". . . men can't be faithful . . . " Repetitive Hate Mail

IT IS ONE OF THE THINGS that I have found is ridiculously controversial whenever I write about it, the promotion of gay marital fidelity.  The first time I got into a brawl on that over at Echidne's sadly discontinued blog it was in response to some of the idiotic statements made by gay celebrity jerks like Dan Savage that gay men were biologically incapable of being faithful or something.  That's an excuse that straight guys had been using to excuse their cheating since some of the stupider ideas about "cave men" started distorting Western culture.    

I will insert here that the idea that we are not to learn from and consequentially change our behavior through even the hardest of experiences and the observation of human history has to count as one of the most absolutely stupid relics of modernism as an intellectual ideology. Modernism and the ideology that we are biologically programmed idiots is a rank superstition.  Realizing that and rejecting it for the alternative in Hebrew monotheistic religion was what led me to believe that the future could be better than the past. It's worth trying to change it than to just throw up your hands and figure we're lumbering robots programmed by "our genes" and there's nothing to do about it.

The quintessential example in my life was that I lived through the untreated AIDS slaughter of gay men in the late 20th century and know that if one such promiscuity spread disease can unexpectedly arise there's nothing to prevent another one arising and killing millions before there are any effective treatements.  I remember the long, far too long period before there was an all too temporary change of behavior for the better among many though certianly not all gay men as the means of transmission of HIV became known and the rate of infections slowed. I remember the fury of many of the 1980s gay male political celebrities resisting the scientific promotion of condoms and avoiding promiscuous sex, such "activists"  coming up with idiotic lines and slogans, paranoid accusations made against scientists that, in retrospect, sounded a lot like the Republican-fascist lies told about Covid-19 and Dr. Fauci. In fact, he got the same then, too.  God bless Dr. Fauci and the others who told the truth and got pilloried for it.  

The sex carnival of the 1970s was hard to close down even at the cost of many, many thousands of lives even at the height of the crisis.  Another such STD epidemic could be even worse and there is no guarantee that any effective treatment will be found for it. Closing down the one that flourishes now, even in the same kind of full-blown public health emergency will be harder.  I'm not surprised that warning of that in advance gets the hostility my comments did.  

I strongly suspect that during the period when the earliest Scriptures were being written that a knowledge of promiscuity spread disease as much as men being unwilling to support children of other men led the early moral theologians to figure out that marital fidelity was desirable, some of them even figured out it was morally superior.  They certainly didn't learn that from the examples of the earliest of the Biblical patriarchs who were a pretty shady lot when it came to sex. I suspect that knowledge hadn't really taken in the period when those folk-stories were made up.  I know we're not supposed to criticize Abraham and Issac, Lot, Judah, etc. but they were pigs when it came to sex. Sexual morality as it can be understood by human beings has been something in continuous development, the last word on that has certainly not been said, back then or later or even today. I don't think anything like that could exist except in the rarest of cases at any time when Women were not considered AND TREATED as equals to Men. I think a vast number if not the great majority of straight marriages, even those in which sexual fidelity was strictly observed by both partners, were far from moral covenants so long as inequality was part of their basis.  Equality may not guarantee morality in human interactions but it is a prerequisite that must be present for human relations to be moral. Straight marriage as a civil matter, when there was legal inequality was morally flawed, though I don't think many theologians or clergy ever noticed that.

I am absolutely in favor of marriage equality.  I'm so in favor of it that I want all LGBTQ+ marriages to be equal having equal legal rights in marriage as straight couples have. Until that equality is the law, such "rights" are privileges handed only to hetero-sexuals.  

But that's not enough, I want them to be equal to THE IDEALLY BEST MARRIAGES, I would like it if all straight marriages equaled those, many of my best friends and loved ones are in straight marriages. To the extent it might be possible to write laws promoting that it should be what the state's role in defining marriage should be.  

I have no desire for same-sex marriages being equal to bad or the worst straight marriages which no one should aspire to copy.  I want all same-sex  marriages to be equal to the best straight marriages, loving, mutually supportive, EQUAL AND FAITHFUL with full legal protection.  

Marriage should be a refuge against many of the harms of life to the extent that is possible, abandonment, lovelessness, loneliness, the absence of mutual support, including financial support. Promiscuity, divorce caused by promiscuity and faithlessness inevitably leads to those evils.  I am convinced that is why Jesus called remarriage after a divorce "adultery," abandonment of wives and children by men was probably what he was thinking about. He knew those listening to him would not understand the immorality of it in any terms other than the adultery they were so used to thinking of as the ultimate of evil in sexual relationships.*   And marriage should certainly be a refuge from one partner giving the other one sexually transmitted diseases of the kind which are also far more likely if one or both partners are sleeping around.  

