TESTIMONY
Senate Judiciary Committee (re: SF2715)
Minnesota State Senate
26 March 2003

Mr.Chairman, members of the committee, thank you for hearing me this afternoon.

Since my ordination to the ministry in 1989, I have presided over many marriages for heterosexual couples and many marriages for gay and lesbian couples. These are sacred rituals, a sacrament held holy within the worshipping community, blessed by the congregation and by God.

Marriage is the joining in lifelong partnership of two adults who love one another and who would make their life in trust together. It is the privilege of the faith community to bless and support such a union, for any couple who chooses it, regardless of sexual orientation – if the faith community is called to do so, as mine is, and has been, publicly, for over three decades.

No household, no family, can survive alone, without the blessing of a wider community. I am a heterosexual woman. My husband and I have been married for 22 years, and we have a ten year old daughter. We have neither the wisdom nor the resources, spiritual or ethical, to raise her by ourselves, in isolation, and so, like all households, we rely, gratefully, on wider circles of support: our friends and family, our congregation, our neighborhood, and the wider secular community, which affirms our intention to be a family, and recognizes us as one. When we go out, the world smiles on us, without even knowing who we are. The law smiles on us.

Our daughter’s godparents, the people we would trust to raise her well if we died, to raise her lovingly and ethically to be a person and a citizen, are a couple we admire deeply, to whom we look for clues, even after 22 years of marriage, – clues on how to be a loving, committed, intentional family. That couple happens to be a lesbian couple, and though their household is loving and clear-minded and faithful and as committed as ours, and has been for the same amount of time, I know that our dear friends and their child live as second-class citizens. It is the job of the faith community to bless our marriages. It is the job of the state and the state’s responsibility to protect our common rights, our civil and human rights without discrimination.

I know that my own straight and narrow life is enlarged and enriched every day by my contact with so many others whose households are constructed differently from mine. I think of families in which children are raised by grandparents because the parents are unable. I think of multigenerational families. I think of single parent families who show me what courage really looks like, I think of families in which the shared custody of children is a daily challenge and a serious disciple for parents who have chosen to divorce (most of whom, I think, are heterosexual), and I think of gay and lesbian households – all of which remind me that my one way of constructing a partnership, a marriage or a family is not the only way to live a loving, worthy, normal, American life. This country is made strong by its diversity, not homogeneity.

My definition of marriage derives from the beautiful families I know, both gay and straight. As a minister, I know that the Bible (both the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian New Testament) contains much that is beautiful and true, as do other sacred traditions, regarding human experience and human relationship and the well-ordering of society. But the Bible also prescribes and assumes many time-bound, culture bound ideas about sexuality, about women, about the ownership of women by men or the ownership of children by adults, much about slavery, about criminal justice and the uses of torture, about corporal punishment, property rights and about polygamy and marriage – much which could only be considered inappropriate today.

The question of whether the Bible is to be read as a literal guide for contemporary human affairs, and ethics, and law, is a good question – but it is not a question for a secular state to answer. It is not a question to be decided in a state’s constitution. This is not a Christian nation, and Minnesota is not governed by the Christian bible or any other. No matter what religion the majority may currently practice, we do not live in a theocracy.

As a minister, I have gone in the middle of the night to the hospital with terrified parents whose child has been rushed to the emergency room. And I have sat all night with a mother prohibited from the bedside of her child, who is crying out for her – because she is not recognized as that child’s mother, though she has been since his birth. The hospital was not obliged to recognize that. I have sat with life partners similarly separated, one couple in particular who were married 40 years, but when one was sick and dying, the other could not even visit, could not even say goodbye, as his spouse, the love of his life was dying. And in the end, in fact, that man, then an old man, was forced to leave his home, the home he had built with his partner, as so many of us have made homes with those we choose to love.

Earlier this year I stopped signing marriage licenses for heterosexual couples when they marry until I can sign licenses for all couples when they marry. I do this with the full support of my church, and the support of many heterosexual couples I will marry this summer. They understand the imbalance of rights and benefits bestowed by that license on some and not all, and would not be accomplices to that imbalance. As they approach their own wedding days, they are asking, as so many are asking, What possible purpose to our commonwealth could be served by a constitutional amendment that would outlaw the stable, loving marriages of any of our citizens? I can see none.

Thank you.

The Reverend Victoria Safford
White Bear Unitarian Universalist Church
Mahtomedi, Minnesota