In a famous passage from his 1964 Lectures on Physics, Richard Feynman wrote: “What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”
Scott Bolton is a poet.
On Monday, NASA’s Juno spacecraft entered orbit around Jupiter in a flawless maneuver that Bolton, the lead investigator for the project, called “the hardest thing NASA has ever done.” In the press conference that followed, Bolton was visibly moved as he rhapsodized about Juno’s progress. Showing a video taken by Juno last week of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons as they danced around the planet, Bolton noted that here for the first time we see these moons actually orbiting Jupiter, a phenomenon that Galileo first hypothesized in 1610 with a stunning leap of imagination and recognized as confirmation of the Copernican thesis.
As Bolton noted how Galileo’s discovery revolutionized the way we think about our place in the universe, he alluded also to science’s continuity with an older past by noting that this video also exhibits for the first time the “Harmony of the Spheres,” the music and mathematics the ancient Greeks found in how the Sun, Moon, and planets move through the starry sky.
Revolution, continuity: Bolton’s remarks on Juno’s progress seem apropos of our own Juneau, as CBJ proposes an ordinance to protect the LGBT community from discrimination and the Catholic Diocese protests that ordinance.
We are witnessing a revolution in how we respond to sexuality and gender. The Diocese doesn’t like it and objects to this and other such ordinances as inhibiting its religious freedom.
But let’s be clear: this proposed ordinance contains no provision that would in any way inhibit a person’s Constitutional right to worship as he or she sees fit. The Diocese’s argument is that the Constitution guarantees religious freedom not just for individuals but for religious institutions as well. This is the same kind of thinking that got us into the whole Citizens United mess.
The argument that the Church as a religious institution is protected under the Constitution is a political argument, an effort to gain for the institutional Church greater influence over public policy, and that has nothing to do with our freedom to worship as we choose.
The Diocese notes that the Church is opposed to unjust discrimination, but the only possible effect its objections would have would be to allow the Diocese to not hire anyone whose lifestyle it objects to — that is, anyone who is publicly gay or transgender. And that is unjust discrimination.
But call it what you will. If the Diocese has determined that there are certain people — gay people, transgender people — whom it doesn’t want to employ; people it wants to refuse to hire; people it will not thereby help to feed, clothe, or shelter: then the Diocese has already departed from the principles of Christ, and we can stop pretending this has anything to do with being Christian.
We’re witnessing a beautiful revolution in the way we respond to sexuality and gender. But it isn’t really about sex. The sex is going to happen no matter what — always has, always will; you can’t prevent it. You might as well try to prevent gravity.
The revolution is about love. It’s about the freedom for two people to openly and publicly fall in love when sexual desire is pulling them together anyway, and to do so without having to worry about the hardships of discrimination and the hatred of bigots. It’s about simply being affectionate in public with the person who shares your bed and shares your life. Oscar Wilde’s much-quoted line about homosexuality — “the love that dare not speak its name” — says a lot: it was the love that dared not speak its name, not the sex.
Which brings us back to continuity and celestial mechanics. Our greatest Christian poet, Dante, saw that the ultimate force driving Jupiter’s moons was love: “Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” That divine love continues to move in us only by how well we love others, all others: the ones we sleep with as well as our friends and neighbors — and the ones who come to us looking for jobs.
• Jim Hale lives in Juneau and is a parishioner at St Paul’s Catholic Church.
