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If we think it is mainly made up of individuals, we would treat people as such. On the other hand, if we think society is primarily made up of categories of people, people would be grouped and then treated according to the group they belong to. This is the age-old societal question: individualism, each person unique and apart from others, versus collectivism; pluralism versus assimilation. Individual snowflakes, or categorical snowdrifts. Dividing people into categories by the characteristics they share tends to ignore their individual differences. But seeing people as individually unique snowflakes tends to ignore what they share. In Dr. Bertelson s words, sexual and gender  categories cannot adequately comprehend either the uniqueness of each individual[,] or the fundamental alikeness of all human beings . . . . The Gay Pride festival is this weekend in Phoenix. I m pleased to report that our church and Unitarian Universalism were well represented yesterday in the Gay Pride Parade. When I told my roommate Mike that I was walking as a UU in the parade, he wondered aloud how gay pride and religion could be related. This is not a surprising question. Some views of religion are oriented almost entirely to the next life, another world, rather than to this one. I explained to Mike that Unitarian Universalism is a religion engaged with the world. We try to bring about change in our society; to accord everyone justice, not just those who fit into a pattern we re comfortable with. Unitarian Universalism, and I as a UU minister, are committed to social justice for bisexual, gay, lesbian, and transgender people. In the words of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, recently most widely known as Barack Obama s minister,  different does not mean deficieCHNKWKS ІјЄTEXTTEXT€ˆFDPPFDPPŒFDPPFDPPŽFDPCFDPCFDPCFDPC’FDPCFDPC”STSHSTSH–lSTSHSTSHl–ђSYIDSYID^—SGP SGP r—INK INK v—BTEPPLC z— BTECPLC š—(FONTFONTТ—PTOKNPLC ˜4STRSPLC Z˜:PRNTWNPR”˜jFRAMFRAMў TITLTITLŽЁК READING: [from Snowflakes and Snowdrifts, a book by David Bertelson]  [T]he idea that everyone is unique as each snowflake is unique is a characteristic product of the individualistic value system. . . . [But] so is the disposition to think in terms of sexual categories  to see people as joined together into larger wholes even as the snowflakes within a snowdrift are merged into a larger whole. Sexually speaking, it has generally seemed very important for everyone to be clearly male as well as masculine[,] or female as well as feminine [. A]nd in the twentieth century heterosexual as opposed to homosexual. Nevertheless, . . . these categories cannot adequately comprehend either the uniqueness of each individual or the fundamental alikeness of all human beings that we also claim to accept.  Snowflakes and Snowdrifts A Sermon by the Rev. Terry Sims Unitarian Universalist Church, Surprise, Arizona April 13, 2008 I took the title of this morning s sermon from a book by David Bertelson written in 1986. My friend Jim Lyddane was living with me back then. Jim had taken a class from Dr. Bertelson at the University of Hawai i, and he suggested that I read Dr. Bertelson s book. I was immediately fascinated by the title and what the metaphor might mean:  Snowflakes and Snowdrifts. The subtitle of Dr. Bertelson s book is  Individualism and Sexuality in America. He writes that American individualism assumes that  each person is unique as a snowflake is unique. Nevertheless, unlike some societies in some periods in history, it seems to be important to mainstream culture to categorize individuals in broad terms. Cultures of the world struggle with this question: Is society made up of unique individuals, or categories made up of people who share a common chnt. I attended a concert last week with my law partner, Tony, and many of his former 4th-grade classmates. One of those classmates who have kept in touch with each other all these years is the violist in a world-class piano quartet, Opus One. My law partner Tony is married, and he, his wife, and I had all planned to go to the concert. But Tony s wife, Cindi, was not feeling well. When I arrived to meet the group, none of whom besides Tony knew me, Tony introduced me as his partner. One of the men who knows Tony has been married to Cindi for many years, jokingly asked how Tony meant that I was his partner. In an equally joking way, Tony said he and I were  life partners. Everyone laughed, including me. But I thought with that group, all of whom are past 50, what if we had been life partners? What if I had told those people I m primarily gay? How would they have reacted? Writing in 1986, Bertelson said:  At its deepest level individualism represents the sense that each individual has a validity apart from the social context. Because sexuality touches us all so deeply and personally, the range of expression on the subject  particularly in our own day  is enormous. . . .  Categorically based expectations regarding sexual object choice make no provision for the complexity of sexual and emotional feelings and responses in the personal lives of actual men and women. . . .  