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Cain murders Abel
by Marc Chagal

I was thinking about Yusuf al-Khal’s poem “Cain the Immortal” today when I stumbled across this fantastic archive of Marc Chagall interpretations of Genesis.

A propos of nothing I was thinking of two friends of mine, both men, who have just gotten married, despite the objections of a sizable minority of Canadians who say that gay marriage will tear apart the family.

And then I looked at various images of Cain murdering his brother out of jealousy, and re-read al-Khal’s poem for the lament that it is, and I wondered just what this ideal of “the family” is supposed to be. The very first one, the family that is held up by conservative Christians as the model for God’s plan that men and women should get together to procreate, was torn apart by murder in its very second generation, following hot on the heels of sin in the first. In fact the Genesis story and the “fall of man” is all about how these first humans made so many egregious errors that God bestowed suffering on all their descendants thereafter – suffering of childbirth, of toiling in fields and so on.

And rather than re-examine the business model, the heterosexual family has somehow remained the template in whose name gays and lesbians (and blacks, and Ojibways and many others) were forbidden from marrying.

It’s really a wonder to me that after thousands of years of proof, my friends love each other THAT much to want to join the institution and see if they can’t help to recast it in a better light. I like their optimism though. It’s the same thing vote for hope that I made when I got married ten years ago.