After death, holiness
Apr. 25th, 2013 07:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livWhich is not a very profound title, it's just that the assigned Torah reading for last week was two sections back to back, and the sections are named after the first word (significant word, that is, otherwise half of them would be called "it came to pass" or "[God] spoke" or "the"). But anyway, this particular Torah reading includes the Holiness code of Leviticus, which is a somewhat miscellaneous collection of laws that must be kept in order to be holy, because God is holy. Which in turn includes that infamous verse about a man lying with a male, the one that some fundamentalist Protestants seem to want to try to base their whole religion on:
So I read that out, Ezra-style, which is to say reading a verse at a time with a running translation, as I learned from my teacher R' Hadassah Davies. And I prepared a somewhat milquetoast sermon saying that I could preach my whole sermon about a single verse, an uplifting one like
Somebody declared indignantly that she didn't particularly fancy stoning Graham Norton to death (I didn't know who he was but I assumed he was an out gay celebrity and later confirmed this on the internet.) Another member of the congregation, who has quite debilitating social anxiety and would find it pure torture to speak up in a lively debate, came up to me afterwards and confirmed, making an obvious effort to speak beyond social pleasantries, that we wouldn't need to execute Graham Norton because whatever he did with his boyfriend would be in private and there would not be the two kosher witnesses required for the death penalty. This is in fact the correct rabbinic answer and one of the ways that Judaism has historically dealt with the Torah mandating the death penalty for sexual behaviours. But it's not really satisfactory if you're looking for a proper gay rights perspective, having a theoretical death penalty which is absolutely never going to be enforced as part of your religious teaching is still extremely hurtful.
I had been reluctant to speak too critically about the man-with-a-male verse, basically because I didn't want to offend my community's Orthodox sensibilities. But by failing to challenge it directly rather than being wishy-washy about it, I offended their basic human values, which is far worse. And when they delighted me by being outraged at finding that verse in their beloved Torah, I continued equivocating, I didn't say: of course I don't want to execute Graham Norton or any of my gay brothers or my own bi self. I'm not closeted within the community, but I'm not exactly out either, I've only made the kinds of comments that other Queer people would correctly interpret to mean that I'm one of them, not the kind that straight people pay attention to.
A couple of days later, Keshet tweeted this really amazing article, where a gay man imagines the speech he could have given at his bar mitzvah when he was assigned this week's Torah portion. Mutatis mutandis, I could have given that sermon on Saturday, and I didn't.
Today I was at a mini-conference, and one of the talks was an absolutely brilliant presentation of a PhD on the experience of elderly LGB people with nursing care. (It wasn't about GSM people in general, it was specifically about gay men, lesbians and bi women, because that is the scope of the research. No, I don't know why no bi-identified men were included, but anyway.) Basically as LGB people age they are being pushed back into the closet and forced to pass as heterosexual in order to not have completely miserable lives when receiving home care or in sheltered housing or nursing homes. And they tend to need this kind of care at younger ages than their heterosexual counterparts because fewer of them have spouses, children or birth families who can carry out informal care tasks in the early stages of age-related decline. For the same reason older LGB people are less likely to have relatives to advocate for them and make sure they get the best possible care if they're too frail to deal with the system themselves. Many of the interviewed subjects said they didn't want to be in a "happy rainbow" home for all kinds of people with GSM identities, they wanted provision specifically for gay men or lesbian and bi women respectively. Gay men didn't want to be in homes where the majority of residents would be women, even lesbian and bi women, because of the differences in life-expectancy. Lesbians particularly, coming from the older generation, had often had very little close contact with men for most of their lives, and didn't want to be stuck with "dirty old men" who might have lost their inhibitions about inappropriate sexual behaviour.
I talked to the speaker afterwards, asking a question about whether she thought the problem would diminish over the next decades as LGB people become much more integrated / assimilated into mainstream society. We had a happy bonding session when she answered that she thought the problem would continue, because some people are just visibly gender non-conforming and are never going to fit the marriage-and-kids heteronormative not too threatening model. And because the relatively accepting (at least accepting of assimilated not too visibly Queer gay people) social milieu is limited; there are intersectional issues notably including class. But even people who have spent their working lives in nice fluffy liberal middle-class bubbles, when they start needing care are having their lives governed by low skilled care workers who are often immigrants from countries with very different attitudes to gender and sexuality, and may end up depending on services provided by religious groups, and thus may find a much less accepting environment.
In some way I feel like the problems this researcher was outlining are partly my fault. Because I kind of give a pass to older people and more conservative religious people and people who aren't academics and professionals if they're at least somewhat homophobic, so in lots of ways I'm helping to perpetuate a heteronormative environment. Same at work, I'm really not particularly visible or particularly willing to stick my neck out and make a fuss about places where the curriculum isn't really inclusive. I'm not doing anything active to prevent my doctorlings from growing up to assume all their patients are going to be straight, which will contribute to the kind of difficulties described when people from GSM backgrounds are trying to access care.
I do welcome comments on this, but please do understand that it's fairly sensitive stuff. And if there were an easy answer I'd have found it some time in the past 20 years.
