Ask A Genius 163 – Pillar of Society
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/29
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If we take the perspective of marriage as traditionalists would have it be understood, this comes from, as you know, a broadly based religious, but also cultural, perspective.
So how will culture change with it? How will religious institutions change with it? Because traditional religious institutions view marriage, as you know, as a central pillar of and even the foundational part of society, civilize society.
Rick Rosner: There are three things that can happen to religions. People can consider themselves members of a religion, but they buy less and less of the doctrine and the theology.
They take what they want of it for spiritual counsel and spiritual soothing. Religion can be reactionary and get all pissed off about what’s happening, which much religion will. Religion can adapt by trying to figure out what is good about new forms of relationships.
What is good is the extent to which new relationships reinforce moral behaviour, in the future, it’ll be possible for 4 or 5 people to attempt to link with each other in some intimate way, yet still be forces for good in the world. I just finished a novel called Christodora, which is about mostly AIDs activism in the 80s, in New York. People were still trying to figure out what was going on and to get treatment.
You had a movement in ACT UP, where the activists were acting in a way that could be considered fantastically immoral from the point of view of traditional religion because a high percentage of then were or who had been banging the heck out of a zillion other dudes – having bathhouse and semi-anonymous sex. Somebody estimated that if you were in the bathhouse scene in the 70s, early 80s, you might be hooking up with 3 dudes a day per year – so over 1,000 dudes a year.
Traditional religion would tear its hair about that. At the same time, these activists were doing great good fighting for their own survival and anyone with AIDs by making sure that AIDs was acknowledged as an important thing and making sure drugs were made available, not just to people who fit the traditional definition of an AIDs sufferer, which is a gay man because gay women suffered from it too.
Women’s symptoms of AIDs were ill-understood in the 80s. They didn’t qualify because to get the therapy you had to meet a checklist of symptoms. You have guys high for gay lifestyles, but going great good.
Obviously, some traditionalists had huge trouble admitting or acknowledging the humanity of these people. Reagan took until the last 2 years of his administration before he could say, “Gay,” in public. Other religions or small fragments of religions adapted and acknowledged the righteousness of the cause, even those viewed as sinners.
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