Rainbow over Delaware...and beyond

"Joe is running through the halls with a rainbow flagged tied on like a cape high fiving everyone." Tweet attributed to Jill Biden on a parody Twitter account.

We moved into Delaware on June 29, 2013 and two days later, same sex marriage became legally recognized. Delaware was the 11th state to do so. Same sex marriage would become legal in Pennsylvania (where we left) a year later after a ruling in Federal court deemed bans on same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional. It is no secret that I felt religiously and politically stifled in the area where we used to live. The conservatism of Lancaster County is well known. When I was growing up our Congressional Representative was Bob Walker, known to be the most conservative voter in the House of Representatives. It is also an area where you are routinely asked What church do you go to?-- and church membership is a given. Note that the question was not Do you belong to a church? And in this case, church was a Christian church. Too many times, we had to explain Unitarian Universalism (our church home in Lancaster County) to people who couldn't fathom what we were talking about--even after we explained it.

So when we moved to Delaware just at the moment it was allowing same-sex marriage, it felt as though it was affirming us, too. I know that sounds silly, and I don't mean to make light of those who have real cause to celebrate the act of legislation. We are, after all, a heterosexual couple whose union has been recognized for 22 years before moving to this state. But something was lifted in us. We became a little more free to be the politically and religiously liberal folks we were.

Delaware has a few things to be proud of in this swing of the country toward marriage equality and one in particular: favored son and Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden. The democratic party hadn't been putting its neck on the line for the cause. They had been too quiet about gay issues since the whole debacle of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. What a mess that was. But Joe Biden came out for same sex unions during an appearance on Meet the Press on May 6, 2012. 
"I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men marrying women are entitled to the same exact rights. All the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly I don’t see much of a distinction beyond that."
His remarks sent the White House scrambling to update their official position, which Obama delivered three days later in an interview. Maybe Obama was going to do it anyway--eventually--if the pollsters said it would help him his election--but Joe, in his trademark bluntness got the ball rolling and set the rainbow flag to unfurling. A mere three years later, we are celebrating the historic ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States of America that makes same-sex marriage the law of the land.

Joe Biden was instrumental in this landmark decision for another reason--he was on the Senate Judiciary committee when Justice Kennedy, who wrote for the majority in the decision, was nominated by Reagan and appointed. For those of you who can remember back to 1987, Kennedy was not Reagan's first choice. Reagan first nominated conservative judge Robert Bork for the Supreme Court opening. The nomination sparked massive protests from The Senate Democrats and Joe Biden, from his seat on the Judiciary committee, protested the nomination. Biden felt firmly that the Senate vote was put into place to balance an executive agenda that veered too far from center. Bork was not approved, and Reagan nominated Kennedy instead, knowing that his moderate stances would appease the democrats.
Justice Anthony Kennedy writes for the majority opinion: No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed.

I didn't really understand the impact. States had been dribbling in in support of same-sex unions. And now you can get married in every state in the union. I understood that. It wasn't until I was on Facebook and saw the post of one of my friends who lives in Texas. Angie had married her longtime love a little over a year ago in New York. She posted WE ARE LEGALLY MARRIED WHERE WE LIVE! The Supreme Court had affirmed Angie and her wife. Said that they were who they thought themselves to be and that they could carry that identity with them over state lines, wherever they happen to be in this country. I am thrilled for her and for all my friends who are now able to marry and carry their union from state to state. To be honest, I felt a little squeamish about celebrating our wedding anniversary in this country knowing that it was a privilege that not all couples had. This summer, Mark and I are celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary. It will be a great celebration here in Delaware.

Degrees of Delaware and Arden time

We are barely in Delaware, but we are here, a few miles over the line. Near the point where the furniture stores and computer stores hover (Really, I bet they cast their shadows into Pennsylvania) and vie for your sales-tax-free spending dollars.

