Reporter David Forbes talks about the Asheville-based WE DO campaign, which has been in the national press recently for their high-profile actions in support of LGBT marriage rights. Hosted by Margaret Williams.
Podcast produced by Steve Shanafelt. The theme music is “jam band spy song” by E. Lee.
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The Campaign for Southern Equality has embarked on a mission that is heroic. That so many local communities of faith have joined to defy North Carolina’s unjust marriage laws, which may soon be codified in the state’s constitution, is testimony to the role that religion plays in the civil rights struggle. Civil rights are human rights; religion, while often concerned with the divine, nonetheless speaks to the human condition. Lesbians and gays are human, and what could be more human–or civil–than our right to marry?
Senator Forrester and his ilk argue the convenient Fox News soundbite that marriage is an institution between a man and a woman. They term this ‘traditional marriage.’ But whose tradition? Almost every Native American tribe recognised same-sex marriages; such marriages enjoyed a three-hundred-year tradition in China. And while the long-standing Christian institution (a thousand years or more) of adelphopoiesis may be rendered ‘same-sex union,’ it was, truth be told, more like a modern marriage of equals than traditional heterosexual marriage going back to the palaeolithic. Indeed, ‘traditional marriage,’ which Sen. Forrester would make the law for North Carolina, was usually of the arranged–even forced–variety. One wonders if Sen. Forrester would have been content with the marriage his parents, close relatives, or tribal elders might have arranged for him.