GAY MARRIAGE UP THE YIN-YANG

As Republican candidates focus a lot their attention on such longtime highly resolved issues (at least for a majority of Americans) as contraception and gay marriage, I almost expect their next subject used to avoid coming up with any real solutions for the economy will be a heated discussion of whether the Earth is flat rather than round. After all, this "roundness theory" can be coming from the same pseudo-scientists who claim global warming and evolution really exist.

As far as I am concerned, here in California, Mitt Romney shouldn't even be eligible as a candidate, thanks to his church's major financial support of the bigoted Prop. 8, just overturned by a federal court in this state. A lot of thinking Mormons reject this official church position on gay marriage, but Mitt not only supports it, but is a leader in the church itself. And just as I would question the ability to truly separate church and state of a Catholic priest, Jewish rabbi, Muslim Imam, I don't think the highest secular office in the land belongs in the hands of a Mormon bishop, even someone no longer holding that title. The main problem the Mormons seem to have with gay marriage is that it impinges on their fairy tale scenario about a man and women being united for all eternity in "celestial marriage" on their own planet.

My own concerns about gay marriage revolved around the Taoist concept of Yin-Yang, the way in which male and female energies interact, which are important underpinnings in the Eastern view of medicine and sexuality. I wondered if gay couples were sacrificing the benefits of harmony and health provided by balancing the yin and the yang. However, on further study, I realized this was an oversimplified Western view of yin yang, that it wasn't necessarily about actual men and women coming together, but about the polar opposite energies, which are often just as much a part of gay relationships as heterosexual ones.

In regard to this, I like what poet/philosopher Alan Watts had to say about the yin-yang ideogram we are all so familiar with:

They indicate the sunny and shady sides of a hill, and they are associated with the masculine and the feminine, the firm and the yielding, the strong and the weak, the light and the dark, the rising and the falling, heaven and earth... (Alan Watts, Tao: The Watercourse Way, Pantheon Books, 1975, p. 21).

So it is more about being opposite but complementary than it is about gender, and just as many man-woman relationships have unbalanced yin yang, gay relationships can have balanced ones. ("Whew, now I can relax," he said ironically when he discovered all this).

More irony ensues when the same political types who rail against government having too much of a say in our lives, insist on having too much of a say in our relationships and bedroom behavior.

Thank goodness (or God, if you prefer) we still have men and women of good will and good sense. Otherwise we might see Jews and Muslims mount a campaign against the Jack in the Box commercial showing a young man marrying bacon. Though I do wonder how they got away with the closing line of the wedding ceremony in that ad, "You may now eat the bride."

Jerry

Another one of my multiple personalities writes a completely different blog on prosperity. http://MoneyloveBlog.com