"(Dis)Owning Jefferson and Outing Lincoln?"

Peg Duthie
27 February 2005
Unitarian Universalist Church of Tullahoma

[reading copy -- various bits smoothed out/revised during the actual delivery. The original invitation had been for the same sermon I'd delivered at First UU last year (later abridged and adapted for UU World) so some readers may find the last third of this piece decidedly familiar-sounding.]

As some of you know, in order to plan and publicize a church service, the titles of sermons are generally determined long before the actual piece gets written. At my home church, the ministers tend to be on the spontaneous side, and every now and then one of them has been known to say, "I know the newsletter description said I was going to talk about 'x' – but here's what I'm really going to talk about instead."

Since I'm a Type A, Franklin Planner kind of gal, however, I really am going to talk about Presidents Jefferson and Lincoln, as advertised -- but I'm also going to confess that there's a time-honored procrastination technique called Dreaming Up Alternative Titles For the Sermon Instead of Just Finishing the Thing Already, and one of the ones I came up with last week was "Would You Ban Lincoln From Adopting Children?"

Let me be clear from the get go: I don't know whether Abraham Lincoln was gay. I don't believe it's possible to know. Anyone who would have had first-hand knowledge of the answer has been dead for the better part of a century or more. I've been fascinated, however, by some of the reactions to a book that appeared earlier this winter, called The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, which tries to prove that Lincoln was indeed a homosexual based on the available historical evidence.

According to most of the reviews I've seen – from both conservative and liberal critics -- the book itself is weak. The author's interpretations apparently get pretty stretchy, and since he died two years ago, he isn't around to clarify his various leaps from point A to point G. That said, it's generated some very thoughtful commentary on what it means to prove whether someone is gay or not, and why the uncertainty rouses such strong emotions.

Put one way, why should we care about Lincoln's private life? How can it possibly matter to our own daily routines with whom he happened to sleep eightscore and eighteen years ago? But put it another way: what would it be like to be able to say that Lincoln was gay? For instance, what would it be like to tell certain members of the Tennessee legislature that they are essentially discriminating against one of America's most venerated icons? What would it be like to point out that the laws they want to pass would have declared Abraham Lincoln unfit for parenthood? There have been six proposals filed so far this year to stop gay adoption:

House Bill 543, Senate Bill 829, and Senate Bill 1930 -- prohibits adoptions by homosexual persons

House Bill 775 and Senate Bill 1615 -- prohibits adoptions by homosexual persons, and prohibits a parent from surrendering or consenting to the adoption of such person's child if such person has knowledge that a prospective adoptive parent is a homosexual.

Senate Bill 1924 -- prohibits a homosexual person from being a foster parent and also applies to anyone if a homosexual person resides in the same residence.

I really have to wonder about the people who insist that no parent is better than a gay parent. To give but one example, the religious education director at my church is a Christian attorney now studying for the ministry, and his partner is a physician. They are affluent. They are stable. They are devout. They are raising two adorable twins. However, only one of them is the biological father, and if these laws pass, his partner would not be allowed to adopt the children under any circumstance, no matter what it says in their wills or what the kids want. The upshot is that, if these bills become law, my church stands to lose a phenomenally gifted and dedicated RE director because he needs to protect his family, and that may mean moving away from Tennessee to ensure that his kids don't end up treated as orphans of the state. It makes me absolutely livid to think about the other intelligent, talented people these laws might drive away. I love this state, I'm expecting to live here for the rest of my life, and it has more than enough to cope with without a self-inflicted brain drain.

So, as I see it, these are the stakes: it's easy to take away rights from people you don't know or respect. I have to believe that the legislators in question aren't well-acquainted with openly gay people, and that they're working from a bunch of hazy, theoretical assumptions. If someone they admired or loved turned out to be gay, they'd at least have to think twice about enacting disrespectful laws. It might not stop them anyhow – the name Mary Cheney comes to mind – but it would at least nudge them closer to recognizing that gay people aren't all promiscuous leather-clad anti-establishment freaks horsing around in San Francisco. If the original log cabin Republican was in fact a gay man, what would that mean to the people who vilify homosexuals but see him as a hero? What would it be like to consider someone a role model and then find out he was one of "them"? Would you still take pride in the qualities you have in common -- or would you be mortified and worried about having qualities in common?

On the other side of the coin, I think it's safe to assert that many people find it thrilling when they can claim something in common with a celebrity, particularly if you're not used to seeing people like you praised and adored. It's why I was elated to find out that my great-grandfather was a poet, and why I was geeked just last week to see a Chinese actress on the cover of the New York Times Style magazine. It's why there have been countless pages expended on the identity of Shakespeare – whether it was really possible for someone who never attended university to write those thirty-eight plays, and whether those 154 sonnets were addressed to a woman or a man. It's why Emily Dickinson shows up in various anthologies of homosexual poetry. A former co-worker once described to me how, back in the 1980s, she and her dorm mates used to take turns guessing which interesting female celebrities were gay, and how at one point she felt compelled to say, "They can't all be lesbians just because they're cool!"