The credibility of categories based on sexual object choice rests on the conviction, [despite all evidence to the contrary], that everyone can be meaningfully characterized as either heterosexual or homosexual. . . . Americans are willing to settle for the appearance of conformity and likeness of mind in this regard. People are under considerable pressure to disguise any homosexual inclinations and (if they are unwilling to check them) to conduct themselves in all but the most private situations as if they were heterosexual. This pretense [renders] the majority of homosexuals invisible; . . . so for the most part they disappear from people s awareness. In many instances nowadays this is no longer true, but it is safe to say that most Americans under most circumstances find invisibility preferable to any sort of openly gay identification. My nephews, nieces, and my younger friends in their twenties are not very concerned about my, or other people s, sexual orientation. They re pretty interested in their own, of course. But for the most part, they accept sexuality as an individual question, not a categorical question. This is not to say that everyone is so enlightened, of course. We have a long way to go in terms of treating bisexual, lesbian, and gay people equally, as fully accepted within the range of normal sexuality. But I don t think the great frontier of acceptance now is about sexual orientation or identity. No, the frontier for acceptance these days is gender identity. My psychologist and I agree on that. My friend Tim is 28 and thoroughly heterosexual. He told me the other day that he thought being gay was completely natural and normal. What is unnatural to him is effeminacy,  men acting like women, as he put it. Clearly, that bias is about gender roles and categories, men divided from women and vice versa. For Tim, It s not about whether women and men are sexually attracted to the same sex or what we used to refer to as the opposite sex. It turns out that sexual differences may not be as opposite as once thought. Did you see the Reuters News Agency story by Michael Conlon on Thursday, April 3? According to the article, a transgender man is six months pregnant. Thomas Beatie was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey.  Beatie, 34 . . . was born a woman but decided to become a man 10 years ago. As a girl, he was a teen beauty pageant contestant and earned a martial arts black belt. He began taking testosterone treatments and had breast surgery to remove glands and flatten his chest. . . .  I opted not to do anything with my reproductive organs because I wanted to have a child one day," he told Oprah. Beatie's wife Nancy said she inseminated him with a syringe using sperm purchased from a bank. . . .  It's not a male or female desire to have a child. It's a human desire, a thinly bearded . . . Beatie said.  I have a very stable male identity, he added, saying that pregnancy neither defines him nor makes him feel feminine. Beatie s wife, Nancy, said  the couple s roles will not change once the baby is born.  He s going to be the father and I m going to be the mother, she said. Oprah called the development "a new definition of what diversity means for everybody." Remember the Greek myth of Theseus and Procrustes, whose name means "he who stretches?" Procrustes kept a house by the side of the road where he offered hospitality to passing strangers. They were invited in for a pleasant meal and a night's rest in his very special bed. If the guest asked what was so special about it, Procrustes replied, "Why, it has the amazing property that its length exactly matches whoever lies on it." What Procrustes didn't volunteer was the method by which this "one-size-fits-all" was achieved. As soon as the guest lay down Procrustes went to work on him, stretching him on the rack if he was too short for the bed and chopping off his legs if he was too long. Theseus ended up fatally adjusting Procrustes to fit his own bed. I learned a great lesson from my sociology teacher in college. I took a class called  Minority Groups from Judy Conboy. She asked the class how we thought various minority groups could be integrated into society on an equal basis with those in the majority. As an overly-confident 19 or 20-year-old, I proudly said that I thought the best solution would be for minority groups to be fully assimilated. I went on to explain that assimilation for me meant to blend in more and more until eventually differences would disappear. The lesson I learned that day came not with some pronouncement or correction, but by way of a question. Dr. Conboy asked me,  So you think we ll all get along better as soon as we re all alike? My solution no longer sounded right even to me. It was assimilation, not pluralism; collectivism, not a celebration of uniqueness and diversity. Eliminate differences and you eliminate the problem. Sacrifice uniqueness for the sake of the whole, a whole that looks like the majority of us. My solution wasn t as quick or as harsh as Procrustes bed. But in the end, my idea of assimilation was still a  one-size-fits-all solution. It makes everyone conform to one standard, regardless of how each person might have to deform her or his uniqueness to do so. Conformity to the norm necessarily means deformity of whatever is different, whatever is unique, not normative. Making ourselves into what we or others think we should be means we lose what is special about us. We can extrude ourselves and others into identical ingots, force ourselves and others into prescribed molds. But it means cutting off pieces of ourselves, our uniqueness, as waste or sinful. So, back to the social justice question, our religious question. What do we say to whether to treat people as individuals or as categories? I don t think our first UU principle leaves much doubt on this subject. We say we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person, every snowflake, not just those that are like us, easily assimilated into our snowdrift. What does religion, especially ours, require of us? How do we put the first principle into practice? People are inherently worthy and have dignity just by virtue of being an individual human. That means as you are, as I am, right now. With whatever makes you  you, and me  me. In our uniqueness, we are special, incomparably valuable. No one can replace any one of us, and each of us needs each of the others of us. We hear so much about the first principle that I sometimes have to remind myself how fundamental it is, and how hard it is to put