And a man that sexually uses a male, with the sexual habits of a woman, they have both done an abomination, they must certainly be put to death, they are blood-guilty[Leviticus 20:13]
So I read that out, Ezra-style, which is to say reading a verse at a time with a running translation, as I learned from my teacher R' Hadassah Davies. And I prepared a somewhat milquetoast sermon saying that I could preach my whole sermon about a single verse, an uplifting one like
You shall the love the stranger as yourselfor a controversial one like putting men to death for sexual acts with other men, but instead I would talk about the whole context of the Holiness code and what holiness means and the concepts of "just laws" which seem to fit with ethical instincts and "statutes" which seem to be entirely arbitrary. In fact my lovely lovely community didn't let me get through more than half a sentence before they started arguing with me. Well, not so much arguing with me as arguing with the Torah I'd just read.
Somebody declared indignantly that she didn't particularly fancy stoning Graham Norton to death (I didn't know who he was but I assumed he was an out gay celebrity and later confirmed this on the internet.) Another member of the congregation, who has quite debilitating social anxiety and would find it pure torture to speak up in a lively debate, came up to me afterwards and confirmed, making an obvious effort to speak beyond social pleasantries, that we wouldn't need to execute Graham Norton because whatever he did with his boyfriend would be in private and there would not be the two kosher witnesses required for the death penalty. This is in fact the correct rabbinic answer and one of the ways that Judaism has historically dealt with the Torah mandating the death penalty for sexual behaviours. But it's not really satisfactory if you're looking for a proper gay rights perspective, having a theoretical death penalty which is absolutely never going to be enforced as part of your religious teaching is still extremely hurtful.
I had been reluctant to speak too critically about the man-with-a-male verse, basically because I didn't want to offend my community's Orthodox sensibilities. But by failing to challenge it directly rather than being wishy-washy about it, I offended their basic human values, which is far worse. And when they delighted me by being outraged at finding that verse in their beloved Torah, I continued equivocating, I didn't say: of course I don't want to execute Graham Norton or any of my gay brothers or my own bi self. I'm not closeted within the community, but I'm not exactly out either, I've only made the kinds of comments that other Queer people would correctly interpret to mean that I'm one of them, not the kind that straight people pay attention to.
A couple of days later, Keshet tweeted this really amazing article, where a gay man imagines the speech he could have given at his bar mitzvah when he was assigned this week's Torah portion. Mutatis mutandis, I could have given that sermon on Saturday, and I didn't.
Today I was at a mini-conference, and one of the talks was an absolutely brilliant presentation of a PhD on the experience of elderly LGB people with nursing care. (It wasn't about GSM people in general, it was specifically about gay men, lesbians and bi women, because that is the scope of the research. No, I don't know why no bi-identified men were included, but anyway.) Basically as LGB people age they are being pushed back into the closet and forced to pass as heterosexual in order to not have completely miserable lives when receiving home care or in sheltered housing or nursing homes. And they tend to need this kind of care at younger ages than their heterosexual counterparts because fewer of them have spouses, children or birth families who can carry out informal care tasks in the early stages of age-related decline. For the same reason older LGB people are less likely to have relatives to advocate for them and make sure they get the best possible care if they're too frail to deal with the system themselves. Many of the interviewed subjects said they didn't want to be in a "happy rainbow" home for all kinds of people with GSM identities, they wanted provision specifically for gay men or lesbian and bi women respectively. Gay men didn't want to be in homes where the majority of residents would be women, even lesbian and bi women, because of the differences in life-expectancy. Lesbians particularly, coming from the older generation, had often had very little close contact with men for most of their lives, and didn't want to be stuck with "dirty old men" who might have lost their inhibitions about inappropriate sexual behaviour.
I talked to the speaker afterwards, asking a question about whether she thought the problem would diminish over the next decades as LGB people become much more integrated / assimilated into mainstream society. We had a happy bonding session when she answered that she thought the problem would continue, because some people are just visibly gender non-conforming and are never going to fit the marriage-and-kids heteronormative not too threatening model. And because the relatively accepting (at least accepting of assimilated not too visibly Queer gay people) social milieu is limited; there are intersectional issues notably including class. But even people who have spent their working lives in nice fluffy liberal middle-class bubbles, when they start needing care are having their lives governed by low skilled care workers who are often immigrants from countries with very different attitudes to gender and sexuality, and may end up depending on services provided by religious groups, and thus may find a much less accepting environment.
In some way I feel like the problems this researcher was outlining are partly my fault. Because I kind of give a pass to older people and more conservative religious people and people who aren't academics and professionals if they're at least somewhat homophobic, so in lots of ways I'm helping to perpetuate a heteronormative environment. Same at work, I'm really not particularly visible or particularly willing to stick my neck out and make a fuss about places where the curriculum isn't really inclusive. I'm not doing anything active to prevent my doctorlings from growing up to assume all their patients are going to be straight, which will contribute to the kind of difficulties described when people from GSM backgrounds are trying to access care.
I do welcome comments on this, but please do understand that it's fairly sensitive stuff. And if there were an easy answer I'd have found it some time in the past 20 years.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-26 04:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-26 01:06 pm (UTC)I don't think most people really go about having kids as a specific old-age care plan. Individual older people might or might not have supportive offspring, and even helpful offspring are quite likely to reach a point where they can't provide for their parents without professional help. But as a population, lesbians and gay men are statistically less likely to have children, though I do hope that as society becomes more accepting more and more will at least have spouses or acknowledged life-partners.