By CHRIS POWELL
It’s traditional at events like this to have some readings from the Bible.
So here’s something from the Old Testament, the third book of Moses, Leviticus Chapter 20, Verse 13:
“If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death.”
And from the New Testament, St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, Chapter 1, Verse 27:
“Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.”
Or as a more recent prophet said, “A ‘faggot’ is a homosexual gentleman who has just left the room.”
We’re here with Bob and Luis today because to some extent we question all that or are at least willing to overlook it in favor of the good old libertarian philosophy of “live and let live.”
What Vermont has made possible for Bob and Luis is evidence of the success of that philosophy. I don’t like the undemocratic way in which it all came about in this state; I don’t believe that constitutions give the courts the power to compel legislatures to legislate. Nor do I think that the particular benefits made conferrable by Vermont’s “civil union” statute are much that people couldn’t already have obtained for themselves in ordinary methods of legal contract.
But the purpose of those who advocate such statutes is less to achieve those benefits than to proclaim the legitimacy of same-sex marriage. And if two people of the same sex want to make certain legal commitments to each other, I don’t know why the law shouldn’t facilitate them and give them the opportunity for one-stop shopping; it’s no skin off anyone else’s nose, except maybe for the lawyers who won’t get the work they might have gotten otherwise.
I figure that Bob and Luis are here today not because they really need the state of Vermont to put their affairs in order or to signify their commitment to each other — they did that themselves long ago — but because they want to make the political gesture Vermont has afforded them. And whatever anyone thinks of it, this political gesture requires great courage, if no more courage than what their whole lives have required for the last 20 years.
Their lives together have been remarkable political gestures in themselves — far more meaningful than anything the government can confer on them. That these gestures have had some impact may be demonstrated by Bob’s resounding election to his town council in Florida, his becoming what his family has delighted in calling the council’s first openly Polish member.
Indeed, I see what has brought us here today as less a “coming out” for Bob and Luis than for their family and friends and acquaintances, and in time a “coming out” for their future acquaintances. Bob and Luis chose their path long ago. But some of those who know them and those who will come to know them may still have to choose whether to live and let live, and thus to choose what might as well be called their religion — to choose Moses and St. Paul or something else.
Religion long has condemned what we today are here to celebrate — both the old and new testaments, the Jewish as well as the Christian tradition. My problem with this religious tradition is the same problem the hero of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” struggled with. That is, Huck found that at the moral crisis of his life the religious tradition went against all his experience of what was right.
Maybe you remember the episode from the book. Huck has been going up and down the Mississippi River with a fugitive slave, Jim, who lately has been waylaid by some bad guys and is in danger of being sent back to his owner, Miss Watson, and thus back to slavery. Huck’s meditation about what he should do may be the greatest passage in American literature. Here it is.
Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he’d got to be a slave, and so I’d better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to tell Miss Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion for two things: She’d be mad and disgusted at his rascality and ungratefulness for leaving her, and so she’d sell him straight down the river again; and if she didn’t, everybody naturally despises an ungrateful nigger, and they’d make Jim feel it all the time, and so he’d feel ornery and disgraced.
And then think of me! It would get all around that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom; and if I was ever to see anybody from that town again I’d be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame. That’s just the way: A person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide, it ain’t no disgrace.
That was my fix exactly. The more I studied about this, the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman’s nigger that hadn’t ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there’s One that’s always on the lookout, and ain’t a-going to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared.
Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn’t so much to blame; but something inside of me kept saying, “There was the Sunday school, you could ‘a’ gone to it; and if you’d ‘a’ done it they’d ‘a’ learnt you there that people that acts as I’d been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire.”
It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come.
It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie — I found that out.
So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn’t know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I’ll go and write the letter — and then see if I can pray.
Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:
“Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. — Huck Finn.”
I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking — thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell.
And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the nighttime, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing.
But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me ‘honey,’ and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell” — and tore it up.
It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.
And so Huck Finn found his goodness in his willingness to be thought bad by those who claimed as moral authority only a tradition based on arbitrary religious texts — texts that, far from being the Word of God in every respect, were actually compiled and edited and expunged as necessary by men.
Because of the deaths of his two daughters and his wife, in his old age Twain got very bitter; his long short story, “The Mysterious Stranger,” is almost too painful and nihilistic to read. But through Huck Finn, Twain shows that the best proof of God is not in those arbitrary old texts that often fail to explain themselves and thus generate all sorts of superstitions but rather in man’s own moral sense, his capacity to tell right from wrong and, over the centuries, against all obstacles, to incline toward the right.
So until someone can explain to me how any two people’s committing themselves to each other and caring for each other is anything but good, or how it’s anyone’s business but their own, I’m with Huck. And I think he might join me in the toast all this was meant to lead up to, as I hope all the rest of us here will join me in love and admiration.
To Bob and Lou, our dear brothers: I’ll see you in hell or know the reason why!
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.
Chris Powell column 