THE EXPECTATION THAT someone who takes the teachings of Jesus seriously and who has admitted that Paul is one of the major sources of the transmission of that will have to follow the expected line on issues of personal morality is something I have no problem with explaining is not the case with me. In fact, it's not the case with much of anyone who calls themselves a "Christian" from the most far right to the virtually Unitarian. I am challenged on the fact that I am a gay man while I advocate Christianity.
Today's Republican-fascist LGBTQ+ basher "christians" have no problem with the florid violation of one of the few things Jesus ever said about sexual morality when he said divorced people who marry again (presumably during the life of the partner they divorced) are guilty of adultery. That is something which most Protestant denominations have allowed from way back though it couldn't be clearer what Jesus meant by that, it is something that the most right-wing of Catholic Bishops and priests have no problem with when it's someone like the adulterous, thrice married, twice divorced Newt Gingrich and his adulteress present day wife. The then twice-married Gingrich's affair with her while she was a chorister at the National Cathedral, his subsequent divorce and marriage to her was overlooked by whatever Bishop had jurisdiction over his "conversion" to right-wing Catholicism and her being allowed to remain a Catholic in good standing. That is hardly the only case among right-wing Republican-fascist Catholics in which the most obvious and plain-worded teaching on divorce and remarriage by Jesus is shoved aside in favor or the rich and famous and fascist.
I don't know if he has cheated on his third wife as he did the first two but if I were married to him I wouldn't trust him - but, then, I wouldn't have married him to start with.
The same right-wing Bishops and priests and billionaire fascist-Catholics have no problem with a double standard when it comes to those rich enough to buy an annulment or who have the shamelessness to make the claims necessary to get one are the ones who want to deny communion to even the most sincerely dedicated, faithful Catholics who have remarried after divorces, even in cases when a first spouse was violently abusive or abandoned their first spouse for another spouse.
Before I read Luke Timothy Johnson's book The Real Jesus, his criticism of the "historical Jesus" movement, I read article Homosexuality & The Church Scripture & Experience. He began by making the same point above that I have since the beginning of the arguments about marriage equality, that the majority of sexual immorality is committed in the majority orientation of heterosexuality and the Churches, by and large, have little to nothing to say about that in the 21st century.
Is the present crisis in Christian denominations over homosexuality really about sex? I don’t think so. If it were, there would be no particular reason why homosexuals should be singled out for attention; there is more than enough sexual disorder among heterosexuals to fuel moral outrage. The church could devote its energies to resisting the widespread commodification of sex in our culture, the manipulation of sexual attraction in order to sell products. It could fight the exploitation of women and children caught in a vast web of international prostitution and pornography. It could correct the perceptions that enabled pedophilia to be practiced and protected among clergy. It could name the many ways that straight males enable such distorted and diseased forms of sexuality.
Instead, the relatively small set of same-sex unions gets singled out for moral condemnation, while the vast pandemic of sexual disorder goes ignored. In my view, this scapegoating of homosexuality has less to do with sex than with perceived threats to the authority of Scripture and the teaching authority of the church. For those opposed to the ordination of women priests and bishops, or of married people, deviation from the uniform and steady practice of the church (glossing over the fact that it has rarely been steady or uniform) means starting down the slippery slope toward rejecting church authority altogether. And accepting covenanted love between persons of the same sex represents the same downward spiral with regard to Scripture, since the Bible nowhere speaks positively or even neutrally about same-sex love (glossing over the relationship of Jonathan and David, see 1 Samuel 18–2 Samuel 1). For those who think this way, the world is becoming dangerously depraved; a line must be drawn in the sand somewhere, and homosexuality seems clearly to be the place.
