Salon.com > Sara Miles

A band of gold

Sat, 17 May 2008 11:28:00 +0000

I never bothered taking off the ring.

A little over four years ago, I swung by a jeweler and bought a $40 gold band, rushing to an event I'd never expected would happen -- my wedding. Martha and I, who had been together for 11 years then, were married, with our daughter as witness, at San Francisco's City Hall, in the great Valentine's Day uprising of affirmative civil disobedience.

Along with 4,000 other couples, we received what many of us hadn't known we were looking for: legal families, a laundry list of new rights and obligations, and the teary, cheering welcome of our fellow citizens.

Strangers kissed us and thrust carnations into our arms. A little girl, on the steps of City Hall, shyly gave my bride a handwritten note, in pink magic marker, reading "Congratulations on your marriage." My mother was so happy she almost wept when I called her with the news. My sister yelped with joy. My brother's voice cracked. "Oh, Sara," he said. Then, "I guess we're gonna have to buy you a kitchen appliance, now that you're legal."

But our next-door neighbor, Isabel, who was 6, looked confused when her parents ran into our backyard whooping congratulations. "I thought Sara and Martha weremarried," she said.

My daily bread

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 12:32:00 +0000

My first year at St. Gregory's would begin, and end, with questions. Now I understand that questions are at the heart of faith, and that certainties about God can flicker on and off, no matter what you think you know. But back then, I thought "believers" were people who knew exactly what they believed and had nailed all the answers.

My first set of questions was very basic. I covertly studied the faces of people at St. Gregory's when they took the bread, trying to guess what they were feeling, but I was too proud and too timid to ask either priests or congregants the beginner's queries: Why do you cross yourselves? What are the candles for? How do you pray? And, more seriously: Do you really believe this stuff?

My next question was not about God or church; it was nakedly about me, and my fears. What would my friends think?

Ban on gay marriage denies justice to children

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 13:00:00 +0000

There's nothing like a judicial ruling -- in this case, the extremely tortured one written last week by Judge Robert S. Smith of the New York Court of Appeals against gay marriage -- to make me feel simultaneously all-powerful and helpless. On Friday, my family read the news over breakfast. I was on my way to volunteer at my church food pantry; my wife was finishing the endless paperwork for our 17-year-old daughter's college loan, and Katie -- one of the "children" in whose interest the court said it ruled -- was on her way out the door to her summer job.

Who knew we could have such a grandiose impact? Just by hanging out in our kitchen, the three of us challenge what Smith called the "accepted truth for almost everyone who ever lived, in any society in which marriage existed, that there could be marriages only between participants of different sex." By asking for the legal benefits of marriage, we threaten the already unstable institution of the heterosexual family.

It’s a girl!

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 19:00:00 +0000

It's always a bit of a shock when God shows up in church. There's not much in Scripture to suggest that God's particularly interested in church of any kind, and Jesus, with his deliberate flouting of religious laws, had a notable impatience with the enterprise.

And yet, as Christians, we hope and pray that it will happen. The election of the Right Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, bishop of Nevada, as the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States appears to be a hint that something's going on beyond the usual human bickering, self-congratulation, scapegoating and piety that abound whenever church people gather. The "kingdom of God" -- a phrase used by Jesus and often equated by Christians with the church -- is like a weed growing in the tidy garden of human culture. It grows as it will, unbidden and frequently unwanted; its growth is always to God's design specs, not those of tradition-bound churches.

Jefferts Schori, a former oceanographer, was considered a long shot for the position by most church experts: Although she's a fairly mainstream liberal, her gender made it unlikely that the church would choose to be stirred up at a moment when it seemed to require smoothing over and calming down.

Rome’s latest witch hunt won’t stop with gays

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 00:43:00 +0000

For anxious Catholic seminarians, teachers and priests, the disclosure that teams of Vatican inspectors will be visiting the more than 200 U.S. seminaries to "look for evidence of homosexuality" and investigate if seminaries have "a clear process for removing faculty members who dissent from the authoritative teaching of the church" set off a storm of speculation about a new witch hunt against gay men in the priesthood.

Archbishop Edwin F. O'Brien, the Vatican's coordinator of the investigative visits, told the National Catholic Register that "anyone who has engaged in homosexual activity, or has strong homosexual inclinations, would be best not to apply to a seminary and not to be accepted into a seminary," and said that the Vatican would be coming out with a document clarifying its 1961 position on homosexual seminarians and clergy.