New York

From Rosemary Bray McNatt, Testimony in Support of Freedom to Marry Bill in Albany, New York

(March 3, 2004) Good morning. My name is The Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt, and I am minister of the Fourth Universalist Society in the City of New York, one of the thousand plus churches that are part of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

Fourth Universalist has a 165 year history of advocating causes involving family justice that at the time have seemed radical but that quickly became accepted parts of our social contract. For example, more than 100 years ago, Fourth Universalist established a free kindergarten. At the time, accepted practice was not to bother with the very young. Today, the wisdom of investing early in a child’s education is well established, and in New York State, all children are guaranteed the right to a free public education.

My purpose this morning is not to talk about the particulars of education, but rather the equality of all people under the law, even if the particulars are not generally supported in parts of society.

I thank you for the opportunity to speak before you this morning, especially this morning, because today is a very special day in my life. Twenty years ago today, I married my sweetheart. In the years since March 3, 1984, Bob and I have lived through his life-threatening illness, my career change and years of study as I answered a call to the Unitarian Universalist ministry, several relocations and the birth of our two sons, now in elementary school. It has been a full and rich two decades, and we wouldn’t trade a single day of it for anything. I have found that a happy marriage is one of life’s greatest blessings.

Because I have lived this blessing, and because I celebrate it today, I am honored to come before you today as you consider the issue of marriage for lesbian and gay people, and to speak unequivocally in favor of the bill before you. I speak both personally and pastorally, for as the minister of a growing congregation on New York’s Upper West Side, I have been entrusted with the spiritual care of nearly two hundred people. Among those I care for are gay and lesbian individuals as well as gay and lesbian couples who have chosen to share their lives, just as Bob and I have chosen to share ours.

Susan and Sherri, Marty and Steve, Rebecca and Betty—they are only names to you. But they are families to me—families that have loved and honored each other—often for decades, have comforted and cherished each other and those in their family circles. They have been poor and not so poor together, they have cared for each other in sickness and in health, have shared each other’s joys and borne each other’s burdens. And they have done so under circumstances that would make the strongest among us tremble. They live and love one another in spite of hatred and scorn; in spite of contempt and invisibility; in spite of the lies about gay and lesbian people that circulate in our culture.

These lies are fed by the ignorant and the malicious among us who either have never known or have utterly forgotten both the religious truth that every one of us is created in the image of God and the secular truth that every human being is free and equal before the law. Both truths demand from you a legal response—a response that honors this universal religious truth and reinforces this secular truth upon which our nation rests.

There is much to be said for making this struggle strictly a legal issue. In some ways, it should be obvious that the State of New York has a responsibility to separate the demands of certain religious belief systems from the state’s compelling interest in defining marriage. There ought to be and there needs to be a clear distinction on the state and federal level between civil marriage, which the government has no right to deny to any two people willing to make such a commitment, and the religious recognition of that union, which each church has the right and responsibility to make in keeping with its theology and polity. Civil marriage is a civil right, and I believe that the State of New York has an opportunity to lead the nation in declaring that fact simply and straightforwardly.

The couples in my congregations—along with the millions of other gay and lesbian couples in cities and towns all across the nation—share the desire to do something simple, and basic and human and real: They want to publicly affirm their commitment to each other and to secure the legal protections and benefits afforded to heterosexual married couples and their children. In Massachusetts, when this issue came before the Supreme Judicial Court, the court agreed with them, and when the state asked whether civil unions would be good enough, the court was brilliantly clear. For civil unions, as helpful as they might seem in the short run, are in fact like the colored schools and bathrooms and water fountains of the Old South, the back doors and the back of the bus in a country segregated by race—separate and unequal. And separate but equal cannot succeed. It did not work in the matter of race, either in the United States, or in South Africa. Fifty years ago, the United States Supreme Court ruled that separate could not be equal in the question of race. The ruling was resisted by many who forecast dire consequences in education and in society at large. But fifty years later in New York State and elsewhere, we know that separate does not mean equal in matters of race or in other matters of identity and human dignity. Separate but equal will not work any better in the arena of sexual orientation. Separate but equal cannot succeed because it stands in the way of freedom and justice, and the story of America is one in which, sooner or later, imperfect though it may be, freedom and justice always win.

But there is another reason this bill is so important. For 20 years, I have known what it means to build a life with someone who really knows me and loves me anyway. I know how sorrows are halved and joys are doubled when you share your life with someone who makes you happy just by walking into the same room. I realize that the only big worry I have is whether our being married 50 or 60 years will be enough time for us to be together. Everyone I’ve ever known who has had such a love wants to declare it openly, proclaim it proudly, and rest in the security of societal recognition.
Love like this is a precious thing; it deserves the blessing and the calling forth of all that is holy. Marriage allows such love to be codified, allows the two lovers to be drawn into covenant, a powerful promise that guides and shapes their common life, just as (within Unitarian Universalism) the covenant we have with one another in religious community serves to guide and to shape our lives together.

The love that calls two people to a life together is a sacred thing, a gift of the divine, and no government has the right to limit or constrain the holy. I am angry--and other religious leaders are angry--because some religious groups are trying to persuade the state and federal governments that there is only one religious response to same-sex marriage. These religious groups are working under false pretenses. Their efforts misrepresent the many communities of faith who have witnessed the truth of gay and lesbian people’s lives. What is more, their campaign of bigotry misrepresents the truth of my life, and the lives of millions of other happily married heterosexual couples, whose lives and marriages are enriched, enlivened and blessed by the gay and lesbian people who are our friends, who are members of our families, our communities, our churches, synagogues and mosques. My religiously conservative brothers and sisters are bearing false witness against people I know and people I love. Frankly, I am tired of it.

So it is with all these feelings—feelings of anger and frustration, of determination and joy—that I come today to urge you to support _______. This bill reflects the truth about love, about marriage, about gay and lesbian and straight people in New York, in the United States and around the world. As an African American woman, as the beneficiary of the freedom movements of the last 400 years for women and for people of color, I cannot be silent when the freedom of others is constrained and threatened because of who they love. As a minister of religion whose principles call me to see and to embrace the divine in every human heart, I can no longer be silent as the state limits not only gay and lesbian people’s freedom to marry but limits the free exercise of my religious faith as a Unitarian Universalist. The history of the congregation to which I minister is one where social justice, especially on matters of the family, marches onward. The New York State Legislature has a fundamental choice to make. I urge each of you to consider the lessons of history, and to remember that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it surely bends toward justice. S __________ recognizes that justice applies not just to some people, but to all people, without exception. Thank you.

Archival Coverage from the UUA:

Additional Resources:

• "For Richer, For Poorer: Same-Sex Couples and the Freedom to Marry as a Civil Right" by Evan Wolfson. Drum Major Institute, June, 2003
• Marriage Equality Kit for Same-Sex Couples , from GLAAD
• "Why gay marriages just don't want to go away" By Frank Rich - The New York Times (published 3/1/04 in the Oakland Tribune)

Archival Coverage from the UUA:

• Comprehensive UUA.ORG Coverage of Freedom to Marry, for all People
• UUA President Opposes Call for Constitutional Amendment (2/22/04)
• Listing of UU ministers who will not sign marriage licenses until same sex couples are allowed to marry

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