Of course, Christianity as actually practiced has never lived in precise accord with the Scriptures. War stands in tension with Jesus’ command of nonviolence, while divorce, even under another name (annulment), defies Jesus’ clear prohibition. And which Christians have ever observed the exhortation in Leviticus to stone psychics and put adulterers to death? But make this point to those opposed to same-sex unions, and you’re liable to find it turned back against you. See how far down the slippery slope we have already come? many will ask. This has to stop somewhere! For them, the authority of Scripture and tradition resides in a set of commands, and loyalty is a matter of obedience. If the church has always taught that same-sex relations are wrong, and the Bible consistently forbids it, then the question is closed.
Johnson points out that his Lesbian daughter's committed relationship had a large influence on his conclusions. He expresses no patience for those who he says claims the Scriptures say what they don't say or don't say what they say but he invokes the witness of our personal experience as a valid source of moral discernment outside of what Scripture might say. He points out the difference between modern thinking on slavery with slavery as it was permitted in Scripture. I would point out that the original statements on that in the Old Testament seem to mean a far different kind of slavery than was practiced by Europeans and Americans who certainly didn't follow the laws of Moses in that regard and certainly violated the instructions of Paul in the letter to Philemon.
Much as I value and respect the Scriptures, they are written from the point of view of those who wrote them in the times they lived. As Johnson points out, whenever they speak about same-sex sexual relations, it is not in the context of faithful love and mutual respect and treating each other as equals and being careful to do no harm, it is in a context of the worst things that sex can be used for such as in the rape of children, adults, the defeated in battle, those conquered, the prostitution of slaves, especially enslaved children, etc. If that's all I knew about gay sex I'd be against it too. If that's what same sex marriage was I'd have thought it wasn't anything anyone should bother to try to have recognized by the state.
But every single thing that can be said about the sexual abuse that the authors of the Bible seem to have as their only context for thinking about same-sex sex can be said about other-sex sex. Which, by the way, the Bible often speaks in both ways about. The story of the wronged Tamar "playing the whore" (JPS) to trick her asshole of a father-in-law, Judah, into fathering twins by her, thus insuring that she wouldn't lose her place in the family she was united to by marriage to his "wicked" and dead first and second sons. He purposely violated the moral code of the time by keeping his third son from marrying her. And he was hardly the only total asshole among the Patriarchs who set the great monotheistic tradition going. Even father Abraham seems to have more or less set up his wife for adultery in the two accounts of when he went to Egypt and pretended she was his sister because he figured the Egyptians would kill him to get her. Whatever else you can say about the early Hebrew notions of virtue and marriage, some of those old stories show they were real sleeveens. I will say that when Tamar proved that the guy who was the father of the twins she was expecting was none other than Judah, he admitted that he was far more in the wrong than she is.* I have yet to hear any of the right-wing accuser adulterers (the list is too long to list), johns (probably that one too), rapers of children (Matt Gaetz, any number of trad-Catholics), fornicators (I'd bet that list would include almost all of them) admit that about themselves as they play The Accuser (the meaning of Satan) for their own political gain.
As a gay man who has always rejected anal sex due to the dangers I knew of when I was young (hepatitis, syphilis, etc.) those which became horrifically manifested in the 1980s (HIV-AIDS, incurable TB, etc.) and things like that much more recent misrepresented Montreal study touted as proving the benefits of heterosexual promiscuity but which, also, indicated the possibility that receptive anal sex in males might lead to a large increase in the chance of prostate cancer, I have always advocated against practicing anal sex. I wrote a lot about that to both the confusion and anger of people who apparently think of sex outside of the consideration of the immoral uses of it. I remember the first time I addressed the dangers of anal sex at Echidne's blog, someone commented they'd never heard a gay man talk like that before. I could assure them I had been since the 1960s when I first heard an idiot bragging about getting hepatitis in Provincetown.
Considering how morally fraught all sexual practices involving two people can be or, I'd assert, all involving more than two (including possibly conceived children) anyone who doesn't see that sex is full to the top with moral problems as money is, is willfully blind. There are even adult consensual practices that are so fraught with dangers that I would assert they are probably always wrong, I think anal sex likely always is. I would assert that promiscuity always is. I would say that prostitution and pornography, since they almost inevitably involve promiscuity, are probably always immoral.