I went to college in Delaware, but I saw that more as college culture. I didn't get a sense of what it meant to live in a different state. So what has changed for us in Delaware besides acquiring the country's ugliest license plate? We thought we were getting away from scrapple, that Lancaster County classic that is revered and hated in equal measure, but apparently scrapple is even a bigger deal in Delaware. They even have a festival devoted to it, though it shares a billing with apples. I have mentioned the beach culture and how, even in Wilmington, the ocean pulls people away from their normally scheduled lives. And don't call it the shore. That's New Jersey.

In Delaware, I have been at events where the governor is in attendance, and he is approachable. When you govern over three counties, as opposed to Pennsylvania's 67, it makes you more available to your constituency. All Delaware politicians are. Everybody has a story about Joe Biden. I am convinced that any Delawarean could call him up today and the call would go through--straight to the man. That's how it works in Delaware. It isn't Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (a Pennsylvanian). In Delaware, you are only one or two degrees removed from another Delawarean. It isn't an island, but until the 1950's and the building of bridges and I95, Delaware was not readily accessible to those who lived outside of it. You had to really want to come here, and you had to really want to leave. It was a bit of an isolated population.

Sometimes, it is hard to figure what cultural differences are Delaware and which are purely Arden. In Arden, we have Arden time. It's a slippery thing, time. In Arden, you tell people you are going to start the procession or the egg hunt at a certain hour.  However, if you actually start it when you say you will, expect a few disappointed children whose parents were operating on that buffer of anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes that fall within Arden definition of on-time. I'm not sure whether to chalk that up to a more relaxed south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-line way of life or to the artist/hippie disdain of rules. Or maybe it is a little of both. Mark and I have acquired more tie-dye shirts than ever before. We are trying to to meld into this new informality. "Trying" is a funny way to say it. Who has to try to be late? It isn't as though we are having to go the other way and fit into stricter codes of conduct. My hair would never stand to be high-society. No sommelier is ever going to look at me and say, "Let's push the expensive wines." This new relaxed way of being fits us, but learning to let go is an art. In letting go of standards of time and of formality, even just a tiny bit, you find out where all your tensions and hang-ups lie. It is a good lesson.

Rebels and Ice Cream

In 1910, the writer Upton Sinclair moved to Arden, DE, after the experimental Helicon Home Colony he started near Englewood, NJ, was destroyed by fire. His bungalow in Arden, referred to as the “Jungalow” after Sinclair’s muckraking book The Jungle, sits within a half mile of my present home. I pass it when I take a walk. It is perhaps because of Sinclair’s celebrity that an incident in Arden received national attention in 1911.

 On July 30th of that year,  vengeful anarchist George Brown had eleven fellow Ardenites, including  Sinclair, arrested for playing baseball and tennis on a Sunday which violated the Blue Laws, which outlawed shopping and other leisure activities on the Christian sabbath. Those arrested that July day did not pay their fine on principle and instead went to the work pile for their sentence of eighteen hours. Upon their release, they celebrated with ice cream and even treated their jailers and the police who arrested them. (There had been ice cream at the baseball game. The ice cream man himself had been arrested.) The group went on to protest the Blue Laws and were instrumental in getting them repealed. The 1911 event was written up in a full page spread in the New York Times, the editor of which sent a reporter down to Delaware to cover the story.

This past Sunday, Arden celebrated this famous event with a reenactment of the baseball game which included homemade lemon ice cream so delicious that it should have been a crime. It is this kind of hell-raising and outside-the-box action that is celebrated in the Ardens by those of all ages. I noted residents from 3 to 91 years of age at Sunday’s game. My 17-year-old daughter watched the game from a precarious seated position on a blanket with a foam donut at the ready. The day before, she broke her tailbone when she fell off the roof of our screen porch trying to sneak out after her curfew. Apparently, teens sneaking around to hang out in groups is another hell-raising tradition in Arden. As coincidence would have it, I recently opened up a historical book about Arden to see a photo of a group of kids camping out by the old pool (a dammed up section of Naamans Creek). Midnight swims were a big attraction to the youth of 100 years ago.

