A Letter to Democratic Politicians

I am a fellow Democratic voter. I have always supported Democrats, with exception to the one time I voted Libertarian in 2016 when I was my young dumb self with the freedom to vote for the very first time. I had the choice of Trump, whom I hated, or Hilary, whom I was being bombarded with warnings about. So I chose what I felt would make me “different”, and that was the only 3rd party option that was available. It was my biggest regret, of course. Even before 2016, I had supported Obama. I supported Democrats even when they fell short because I always understood their vision and aspirations of a more just society that engages in social and scientific issues for the betterment of society, and in particular, the people.

Democracy to me is very important, not just because it is a form of government where all human knowledge collaboratively solves problems in the best way possible, but because the flaws of every one human must be met with checks and balances. And while I disagree with C. S. Lewis's stance on hierarchy, this is a view of Democracy that I share with him; Democracy is just as much about checking the power of any one person as it is about collaborative governance. A collaborative governance, one that checks humanity's worst impulses, cannot be small, it must be as wide as the number of civilians, and we do this through voting and real representation. I still have not lost faith in this form of Representative Democracy, but I am concerned that we as a society have lost or ignored the reasoning behind why it exists. It is not just that we have to protect Democracy, it is that Democracy offers us the chance to both have our voices be heard and to check overgrown power.

However, I am even more concerned by an insidious assumption seen increasingly among certain intellectuals that we must be central to all issues at all times in every context. This is antithetical to the truth. It is morally relativistic. And it reinforces hierarchy of dignity, of the imago dei.

I have a B.A. in Theology from the University of Briar Cliff. It is something I am very proud of, particularly because of my homosexuality. I was one of only two Theology graduates at Briar Cliff in 2023, and I cannot express how much I was shaped, supported, and taught by the amazing professors, especially Theology professors, there that helped me grow and gave me my voice, who encouraged and helped me to write my Senior Thesis, and its presentation, on LGBTQ+ Theology. In it I argue against the "traditional" interpretation of the clobber verses, from both a Jewish and Christian perspective, and I argue for a sexual ethics that applies to all sexual identities alike, heavily influenced by the work of Margaret A. Farley and Robin Dembroff. Thus, my sources of Theology involved historical tradition, scripture and literary criticism, reception criticism, philosophy, and science. But the core of the book, its very center, aspired to be a section on personal experience, because that, too, is part of Theology.

I grew up in a Protestant environment. My biological grandfather was a Pastor during my mother's childhood. I went to Salvation Army when I was younger, and was the last of my siblings to stop going during elementary school. But I never lost my connection to religion. From then on it had only grown through experimentation with other religions and Christian sects, doubt, and eventually through despair and self-hatred during my second year at University. But I would not change the past if I could, because God was leading me somewhere, to a richer faith that includes both doubt and self-acceptance. 2018 was a hard year for me. During that year, I was finally coming to terms with my homosexuality, something which I had repressed and ignored my entire life, while at the same time dealing with two family deaths and my step-father's cancer (he's in full remission now). I felt lost and alone. I felt like God hated me, and I hated myself, deeply. In 2019 I was required to take a religious studies class to meet minimum requirements. In religious studies, religion opened up from something restrictive to something dialectic and nuanced. God became personal and connective, rather than immaterial and distant. Scripture went from God's Word to God's influence to human's experience of God, and self-hatred became self-doubt. I would not reach self-acceptance until I become acquainted to Judaism, which has a very different mindset on sin and salvation, and has a much more welcoming stance toward LGBTQ+ individuals in the US.

My personal experience of homosexuality emphasizes this whispering voice in my mind telling me that I'm okay, telling me that I am not lesser, that I'm not sinful or deviant, and not only does this come from self-understanding, but this self-understanding is conferred by God, a dialogue between God and one's self. I am not deviant, I am not a pedophile, I am not morally evil, I am not the result of abuse, I am not a destruction of society. I am who I am because God gave us this gift of perspective and of difference, something that expands and gives nuance to reality. I ran from the calling towards Tarshish, throwing myself into the watery depths of self-hate, and God's whispering voice brought me out and sent me back on my path to my calling, which is to argue for LGBTQ+ individuals and their divine dignity, and to show that religion can be expanded to include LGBTQ+ individuals. I don't take this lightly or grandiosely. I think this calling is coming to every religious LGBTQ+ individual as a response to our pain over the past many many years, and the pain that still happens within religious communities. The prophetic voice is coming from the vulnerable, as it did in Jesus' time, as it did in the time of the Prophets.