Call me old fashioned, but I think adultery is immoral. Especially among those who commit adultery while denying same-sex marriage to those who are prepared to be faithful.
There are two-person sexual practices that don't have anywhere near the moral dangers of even vanilla, in-marriage, hetero-sexual intercourse, especially if the husband is a jerk or both of the couple don't intend to have a child they intend to care for but don't use contraception. By the way, I think modern contraception has probably done more to lessen the moral peril of sex than anything since allowing that women had some rights. I think the moral consequences of an act are the thing that enables us to know that it is immoral. As to its morality, that has to be a product of both partners' informed, considered conscience.
I think the safest way to avoid immorality in sex is to have sex only within a loving, faithful relationship, always with consent and always avoiding anything that could harm, or result in an unintended pregnancy, or uses, exploits, degrades or hurts the feelings of either of the participants. For that, for my fellow LGBTQ+ People, that would be either within such a relationship without legal and/or religious marriage or within a faithful, loving marriage. So marriage equality should be respected in law and society and practiced by those who marry.
* By the way, Tamar's second husband, the brother of her first husband, Er, who was wicked and God killed him on her, was the infamous Onan who "wasted his seed" instead of giving her a son who would have taken his place in the inheritance scheme of the time. It was Onan depriving her of what might have likely been her best chance at long-term survival and the possibility of having legitimate children, the injustice to Tamar which was his sin. That was among the wrongs of her asshole Father in Law who, nevertheless, becomes one of the major patriarchs, the father of the nations of Israel and Judea. Anyone who reads the text to think Onan was masturbating solo so as to condemn probably the least morally fraught sex act there is has to be lying when they use that to say it's a sin. More likely he was practicing the stupid and ineffective contraception method of "pulling out". No where in Scripture is masturbation addressed that I know of, no more than abortion is. If someone wants to tell me where that is, I'll issue a correction.
In meditating on the fraught election of yesterday, I thought about the perils of "Christian Democratic" parties and those neo-pagan parties, such as the Republican-fascist one, that pretend to something like that. I think there is a need for, not a party, but a Christian movement in support of egalitarian democracy which takes actual political stands - no tax-exempt status, best to avoid big donors.
One of the things I think such a movement should hold to, other than equality and democracy is that the attempt to legislate what mature people choose to do with their own bodies on the basis of alleged morality is outside of the legitimate interest of the state. As with abortion in which the state's legitimate interest to legislate ends at an individual's skin, so in matter of mutually respectful, consensual adult sexual behavior, the state has no right to legislate on what they choose to do. I would make an exception when it becomes a matter of money changing hands in a commercial transaction, which I do hold that the state has a responsibility in regulating, the abuses which come with even legal prostitution and the fact that prostitution inevitably involves promiscuous use of one person's body by many (men, usually) and the public health consequences makes it a legitimate area for public regulation if not prohibition, the same with pornography. In the matter of prostitution, given the facts of what it is, I would put all of the legal responsibility and punishment on the buyer, not the frequently desperate seller. The distribution of pornography is certainly something that can often if not always be legislated because it is commerce. Certainly anything risking the sexual use of adults against their fully given consent or any minors is something that should be regulated out of existence.
Read Genesis, especially in the Jewish Publications Society Jewish Study Bible (by the way, you can get it from them, online) and in Everett Fox's translation with its own commentary. If you like most Christians, haven't read the whole thing yet it will knock your socks off, especially considering what it's been claimed to have been for so many centuries. The last thing it is is a set of moral certitudes, it is murky and even slimy in places, just like all human life and thought has been. That isn't to say, especially taking into account the culture and world in which it was created, that there aren't glimmers of recognizable moral discernment in it, though I think that really starts getting going in Exodus and Deuteronomy - though they're far from being unproblematic too, especially as latterly interpreted into civil law.
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