lavendersparkle: Jewish rat (Rat)
lavendersparkle ([personal profile] lavendersparkle) wrote2007-11-20 09:25 am
Entry tags:

Homosexuality and Religion

When I was chatting to Alec last night he told me about what he'd been up to that day, most of which had been spent preparing for a youth group he's leading this evening. he took a long time preparing it because he hasn't met this youth group before and because he was given a topic rather than a Bible verse. His topic is freedom and he's going to be studying the song of Zechariah, prophesies about what the messiah would be like and Paul's explanation of what the messiah was. Part of the song of Zechariah talks about being able to serve G@d without fear so Alec was looking through examples of people who were in some way not respectable who approached Jesus i.e. the Samaritan woman. One of the people he was looking at was the centurion who asked for healing for his son/slave/servant/friend/lover (isn't Greek a wonderfully ambiguous language).

This lead Alec into reading lots of online exegesis claiming that this story said showed the Jesus didn't think gay sex was wrong. There seem to be a number of problems with this exegesis:

1) It's not clear from the text that the centurion is actually in a gay relationship. The word used to describe their relationship could mean servant or slave or friend. It could mean boyfriend but it could not.

2) Even if the sick man were the in a sexual relationship with the centurion what does Jesus healing him show? That Jesus thought people shouldn't be excluded from medical care because they've had gay sex? I hope even the most conservative of Christians would agree with this. The Gospels describe Jesus healing lots of people, all of whom were sinners. This doesn't imply that he tacitly approved of all of their sins.

I think this points to a wider problem with a lot of Christian and Jewish justifications for why gay sex is allowed even though the Bible might seem to say that it isn't. I have heard several of these explanations put forward again and again:

1) Before {pick date of your choice between 0CE and today} there were no consensual, mutual homosexual relationships. All homosexual relationships in that time were abusive and about domination so when the Bible says 'don't lie with a man' it means 'don't have an abusive relationship with a man'.

There a couple of problems with this. Firstly, what evidence is there that mutual consensual gay relationships were invented at {insert date here}. Call me a hopeless romantic but I think it's quite likely that there have been consensual mutual gay relationships since time immemorial. Just look at the story of David and Jonathan. You can't have them as the poster boys of 'G@d loves gays' and then claim that Paul disapproved of gay sex because it was always abusive. Secondly, what about heterosexual relationships? Surely they have always been far more likely than gay relationships to be abusive because the scriptures were written in patriarchal and sexist societies. If G@d was so concerned about power imbalances, why prohibit gay sex but not heterosexual sex? Surely that's the wrong way around unless we're willing to say that the Bible is pretty much saying it's OK to rape women but not men because women are in some way second class citizens.

2) When the piece of scripture was written, gay prostitution was a really common way of worshipping the pagan gods so when it says 'don't lie with a man' it means 'don't engage in elaborate idolatrous rituals that just happen to involve ritualistic gay sex'.

This seems to be a slightly better line of attack. There are quite a few Torah prohibitions which seem to possibly be trying to prevent practices associated with idolatry, e.g. cooking a kid goat in it's mothers milk, marking the skin with tattoos or scars. However, even if we think that's might be the root of them, most Jews err on the safe side and still don't get tattoos or boils kid goats in their mother's milk because there may be other reasons for these commands that still hold today, such as compassion for animals and acknowledgment that one's body belongs to G@d. This line of attack works better for Christians who quite happily pick and choose which bits of the Torah apply to them and which don't. A greater problem is again, is there any evidence that big gay orgies were a regular part of religious practice in Ancient Egypt or Palestine. I have heard this claim again and again from religious liberals but never from and Egyptologist. Surely if you discovered evidence of the big gay orgy cult you'd be write some nice salacious popular history books about it and definitely get a Channel 4 documentary with tasteful, not at all for titillation, reconstructions of said gay orgies.

3) If we love each other and it doesn't hurt anyone else then it must be good.

I know I'm on slippery ground with this one as I'm dating someone my co-religionists would definitely say I shouldn't be in a relationship with and it would be quite easy to interpret Paul to say that Alec shouldn't be dating me. However, let's just look at the logical consequences of this idea. There are an awful lot of prohibited sexual relationships in Judaism some of which are retained by Christianity. Under the 'mutual love is enough' argument we would allow: cohenim marrying converts and divorcees, mumzirim marrying non-mumzer Jews by birth, marrying out, and incest. Depending upon what stream you're in you might be OK with some of those relationships but I've yet to hear a liberal Christian or Jew advocate tolerance of incest. If 'love is enough' what argument is there against incest that doesn't amount to 'urgh, it's just wrong innit' or depend upon eugenic arguments.

I'm not saying that I think gay sex is wrong. I'm saying could we please come up with some better justifications that aren't full of more holes than a swiss cheese.

[identity profile] wildeabandon.livejournal.com 2007-11-20 10:33 am (UTC)(link)
As a datapoint, I'm a liberal Christian who advocates tolerance of intra-generational incest.