So it is with great dismay that I see politicians othering us or using us as objects, and Its, only to be disposed when it is politically advantageous. One moment we gain marriage rights, the next we are threatened with an erasure of our history, a reductionist view of our relationships, a possible reversal of our marriage rights, and the very people who had supported us going back on their words in order to appease the moderate and a center that moves to the right when the right becomes more extreme. We as LGBTQ+ individuals are fully embodied human beings who have a soul, are made after the divine image, and have all the creative and agential power that comes with this divine image. Our abilities to connect with others, to love, to live in communities, to provide support for those in need and for each other, and to express our experiences enrich society and religion as a whole, and they enrich our relationships with God. Our relationships fully embody the principles and spirit of the examples of love and relation that God has given us throughout history, inside and outside of Scripture. To read Scripture's absence of accounting for LGBTQ+ marriages as a restriction of our relationships is to deny us not only a core part of who we are as embodied, material human beings, but to deny our procreative and communal power; and I don't mean procreative in the sense of child-bearing, but rather a mutual generation of love and collaboration which flows out into the community as a whole, just as the love between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit flows out toward humanity. This fruitfulness is not just expressed in that way, but also in the way many LGBTQ+ couples adopt children and care for them. To claim the Bible is in support of restrictions on our marriages is to make a very serious logical fallacy: lack of such precise examples in the Bible such as homosexual couples do not prove the Bible was against them, only that they did not exist or were not socially acceptable to see, write, or read about at the time. But what we do have are examples of couples, which although heterosexual, still serve to demonstrate the very same principles that are often shared and exemplified in homosexual couples; homosexual couples embody the I-Thou relation just as much as heterosexual couples, and we deserve not only the freedom, but the respect to show that and to live it out in community.

While I understand that speaking on Trans issues is tough in these times, you cannot abandon Trans people, for they are God's people, just like the rest of us, and their relationships also embody the same principles as every other relationship. Double standards are often placed on Trans people, just as they were on homosexuals. For example, a Trans person going into their preferred bathroom generates concerns of sexual assault, and yet a gay person going into the men's bathroom, or a lesbian going into the women's bathroom, does not generate the same concerns. It also confuses what it means to be trans and straight: straight Trans people would still be attracted to the opposite gender than they are; a straight Trans woman is attracted to a man. Furthermore, it is seen that Trans women are problematic in women's sports, but Trans men are just fine. This assumes some inherent disadvantage in skill and strength to cisgender women, which I find to be insulting, particularly when I realize that I don't often find people arguing that sports shouldn't be gendered to begin with. Lastly, the science is clear on Trans people and hormone therapy; it helps them. But even if it might not, only a qualified person would be able to determine that within a given context. This is the expertise of the doctor or psychiatrist, not politicians who have no expertise in this sort of thing. Most importantly, to not realize the contextuality of this topic is to do harm to everyone based on overly-generalized rules. The lives of Trans people are not something that can be compromised with; they are who they are, and they deserve the same respect and freedoms to live, work, recreate, and love as everyone else. Their experiences and relations enrich society.

The biggest insult to LGBTQ+ individuals is when our very lives are turned into political ideologies. Being gay or Trans is not political. Our rights are not political. Our abilities to love and care for others are not political. They are part of our imago dei; they mirror the same creative powers of God. Only through embracing humanity in all of its forms can we fully comprehend what there is to comprehend of the expansiveness of God; all of us in aggregate are a mirror of God. Not some of us, or any of us individually, but all of us together.

So, with all of that said, I want to express my concern for the centering of many Democrats in general. While our lives are not political, we cannot deny that they are seen as political, and so part of this centering has resulted in politicians giving up their LGBTQ+ values or positions to try to appease more people. While I do not think this is going to be effective, and it could keep some of us who have historically been Dem voters from voting Dem again, I also think this sacrifices values for short-sighted political gain and causes more long-term harm, not just to the LGBTQ+ individuals who will be left with significantly less representation, but also to the country and all of the people living here as a whole. For every person, including every minority, matters in this country.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said:

"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

Christian Lee Seibold