And, I think, it's why some UUs talk about people who are "UUs at heart" or "people who are UUs but just don't know it yet," and why there are lists of "Famous UUs" to prove how influential Unitarian Universalists are, and that our movement isn't just some freaky contemporary cult. The lists can be a useful educational tool, because it’s easier to discuss specific role models instead of abstract principles. When we say that ”Frank Lloyd Wright" and “Ray Bradbury” are Unitarians, there’s a tangible glamour that just doesn’t come with “interdependent web.”

But, just as gay anthologists come under fire for including Shakespeare and Dickinson amongst the tribe, the Famous UU lists are also tremendously problematic because some of them include virtually anyone who’s ever stepped into a Unitarian church or expressed a Universalist thought, which leads to massively disputable claims about things like how many Unitarians signed the Declaration of Independence. One of those signers, of course, was Thomas Jefferson. The consensus seems to be that he had strong Unitarian sympathies, but that he did not formally belong to any Unitarian church. There have been acres of sermons, articles and books written on whether Jefferson thought of himself as a Unitarian, often choosing to emphasize different key phrases from his writing. Those who prefer to regard Jefferson as an independent deist tend to highlight the letter where he says, “I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know.” Those who want to hold him up as a UU role model frequently point to another letter where he says, “The population of my neighborhood is too slender, and is too much divided into other sects to maintain any one preacher well. I must therefore be contented with being a Unitarian by myself.” Jefferson was known to worship at Joseph Priestly’s Unitarian church in Philadelphia, but he was also a regular contributor to St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, and was involved enough to serve on its vestry.

With Jefferson, there’s another wrinkle, which is whether Unitarian Universalists ought to be so very eager to claim him at all. Eleven years ago, at the Charlotte General Assembly, a group led by African American UU ministers formally expressed their outrage at plans to hold a birthday ball in honor of Thomas Jefferson. They asserted that “Thomas Jefferson's role in the racial history of the United States is not one which African Americans, native Americans, or others victimized by the ‘founding fathers’ wish to honor.” One result of the protest was four years of passionate debate over whether the name of the Thomas Jefferson District – the district to which this church belongs -- ought to be changed. The final vote in 1997 was actually 75 to 51 in favor of dropping the name, but that was short of the 2/3rds majority required to enact the change. When I spoke about Jefferson on Independence Day last year, a member of the congregation told me afterwards that she was glad to hear about others not considering Jefferson a role model -- in her view, Jefferson was a rapist. We could easily spend all day discussing that controversy – who Jefferson had sex with, whether they truly had any sort of leeway to say "no," what it means for the people who may or may not be their descendants, and so forth.

For me, all of this is tough -- as a kid, I totally idolized anyone who was a Renaissance man, and I had a postcard with Jefferson's face taped to my bedroom wall. I even wrote a poem about him which got me onto the teen board of Seventeen magazine. I didn't want to hear about any of my heroes having extramarital affairs, consensual or not – I hated the idea of George Washington getting overly friendly with Sally Fairfax -- and I remember another friend having the exact same reaction when he learned about John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.

A lot of labels can be pinned on Thomas Jefferson -- hero, statesman, genius, slaveowner, racist, sinner. In my opinion, to sum him up by any single one of these is to leave out crucial parts of his story. To call him a Unitarian or a Universalist doesn’t really give us a true handle on what he believed – and that goes for all of the other Founding Fathers and celebrities listed in our brochures and websites, regardless of whether they were official UUs or UUs by association or “UUs-at-heart.” The words “Unitarian” and “Universalist” are no more adequate than “gay" or "straight," when it comes to describing you, me, each other, our ancestors or our heroes. At best, the words are hints; they are not definitions. In my favorite patriotic anthem, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” we sing of and to the God of our fathers:

Our fathers' God, to Thee,
Author of liberty,
To Thee we sing;

Whether that God was Unitarian or Universalist or some utterly unknown, unnamed entity, and no matter what God you yourself do or don’t believe in now, it deserves acknowledging that for many of our ancestors and predecessors, God provided extraordinary strength and solace. It is worth remembering that, regardless of their religious identification or lack thereof, and regardless of their sexual histories, provable or forever uncertain, they accomplished important things. Our closing hymn notwithstanding, none of them were saints -- but they weren’t merely sinners. For all of their faults and blind spots and inconsistencies, Lincoln and Jefferson and our other forebears were astoundingly courageous and visionary; no matter which God they personally worshipped, and regardless of what they did or didn't do in their bedrooms, they were able to create and preserve a country capable of sustaining liberals and conservatives, believers and heretics, Unitarians and Universalists. Their achievements are well worth celebrating, during Presidents' Month and the rest of the year, too. Amen and alleluia.