into practice. But doesn t religion ask something of us? Doesn t it ask us actually to become someone we were not before? My friend and UU minister Jan Christian has said that telling some people to be themselves is the worst advice you can give them. What about religions that identify sin and call us away from it? Is UUism one of those? Do we identify sin and call ourselves away from it? The problem I have with some religious teachings is that they seem to talk in categories, in dichotomies of male or female, straight or queer. And some religious teachings tell us there is something wrong with you if you do not conform in belief to doctrine, if you do not conform in lifestyle to easily identifiable, comfortable categories such as man or woman, straight or gay. As a society, the United States has tended to tout assimilation by suppressing difference, not by celebrating diversity. The other concern I have about some teachings in the name of religion is that they identify differences, deviations from the norm as sin. And yet they pay little or no attention to the sins to which all of us are prone because we all share the condition of being human. The joy and fun of the Gay Pride parade was slightly marred for me at the very end of the parade route. There was a group using a bull horn to talk to the parade participants and observers. They were telling us that instead of celebrating sexual and gender diversity ( deviancy is the word they would have chosen), we ought to be transforming ourselves, deforming ourselves away from the sins of sexual and gender nonconformity.  The Bible says a man shall not lie with a man, nor a woman with a woman,  God hates homosexuals, and so forth. I do not mean to portray this as another clear-cut or easy dichotomy,  us versus  them. I think there are many well-meaning religious people in the world. I think some of them sincerely believe in their interpretation of a text they consider authoritative and holy, like the Bible. Because their interpretation tells them to think in dichotomies, polar opposites, they believe that whatever is not ordained as normal is abnormal or deviant, and often sinful. Their religious idea tells them that being gay, or bisexual, or lesbian, or especially transgender, is wrong, unnatural, sinful. Their sincere view is that those of us who do not believe as they do, or love as they do, or see ourselves as masculine or feminine as they do, must conform to be saved. They believe salvation is so important that it does not matter what we might have to do to deform ourselves. No matter what conformity might cost us in terms of our individuality. Such religions tell us that the part of us that is sinful must be cut off, that we must deform and conform ourselves to fit their Procrustean bed. That our uniqueness is not just unimportant, but perverse; not just deficient, but damning. So, salvation by becoming someone else? Transformation in what sense? All of the religions I know do expect to make us into what we were not before. Religion should not leave us as we were. It should change us; it should radically change us. But despite the sincerity of other religions, I cannot believe that the truly religious principle asks us to be changed for the sake of conforming to what society identifies as normative. Salvation cannot depend just on becoming part of a snowdrift. I cannot believe that real religion seeks to destroy or take away what is uniquely me, the snowflake I am. Surely the goal of religion is not to deform us into what we are not. I cannot believe that being a religious person asks people to become heterosexual if we are not, to be male if we understand ourselves to be inwardly female, or vice versa. My view of religion calls us not to eliminate our unique selves but to use who we are in the best way possible. Not to be less human, less ourselves, but to be more of who each of is. Which means more of who we can be. Bertelson has written:  Like it or not, we all know that we have no choice but to accept the burden of our own individuality or selfhood. If we feel that our sense of self is threatened by ties with others, we are obliged to reject the dream of the good society and to settle for one based on impersonal [categories]. . . . But  [a] world of snowflakes would be very different from our present world of snowdrifts. It would be a place where familiar distinctions of sex and sexuality would have little if any cultural significance  a world indeed of individuals, but not of isolated and wholly self-centered individuals.  The uniqueness of each individual [sh]ould be balanced by an emphasis upon a shared humanity. . . . Religion expects more of us, and we should expect more of ourselves by being religious people. Religion should not seek to transform those things that are different about ourselves, uniquely special about us. Instead, the job of religion is to transform how we are the same, the weaknesses of our common humanity: our greed, our self-centeredness, our hate, our tendency to judge others so harshly and ourselves so leniently. It s not about changing our particular characteristics, whatever they may be. It s about changing hearts. It s about transforming human spirits. The truly religious ideal is not to make us all alike, to treat us as only a part of a category, a snowdrift. The true religious ideal is that each of us individually will be transformed into the best our unique selves will allow; a beautiful, special, individual snowflake to gladden our own and others lives. Amen. BENEDICTION: The hope of the world is not found in human sameness. The hope of the world is in each special one of us becoming the best unique self we can be. Go rejoicing! # e versa. My view of religion calls us not to eliminate our unique selves but to use who we are in the best way possible. 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