I sit at my computer with tears flowing down my cheeks. The New York state legislature, with a Republican majority in the Senate, voted tonight to legalize same-sex marriage. The blll was approved by a 33-to29 vote as 4 Republican state senators joined 29 Democrats in voting for the bill. New York joins five states in permitting same sex marriage.
Hearing the news I was reminded of the following commentary I wrote in 2009 in the midst of Utah debate about gay rights:
"Victor Frankl was a German psychiatrist who survived the holocaust and wrote powerfully about the spiritual lessons he learned while in the Nazi death camps between 1942 and 1945. Man’s Search for Meaning, first published in 1959, is one of the classic psychiatric texts of our time. As one reviewer noted, Frankl reminds us of “the responsibility each of us owes in valuing the community of our humanity.”
Frankl asserts that a core drive for humans is our search for meaning. He wrote from the perspective of life in the death camps. My experience is that in our lives we also find meaning in the antithesis of the horrors of the death camps, in those precious moments when we experience spiritual love.
All of this comes to mind as I think about one of those spiritual moments that occurred a few days ago while hiking in a beautiful wash with my wife. We had gone deep into the wash and stopped to rest and listen to the quiet amongst huge boulders that had fallen many millennia ago. She was sitting across from me with the sun reflecting off the rocks giving her face a subtle red glow while the early afternoon sun highlighted her beautiful blond hair. In a scene that could only be described adequately by a poet, which I am not, she was, at that moment, the center of my world and my existence. The love that I feel for this woman after 25 years of marriage is deeply felt but indescribable. The moment passed and we began our walk back to the world, while I continued in the afterglow of my experience.
As we walked I recalled the letter to the editor I had written a few days earlier trying to address the sources of our sexual orientation. I asserted that sexual orientation is not a behavioral issue but it is rooted in our wonderful human encounter with love. Love, that mysterious indefinable process by which we become attracted to other humans and engage in relationships of emotional and physical intimacy, intimacy when at its best has a deep and profound spiritual quality.
My letter drew the predictable responses online by some unable or uninterested in understanding my argument. The memory of those responses brought me back to another moment I experienced 15 years ago while working as a mental health counselor at an agency in Atlanta, Georgia. We provided services to predominantly young gay men and their families as they struggled with the prospect of premature death from complications related to AIDS. At the time there were no effective medications to counter the effects of this disease.
During an emotionally intense counseling session with a young man, we were exploring aspects of our lives and our mutual experiences of romantic love. At one point he looked at me and said: “George, can you understand that the love that I feel for my partner is not different than that that you feel for your wife?”
In that therapeutic moment, a moment of genuine human intimacy and meaning, the student became the teacher. Reflecting later, I came to understand that in that moment I was confronting the last vestiges of my own homophobia and this man who sat across from me in this quiet room facing his own death had invited me into Victor Frankl's “community of our humanity.”
As state legislatures consider the bills extending legal protections for gay and transgender couples, can they think beyond the narrow private sexual behavioral issues that dominate the debate to the more important issues of human relationships and love?"
And so this evening, the progress continues.