[identity profile] naath.livejournal.com 2007-11-20 10:53 am (UTC)(link)
Incest> I think the most useful reason to make incest not allowed is that there is an enormous potential for abuse. I'm not against consensual incest, but I do think that it can be tricky to decide whether consent exists.

The rules about what sort of Jew certain sorts of Jew might marry - I don't really understand them, but if someone in one of those categories were to say "stuff this, I'm going to marry this Hindu that I am in love with" would they be chucked out of "being Jewish" or would they just have some sort of rank taken away from them? Is there really some argument that in order to properly shepherd your Jewish 'congregation' you need to be married to someone else who is going to help with that (and what's up with converts not being Jewish enough?).
emperor: (Default)

[personal profile] emperor 2007-11-20 11:06 am (UTC)(link)
You might be interested in "A Question of Truth", where the author deals with the Roman Catholic Church's position on homosexuality.
ext_12531: Cesy quill (Default)

[identity profile] cesy.livejournal.com 2007-11-20 11:24 am (UTC)(link)
Well said.
I'm still waiting for one of those many people who believe that "If it doesn't hurt anyone, it's fine" yet "incest is still wrong" to give me a logical reason.

[identity profile] oedipamaas49.livejournal.com 2007-11-20 03:45 pm (UTC)(link)
I'm not convinced there are better reasons, beyond 'being nice to people is more important than being a good Jew/Christian'. if you find any, post them!

[identity profile] amyheartssiroc.livejournal.com 2007-11-20 05:28 pm (UTC)(link)
I heard recently a Muslim explanation of "homosexuality is an abomination" which began with, "Well, it depends on what you mean by abomination..."

Personally I'm just happy when people try to explain things rather than just "I don't like this so I'm going to ignore it."

[identity profile] mummyfrances.livejournal.com 2007-11-20 05:36 pm (UTC)(link)
I will be emailing ytou a copy of my dissertation when it is finished then.....

Incidentally, I think I may have met conservative "Christians" who believe gay people should not have medical care. At least, the rest of their shit leads me to believe they would think that.

I don't know much (actually, anything) about the Egyptians, but I can point you to at least one cult (if I could only remember the bloody name... I will get back to you on that bit) from ancient Rome with mass gay orgies and so on. The reason they are not shouting them out from the hills is becuase in the land of Classics, orgies are old news: sorry.

:)
chess: (Default)

[personal profile] chess 2007-11-20 07:34 pm (UTC)(link)
I don't think there is any sound argument against incest which does not depend either on eugenics arguments or power imbalance arguments (the latter obviously being invalidated in the siblings-separated-at-birth case).

The main reason I can see for not advocating incest (or, indeed, gay relationships, or women's rights) is the 'be above reproach in your society wherever possible' argument - that Christians (and presumably Jews, although I haven't studied that one as much) should not do anything which would bring them opprobrium from the people around them unless they are obliged to do that thing by a moral imperative, as opposed to just wanting to do that thing for their own comfort. In Christianity this is explicitly framed as being for the purpose of making people more likely to convert. (It's been a while since I looked into this, but ISTR that it's all in the Letters somewhere.)
nameandnature: (jc)

[personal profile] nameandnature 2007-11-20 10:43 pm (UTC)(link)
This line of attack works better for Christians who quite happily pick and choose which bits of the Torah apply to them and which don't.

If they want to claim to be Bible-believing Christians, they can do this with some Biblical justification: the Council of Jerusalem recorded in Acts 15 gives Gentile Christians a lot of latitude, but does prohibit sexual immorality (or "fornication" as the KJV puts it). So Christians could argue that the Torah's prohibitions on homosexuality were part of the sexual immorality rules while still eating pork without inconsistency (but not while eating black pudding, I hope you noticed). In the NT, Paul's letters have their own passages which can be taken to prohibit at least some forms of homosexuality, but like the OT passages, there are arguments about the cultural context.

My water-tight justification for the claim God doesn't say that homosexuality isn't intrinsically immoral is that God isn't real. This shortcuts a lot of arguments about what we can and cannot justify from the scriptures, I find.

[identity profile] gaytheist1.livejournal.com 2008-01-09 08:56 am (UTC)(link)
(Stepping in from abortiondebate) 'ello. Opposite side of the isle, but hey, can't agree on everything.


Right, so, the incest thing. When a child grows up, his/her family is, obviously, a big part of what forms that child into an adult. If a parent or sibling, who had something to do with that child's upbringing, proceeds to have a sexual relationship with that person, it has an incredibly huge power imbalence. From day one, the child was groomed to be a potential sexual partner of the older people in his/her life.

For this reason, I have much more of a problem with sexual relationships between close relatives by adoption than I do with the same relation through blood.

Honestly, while it makes my stomach churn to imagine a brother and sister, even seperately raised, together, I can't see a justification to make them stop. It's not my right to chose for them. They should, however, as an ethical, but not legal obligation, submit to genetic screening as a debt to their potential children. If the pair is gay, or otherwise unable to concieve together, well, that's entirely their business and they carry no responsibility of any kind to anyone else about it.