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Thistlethwaite: Love is love

There are values that transcend partisan politics and whom you love is one of them.         

I think that is why a whopping 71% of Americans now favor “same-sex marriage” per a Gallup poll released in June. The same poll the previous year showed 70% support.

The U.S. Senate has just advanced a bill to codify marriage equality for LGBTQ+ people as well as respect for interracial marriages by 60-37. It now goes back to the House for a final vote and then on to President Biden to sign it. Unfortunately, it has become necessary to enshrine these rights in law since this conservative Supreme Court has signaled it could restrict them.



I was an original, volunteer member of the Religion Council of the Human Rights Campaign for several years before the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex marriage was constitutional. Our goal on the HRC Religion Council was to make a case to the American people that equal rights for LGBTQ+ people are religious values.

My church, the United Church of Christ, had been supporting equality for all people, including LGBTQ+ rights, for decades. As a pastor, seminary professor, and then president of the seminary, I traveled around speaking on the importance of marriage equality.

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It did not work all that well. I would routinely get drawn into debates on “the bible forbids homosexuality” and “homosexuality is a sin.” In the Christian faith, no one is sinless except Jesus of Nazareth, but the prejudice against LGBTQ+ people would override that simple theological point.

So, I stopped arguing about these points and so did many of my other colleagues on the HRC Religion Council.

The most crucial argument for marriage equality is that love is love. No one can tell you whom to love or why. Love transcends civic arguments about why marriage is a cornerstone of strong communities. Love is the most important religious value of all. As the Apostle Paul, not always a fan of LGBTQ+ equality, wrote in 1 Corinthians 13:13: “Faith, hope, love abide, but the greatest of these is love.”

“Love is love” resonates strongly with the American people and that is why, in my view, now an overwhelming majority support marriage equality.

Today we can also see the narrow and frankly poor-spirited ethos that has taken over the majority on the Supreme Court. The contrast between the court that decided marriage equality was constitutional to the one that opened the door to banning reproductive justice in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is stark.

In Obergefell v. Hodges, the marriage equality case, Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his majority opinion, embraced a vision of a living Constitution, one that evolves with societal changes.

“The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times,” he wrote. “The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.”

This is also true for Christian biblical and theological interpretations. Human beings discern the sacred only very dimly and through the filter of their own times. As we grow as individuals and societies, we can see more.

I know I have grown on the issue of marriage equality. I suspect if you have read to the end of this opinion piece, you have too.

We must protect the insights we have gained on the full equality of all people in both religion and society.

Rev. Dr. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite is president emerita and professor emerita of Chicago Theological Seminary. She and her husband now make their home in the Vail Valley.


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