IN MY RECENT CRITICISM of some of the old patriarchs in regard to their enjoyment of sex, I'm told that "that's different". At least in and around the great flagship of gay-bashing, Sodom and Gomorrah.
In that very story story Lott offered to let the men of Sodom gang-rape his virgin daughters to spare two men (angels) who could presumably avoid being gang raped, if, indeed, that was the implied sin of the men of Sodom. Later Prophets said it was injustice. From what I read about the customs of that time and place, I would guess they might have been 12 or younger. Little girls who, no doubt, were seen of little value to their fathers except in so far as he could marry them off for his profit. Yet Lott is unambiguously presented as a man good enough to save from the destruction of the cities on the plane while his wife got turned into a pillar of salt for being curious enough to look and see what they were running from.
I should say that I don't believe any of that actually happened, I can tell a tall tale when I see one.
And, according to the fable, after they got away he got drunk, had sex with his virgin daughters and bore children with them - wouldn't you know, the story puts the blame on them, probably in their early puberty, still, he an old goat.
While I'm sure there are Bible professing men today who would act that exactly that way, no doubt some of them prominent ministers of religion, no one with an ounce of moral discernment would hold that such acts are now or ever were within a course of moral conduct. Anyone of any moral discernment would say such men should be locked up and the key thrown away, and they'd be right. But the same people would say that sexual morality is unchanging from the time of Lott when it most certainly is when it suits them.
And then there is his more famous uncle. In the same section of Genesis we're told that when Abraham, himself, had Sarah his wife pass herself off as his sister to be taken as a concubine of Pharaoh - an adulteress who was to become the grand mother of Israel - and, if you bring up that inconvenient fact about the text, today's moral absolutists will tell you that that was different, too.
Also when Abraham had sex with Hagar, his wife's slave at Sarah's suggestion and had a son with him, later, at Sarah's insistence driving her and his own son out to die in the desert - the wealthy Abraham giving them the scantest of supplies - when she became jealous of them. That was different than if some total scumbags did those things today or in the intervening centuries. We are told that was different by the same people who tell us that God's moral law is eternal and unchanging.
Well, you can't have it both ways. Did morality change or didn't it because one or the other would have to be true if there is any such a thing as sexual morality and I think there clearly is.
We're told that it's different because they hadn't been given The Law that made such things immoral, even as they tell us that God's moral law never changes. It was, they say, set from the beginning with Adam and Eve, though before the fable of Sodom and Gomorrah, there is no record of what they're accused of being set down as evil. Why wasn't their ignorance of unchanging morality as much of an excuse for them as it was for Lott and Abraham and, lest it be forgotten, Sarah?
Not that long into the fables of Genesis we are told that when Abraham's grandson, Judah approached the unknown prostitute (his veiled and much wronged daughter in law, Tamar) and had sex with her with a promise of payment to be made, impregnating her with twins. If you believe Genesis you have to believe that that was different, too. Though I will admit, when he had the fact that he'd fathered the twins with her thrown into his face by Tamar, he admitted he was the one more in the wrong - he'd called for her to be brutally killed for doing what he, as a john, had participated in. The guys always get off when it comes to having sex, though they'd better not pull out (Onan). Though I doubt any but the most depraved of those today who would make the same excuse of "it was different" for Judah would fail to see a father-in-law doing something like that, today, as being an immoral scumbag. Kind of like Elon's daddy.
We are told today that "God's law doesn't change" by the very same people who hold that those instances of sexual indulgence which no decent person today would say was anything but deeply sinful but who will make excuses for what the Scripture claims "it was different."
That line is used to maintain an impossible pretense that that unchangable morality was not presented in Genesis as acts by difinitively righteous people. If God was ready to overlook or forgive those creeps and bless them, founding the entire tradition of monotheism on them, then I don't find the use of them and their stories to condemn entirely more moral men who would never have any kind of sex with anyone but other fully consenting and competent adults of later times as credible.
You can't have it both ways, not anymore.
I could point to a number of other instances of totally screwy and unambiguously unjust, unfair, and wicked instances of sex enjoyed by those presented in Scripture as good and just men who enjoyed God's favor in which, if you question it today, you will be told "that was different" because times and sexual mores were different. And that's not mentioning other kinds of immorality presented as moral in Scripture in one place only to have the same thing condemned elsewhere.
If times changed in the centuries when the Scriptures were being written, well, times continued to change. Today is different from then, though in so far as it comes to men of privilege and power using and abusing others for their own sexual pleasure and profit (Abraham is presented as having greatly profited from pimping his wife in Egypt, twice) I have no problem with acknowledging many active same-sex couples entirely surpass them in the "by their fruits you will know them" test for judging moral conduct than many of the most illustrious of the patriarchs or their spouses. Or many of the most prominent gay-basher sex-hypocrites of now.