And that does not even go into the role that faithful, durable marriage has in the responsible support, love and guidance of any children who are part of the family.  Promiscuity is not conducive to good parenting.  Anyone who by birth or by adoption takes on a responsibility to vulnerable children has made a covenant that is as serious, perhaps even more serious than anyone who chooses to get married to another adult who has already gone through the vulnerability of childhood. It is one of the major defects in the "institution of marriage" that that moral obligation is not seriously considered nearly as much as it should be.

The idiotic 1960s and 70s notion that modern antibiotics and scientific birth control had ended the physical dangers of promiscuity was always stupid, a consequence of that kind of biological ignorance that flourishes in the United States as something as unimportant as evolution takes up so much of public school science curricula and the media has a ban on such information being made universally known.  The media suppresses the facts about sex even as they use it to sell everything and as they actively promote sexual promiscuity.  It is one of the most serious of acts of immorality that condoms are not openly advertised and promoted in the media.  But, much as I favor their use to make sex safe, I'd certainly never want to rely on something so haphazardly used as condoms to be the only thing between gay men's marital well-being and something like HIV infection. And that isn't only an issue for gay men.  I knew a woman who never slept around who was given AIDS by her faithless husband, though I don't know who he got it from and neither did she.

The idea that "AIDS is over," a criminally irresponsible slogan pushed by one of the most irresponsible gay "journalists" through the free press, is a lie.  People in large numbers still contract HIV through needle exchange and through sex with infected people AND EVEN WITH THE MOST UP TO DATE MEDICATIONS AIDS STILL KILLS PEOPLE EVERY DAY.  

But the physical dangers of promiscuity are not the only ones, I think there are serious, even deadly moral, emotional and other non-physical consequences of marital infidelity.  

Even "open marriages" by agreement and plan diminish the value of marriage and inevitably lead to a devaluation of the lives and persons of other people and ourselves.  I think that marital fidelity, keeping true to the highest form of the marital covenant is honoring the image of God that is intrinsic to us all.  I think that is very much related to that moral absolute of "Do to others what you want them to do to you,"  I think it's other statements of loving your neighbor as yourself and the Commandment Jesus gave in John's Gospel, "Love one another as I have loved you," are also entirely relevant when we are discussing same-sex marriage.  

Marriage is a special kind of covenant, if you insist on a secular definition, a special kind of contract.  I think marital fidelity is a special and specialized instance of all of those Commandments listed above put together.  If that were not the case, then the only thing special about LGBTQ people having marriage equality would just be a cargo-cult contract about getting financial advantages.  I will never, ever say that that is good enough for same-sex marriages, it should never be enough for straight marriages.  I would never want just that for myself and another man, I would not want it for two women or any woman and a man.  

Lesbians and, especially, gay men were sold a huge lie by those who tried to sell us a degraded form of merely legalized marriage on the lie that, especially gay men, were biologically incapable of making an adult and moral decision for faithful marriage.  That idiots like Dan Savage promoted that crap and lots of immature jerks and those who aren't serious about same-sex marriages fall for it doesn't change that one bit.   

The marriage they asked for was an inferior, degraded contract, not anything higher than a car lease and one without even the obligations of care those would normally carry.  American law is far more concerned with financial matters, money than the most important things in Peoples' lives.

The proponents of infidelity never favored a marriage equality that demanded the best, they wanted to screw around like teenage boys with benefits that can only be sustained through adult responsibility. They wanted same sex marriages to be like those of Newt Gingrich, Republican-fascist pseudo-Christian politicians, Jerry Falwell jr., myriads of cheatin' adulterous celebrity preachers and their brats, right-wing celebrities and "journalists", etc.  I say screw that.  I look at such same-sex marriages and don't think I'd have ever bothered campaigning for them if that's all there is to marriage equality.  

As a gay man, gay men deserve better than that shit.  Lesbians do too.

We won't even be asking for marriage equality until we insist that the very idea of same-sex marriages means the best kind of marriages.  There's no reason to settle for anything less.  Considering they have had legalized marriage forever, it's amazing to me that hetero-sexuals have not done so.  You have to wonder what's wrong with them.

* Count the number of times hetero-sexual adultery is mentioned as opposed to those unequal and so unjust and immoral forms of same-sex sex in mentioned in Scripture.  And every time same-sex sex is talked about it is in an inherently immoral act based in inequality.  The gang-rape in Genesis and Judges mentioned was obviously immoral on the basis of inequality of numbers and violence, the pedophile rape and prostitution mentioned by Paul were inherently evil due to patriarchal inequality.  I am unconvinced Paul referred to Lesbian sex in his one instance that is sometimes interpreted as that. Despite what Luke Timothy Johnson has said about it, I think the scholars who make those distinctions are right that Paul never once conceived of equal, mutually loving and faithful same-sex love as a thing, I don't think he could imagine such a thing. What I'm talking about above is something that is not mentioned once in Scripture.