Buddhist Chaplain Mikel Ryuho Monnett on Prop. 8
by Danny Fisher
Our friend and future interviewee Mikel Ryuho Monnett offers a powerful, chaplain’s-eye-view of Proposition 8 over at The Buddhist Channel. This you don’t want to miss. Here’s an especially strong excerpt:
- Given that our culture has an overwhelming interest in the promulgation of persons in committed relationships for the stability of the society as a whole, the state had to prove that they had a reason for singling out a minority within the society for special treatment. And that the state could not do—like the laws against interracial marriage that were still on the books in some states until the late 1960s, the court found that the laws against gay marriage did not hold up under the harsh light of reason. Indeed, such laws, which singled out a group of people solely on the basis of bigotry, were found to lack a just cause. From a legal viewpoint, such laws are immoral because they lead to a corruption of the basic tenet that our country was founded on: that “all men are created equal.”
As for the religious viewpoint, our Constitution provides that each creed is free to decide the issue for themselves and that the government may not interfere. Those who find their interpretations of the message of their founders (Moses, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha or whomever) prohibits these unions are free to bar them from taking place within their houses of worship: those who interpret their traditions otherwise are free to have them in theirs. And while people are free to try and persuade others that their view is the righteous one, so too are others free to persuade them otherwise. They just are not allowed to use the coercive power of the state to impose that belief upon others without compelling and just reasons.
I certainly agree with Monnett’s compassionate view of things, ministering to the needs of a distraught soulmate.
Your post connects to something I learned recently of the point of view of 17th Century puritan Roger Williams on matters of church-and-state. Williams was a founder of the state of Rhode Island and one of our most-neglected Founding Fathers. His view on church-and-state issues was far, far ahead of his time, and yet he was very much a fundamentalist by today’s guage of such things.
Here, from an interview with the author of a new book on Williams, in the November issue of the magazine Church & State:
Q. Williams was almost a fundamentalist Christian by modern-day standards, yet he favored full religious liberty for Catholics, Jews, Muslims and atheists. How did he come to this viewpoint?
A. Williams was “fundamentalist” in the sense that he believed his Puritan worldview to be true and virtually every other worldview (including those of other Puritans) to be false. But his Puritan theology also taught him that God gives all human beings a capacity to be good citizens, regardless of whether they professed proper faith. That capacity for social cooperation is part of the “natural law” instilled in all human beings as part of their creation. In other words, Williams believed that religiously it made no sense to assume that a person had to be a good Christian to be a good magistrate or citizen. His faith taught him to keep the spiritual and the civil separate, so that he could respect as good citizens and neighbors the very people whose religious views he unequivocally rejected.
[Follow-up on my earlier comment]
Of course, it goes unsaid and is perhaps unlikely that Williams, in the 17th C., would have easily been approving of a homosexual relationship. But I do think that fundamentalist and compassionate are not concepts that have to be at odds.
I believe that there are fundamentalists today who passionately hold their beliefs while at the same time recognizing, in a mature loving way, that God intentionally allows other people to live freely and make their own decisions what to believe and how to live.
Rigorous science tells us that sexual orientation is not a choice. Not all fundamentalists have animus toward the truth-seeking determinations of scientists, I think. I hope.