religious equality in the matter of performing legally valid same-sex marriages.

Obviously I would prefer it if all religions joined the 21^st century and started sanctifying same-sex marriages. But I think there is room in the world, at least right now if not forever into the future, for religions which only recognize opposite sex marriages but still treat their with GSM congregants with genuine respect. It takes real courage on both sides to create communities where this kind of accommodation is possible. And I think R Gordon exemplifies that courage, particularly in publicly taking a position that will probably cause him to be reviled by the right-wing sections of his religious community.

Comments

[sophiacatherine]

Just wanted to say - the bill hasn't been passed yet. News outlets keep saying it has, which is surprising (and irritating), as it still has a committee stage, another vote in the Commons, and several stages in the Lords to go through. There are MPs who voted 'for' this time who are are saying that they will vote against at the final reading. All the signs are looking good, but we're not there yet.

The trans issues are a problem, but the bill will improve things for some trans people, including those who have had to get divorces because they've changed their sex on their birth certificates but are now (officially) married to people of the same sex. That will end, thankfully. It would help a lot more if the government would extend civil partnerships to mixed-sex couples (and stop talking about 'sex' or 'gender' at all), of course.

I'm looking forward to getting my 'marriage upgrade' eventually (I'm in a civil partnership)! My partner is non-binary, so we do fall into the category of people who (to some extent) have to pretend to be one thing or another - but my partner is labelled female, and we do want full recognition for our marriage.

[liv]

Thanks for this informative comment. I am aware that it's still an early stage, I'm carefully calling it a bill and not an Act. The fact of the bill winning a free vote in the Commons by such a huge margin is itself pretty big, even if there are still many hurdles in the way of actually having a legal framework for same-sex marriages. I think even a couple of years ago that wouldn't have been thinkable, certainly not in 2005 when we first got CPs at all.

My understanding of the trans stuff is based on auntysarah's summary, and she's usually pretty good on the technicalities of this. What I got from her post is that in future trans people will be able to get their GRC without having to dissolve their marriages, but trans people who already had to get divorced and recreate a CP in the past aren't getting any redress, let alone any fix to the situation. And yeah, I really think both marriage and CP should be completely gender-neutral, there is no point specifying that they have to be "same-sex" or "opposite sex".

I hope things work out so you can get your "upgrade" soon!