Rev. Dr. Nancy S. Taylor

Senior Minister, Old South Church in Boston, 2006 Recipient of the Rabbi Bernard Mehlman Building Bridges Award 

Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry 8th Anniversary Awards Celebration
Wednesday, February 15, 2006

I am honored by this award … and so deeply grateful to all of you and to the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry for your courageous and compassionate work on behalf of what is quite simply a matter of civil rights: the freedom to marry.

I want to thank especially Rabbi Devon Lerner, Director of RCFM and Rev. Anne Fowler, chairperson of the board, for your courage as clergy, for being willing to take the heat. We know you have taken the heat from people of your own faith traditions. We know it is not easy. Thank you for standing up for what is right.

I am also grateful to the United Church of Christ … the denomination in which I am ordained. It is true that not all UCC clergy or congregations support same gender marriage. The UCC, however, is among only a handful of Christian traditions in the Commonwealth whose clergy can, if they want to, officiate at same gender marriages. And, I assure you, many of us have been thrilled and honored to do so.

I want to begin by saying something about myself … about my credentials for this work. I am a Christian, I believe in marriage and I am married. I think this is important because among the opponents of equal marriage there are many who have never been inside a marriage, and who, none-the-less, have taken it upon themselves to pronounce about marriage from afar.

I am a Christian, I believe in marriage and I am married.

I am married to a man who is an ordained priest of the Church of England and who has standing in the United Church of Christ. Peter read theology at Cambridge and then served as Chaplain to one of the Colleges of Cambridge. He has also served parishes in and around London. Peter is also an author of two books on Italian opera … one on Puccini and one on Verdi.

But Peter has another credential that I think you should know about. About seven or eight years ago Peter was awarded the title “Honorary Lesbian”. I need not go into how this occurred or what he did to deserve the title. Suffice it to say that it was conferred upon him by bone fide lesbians and, as such, is a legitimate honorific.

The purpose of telling you this story goes back to the question of my credentials. Not only am I a Christian who believes in marriage and who is in a heterosexual marriage. But, because I am married to an honorary lesbian, I am, thereby, also in an honorary same gender marriage.

Some years ago my husband was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of prostate cancer. While we treated the cancer aggressively, it continued to reappear. The cancer has now metastasized into Peter’s bones and, while he has good days and bad days, he has been told that he does not have many days.

I am telling you this – not because I want you to feel sorry for us – please don’t. Peter and I know ourselves to be blessed beyond measure in so many ways. I am telling you this because I want you to know how our marriage has deepened and strengthened through this ordeal. Years ago we vowed to stay together for better for worse, in sickness and in health. We have arrived at that place in our marriage where “worse” and “sickness” are like unwanted and menacing guests who have moved into our home and lives. We can’t get rid of them; they scare us and they won’t go away.

But I am convinced that it is our marriage – this powerful, complex, elastic and sturdy social institution – that gives our relationship the resilience to withstand this most debilitating assault. Our marriage serves as an instantly recognizable pass key. It provides entrance into a world of privileges, assumptions and guarantees that span the whole of our lives: social, legal, economic, medical, familial and personal. There is almost no aspect of our lives or, today of our medical challenge that is not positively affected by the fact that we are married.

I am a Christian and I believe in marriage. I know from personal, intimate, beautiful and painful experience that marriage matters. I ache for others to experience the rights and privileges that Peter and I almost take for granted.

It is, therefore, such an odd experience to read that a great many smart and informed people are declaring that marriage is an endangered species. I hear it all the time and cannot help but wonder if I am missing something. Should I know something I don’t?

The Hennie Pennie’s who are announcing that the sky is falling on marriage are hard right Christian conservatives who claim that Massachusetts is contributing to the demise of marriage. And isn’t that strange? For at the moment Massachusetts is battling to make marriage bigger and better and open to more and more people, it is being blamed for the institution’s decline. But other Hennie Pennie’s prophesying the demise of marriage are academicians and social scientists.

Like Hennie Pennie they are running around shouting out their imaginary fears, predicting doom and Armageddon for this most fundamental, irreplaceable human social institution.

If marriage were in so much trouble, why would Massachusetts – this bastion of liberalness – be working so hard to make marriage available to everyone who wants in?

We are here to say that the Hennie Pennies are wrong and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is right, and MASS Equality is right and the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry is right. Marriage is here to stay and it is so important that it has found ways to adapt and change with changing times. Marriage is here to stay because it is a vehicle that enables frail, faulty, fickle humans to cling to one another, care and support one another, through thick and thin, for better and for worse. It is one of the most important means to learning about love, respect, patience and forgiveness.

Yes, marriage is changing and adapting. But there is nothing new here. Marriage has been changing and adapting throughout the whole course of human history. Thank God! And right now, in this moment in time, we have the privilege of witnessing and participating in another evolutionary adaptation as this ancient institution revises itself again for a new day. Like all good things, marriage just gets better with age.

I want to thank the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry for your commitment to strengthening and growing the institution of marriage … for your commitment to liberty, rights and freedom. It is a commitment engraved in our state’s Constitution, and asserted in our nation’s Declaration of Independence:  that all people are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights and that among these are the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It was precisely these rights that were confirmed in law in Massachusetts on May 17, 2004 and that we are here today to celebrate, defend and protect.