Today, the kids have a few whistleblowers out to get them. There are those, just like George Brown, who take upon themselves to police the activities of others. They call the police at the sound of a firecracker or to report the noise when gatherings of kids playing KanJam at the Gild Hall parking lot gets too loud. It is a right of passage for Arden youth to gather in places and at times that are prohibited, such as Indian Circle after dark. This is the story of youth everywhere, but perhaps more-so in Arden. Since its inception, Arden has attracted a population of rebel thinkers and doers. As one longtime resident put it, Arden was “a community that most nice post-war families would never have considered visiting, much less buying into.” How can we expect the children descended of a population of rebels to…well…not rebel? My daughter just happened to get caught, and in a humiliating way. The doctors and nurses at the emergency room did little to disguise their amusement when she relayed what had happened. And then there was the fact that she had to wake us, her parents, at 2 AM to drive her to the ER.

Mark and I are still getting used to the culture here.  Our former home was in such a remote location that if our kids did sneak out, they really wouldn’t have anywhere to go or anyone to do it with. We are learning what it means to be in community of free-thinkers at all stages of life.  We are contemplating the rules, the price of freedom and of creativity. We observe the sometimes heated banter that happens on open Arden internet forums and at town meetings. That, too, is part of the energy of intelligent free-thinkers.  The outcome of this particular incident is that our very lucky daughter will live to tell her story. She has made good friends here who brought her…what else?…ice cream to help her heal. We, as parents and citizens, don’t have the ins-and-outs of Arden delinquency  figured out yet, but ice cream seems to be an essential part of it.

Utopia

Arden Gild Hall

What is Utopia exactly? What is an intentional community? Put simply, a intentional community is designed from the beginning around common ideals and the assumption that individuals within the community will pool resources and share responsibilities to work toward those ideals.  In The Ardens (Arden, Ardentown, and Ardencroft) those common ideals are the single tax (based on Henry George); the importance of art, music,  and theater; and the environment. Arden is a Tree City which boasts 50% green spaces including two forests and a 73% canopy.

If you know of my love of art and nature, it is easy to see why I would place myself here, in Arden. But I was drawn to the intentionality itself. My hometown of Lititz, PA was created, not because it was on a trade route or near a river, but as a religious community for the Moravians, a protestant sect that placed a high value on music. My ancestors came there and helped found the place. It wasn’t a closed or intentional community when I lived there, but that is where its roots were. Later, when I attended college, I sought out special interest housing. Instead of rushing to become an adult in my first apartment, I chose to live in housing with a purpose. In my case, it was honors housing, but we had activities with all the houses, many of which were formed around cultures (The French House) or interests (The Music House).

And too, I have a fascination with the Revolutionary Period of our country’s history. I’ve read all the biographies of our founding fathers, visited the homes of Washington, Jefferson, and Adams. I’ve been to Williamsburg no less than fifteen times. Why am I such a groupie of this time period? These men got to invent a freaking country! They got to start from scratch and found a place based on their ideals. Talk about intentionality.

Probably the biggest influence on our decision to move to Arden was the many years we lived without community. In the eighteen years leading up to our move, we lived in a spot which wasn’t accessible to much. We had to travel five miles to a grocery store, over twenty miles to attend a church that matched our beliefs. The school district where our kids went to school was made up of a lot of small little burgs and villages. There was no centralized town around which to rally. Added to that was the fact that in the most recent high school mock election, Obama came in third to Romney and Paul (who was a write-in candidate). The sense of isolation and the fact that our liberal ideals were so far removed from the population made us feel very lost. We were not only looking for a place to belong, but for a place where we could make meaning.

A lot of press has been given to living the intentional life with an emphasis placed on the individual. Not everyone can make the move to an intentional community. My hope, with this blog, is that those who are curious about life lived in such a place can have their curiosities satisfied and move on to new questions about what makes meaning in their own lives. What makes community? How can we satisfy those very human needs? Perhaps we can have a community right here. Feel free to join the conversation in the comments section.