The Big Question - Love, What is this thing called

The UU Salon Big Question for May is:

"I wanna know what love is..." or at least what it means to us. We use that word a lot, we Unitarian Universalists who are standing on the side of love.

In the comments, I supplemented the question with the additional query and observation:

"And what is the difference between "standing on the side of love" and loving? since the former seems to place the love in the persons we stand with not in us. So standing on the side of love, when it refers to advocating marriage equality, seems potentially to refer to a totally different type of love than when it refers to reuniting immigrant families, e.g."

Of course, "Standing on the Side of Love" came into the consciousness of many Unitarian Universalists as a piece of music:

(View on YouTube)

That was about Marriage Equality. So Standing on the Side of Love entered the UU lexicon as part of a specific campaign to belatedly recognize marriage not as a joining of houses or fortunes or a joining justified only by potential procreation and the need to care for its biological products, but as something that had been trying to emerge through the entirety of the Modern Era. The revolutionary aim was to recognize marriage as a joining of persons who love each other. Plain. Simple. Revolutionary.

Of course, other songs shape our concept(s) of love too:

Love is all you need...
Love will keep us together...
Safe in the arms of love...
Love divine, all loves excelling...
Love hurts...
Where is the love?
What's love got to do with it?

And since boy gets girl first entered the list of viable plot lines, stories and novels and movies have emerged from the sea of love, informing our image of "love."

"Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision." - Captain Corelli's Mandolin

"The best love is the kind that weakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants fires in our hearts and brings peace to our minds..." - The Notebook

Love is everywhere you turn. It is saccharin sweet and bitter fire, it is fickle, it is constancy, it is an emotion or a consuming lust or a promise... Like "God," its sometime synonym, "Love" has nearly as many meanings as it has people using it. So what good is it? Does it communicate or obfuscate?

When Jason Shelton's lyrics invite us to stand on the side of love, what is the love that is referred to? What love do we hold to be a justification for the state's licensing and registering marriage in its name, supporting it with a list of special rights the unloved apparently do not deserve?

When we expand the song into a campaign, what rights that we would continue to deny to the unloved do we support for immigrants in danger of being separated from family members as an action of the law?

It seems we think of the many "loves" as a kind of moral glue, holding people together - but only tenuously. The glue is not strong enough to survive without the support of the government. And the glue must be reinforced against the government. In short, the application of the slogan to the campaign is as incoherent and slippery as "love" itself.

However, standing "on the side of love" was originally the rallying cry of allies in a specific political struggle. The love on whose side straight allies of LGBT persons stood was a love between the oppressed. But the slogan was not the oppressed's cry. It belonged to those who covenanted to stand with the oppressed. Expanded to include immigration issues, Standing on the Side of Love continues to be a rallying cry for allies. And allies accept that the struggle in which they participate is not their own struggle to control and direct.

As a slogan of allies, "Love" cannot and must not be defined by the allies but by those whose struggle benefits from the support of allies.