Jesus, in one of his most famous and best parables presents Abraham in a paradisaical state, though I'm sure he must have noticed the deep moral ambiguity of his sex life and conduct. Jesus, though, perhaps uniquely of all of the figures of Scripture, seems to have been remarkably unobsessed with sexual morality except when it came to the faithful fulfillment of vows of marital fidelity. And there I think his motive was to forbid the abandonment of unwanted wives and children by men who had all the power in a divorce. The extent to which that injustice is a part of divorce now, it is as relevant to judging its morality as it was when he forbade it. He certainly wouldn't have condemned Tamar to death like Judah was ready to, at least according to one of the most famous stories in the Gospel of John. He would have had a thing or two to say about the use of his innocent daughters that he proposed to his fellow Sodomites (who would have seemed not to have been gay, at all, according to the story).
I have come to have absolutely no patience with those who slam even the most morally responsible LGBTQ people but who are entirely good with the most blatant of sexual injustice and harm when it's hetero-sexual in nature. And that is the history of such double-speak on sex, from the start of it.
Times are different now than they were even a century ago. For better and for worse, and I'll take the better of our times over what is presented as sexual morality then and for the entirety of recorded human history. In fact, in just about every case I would take today's best understanding of sexual morality over the legal and official moral teachings on it from then. If they were different for hetro-sexual sex then when such treatment of women and girls by men presented as virtuous is to be accepted, now we know better today/ It's time to admit that the times to changed in the human understanding of same-sex sex. I'd say, if anything, the problem with sex is that the times haven't changed nearly enough from the times of inequality and injustice, even when it comes to gay sex. It's certainly too much like it was in the time of Lott and Abraham and Jacob when it comes to hetero-sexuality.
Reading Genesis more closely than I ever have before, really paying attention to what it says, it is a deeply ambiguous, deeply muddled and pasted together book and, as a foundation for moral discernment in many matters, it will not produce the best of the Jewish monotheistic tradition. I don't think the understanding of morality even in the Jewish tradition of previous centuries was anywhere near as developed or discerning as the best of that of now. Creation continues for a reason, if it were to have stayed in the same state it was when Abraham was around, it would have ended then.
That better moral discernment is all about justice and equal treatment for the least among us. In keeping earlier legends and fables as Scripture, they made a huge mistake. Many of those older stories are nothing less than an indictment of the moral character of God, no doubt such stories would not be seen that way in a time and place when patriarchy, familial tribalism and the ownership of other people by such male strong-men produced a morality more closely allied to an American crime-family than they would that grew out of the Prophets. There is a deep and impossible to travel gulf between the best and the worst of the First Testament, you can't choose both without doing deep harm to the best of it. I think it's the same choice as the choice of serving God or serving Mammon, or serving those with power and those without it, in the most obvious facts of human life, patriarchal power as opposed to justice for Women is at the heart of that impossible to heal breach. You have to choose one or the other because if you try to choose both, you can't get the better choice.
You cannot coherently hold that all of the Bible is true unless you say God's morality is not unchanging over time or unless you admit that human understanding of that is always inadequate and that all of Scripture which is the product of human thought shares in the defects and limitations of our understanding.
I have also been reading what are considered the genuine Pauline letters and have come to believe that Paul was a deeply troubled and self-hating gay man, part of the reason for him being so troubled was because his culture and religious tradition gave him no possibility of understanding his own sexual desires in any but a damaging, obsessive, you might say hysterical way. I read his letters - full of some of the most incredible insights into the meaning of Jesus - and find that whenever he had to deal with sexual issues he has a deep fear and disgust of it. Though in his case he did have the moral insight that it is better to marry than to "burn" in so far as straight sex was concerned. It is unfortunate that Catholicism didn't take that seriously as having an unmarried clergy (and so power-structure) has been responsible for some of the worst aspects of that huge tradition even now. As an insight into the morality of sex, Paul has several steps over Genesis and even The Law, though he had no ability to imagine a good, faithful, equal, same-sex marriage. He seems to have not had an ability to imagine gay sex outside of the rape of those kept as pagan temple prostitutes or other such victims of the same slavery-based patriarchy which forms the same twisted sexual morality of Genesis. He imagining all gay sex as sharing the evils that most take for granted in hetero-sexual sex, even today, without any moral qualms, at all.
The Hebrew tradition changed its sexual morality drastically in the course of Scripture, I think what changes with further moral discernment in the human species is that there is a possibility of some progress in appreciating the real moral law of God in which equality, equal justice, and the end of such privilege as patriarchy is based in. I think in the last century several enormous steps toward the real morality of God have been taken by many people, though there are those who are no closer to that than those who called those patriarchs good.
I base my conclusion firmly on Scripture, judging that by the results of those steps as taken by those who have tried the hardest to be honest and equally and faithfully married to another man or another woman. Putting their voluntarily made moral commitments above even that god of modernism, their own changing desires. There is nothing ambiguous about the results of that just as the evils committed by Lott and Abraham and Judah and David and Solomon etc. are obvious. That is despite what the Temple establishment scribes and priests wrote about that. I'm with the Prophets on the moral authority of the Temple scribes and priests. I'm not going to deny what's right there in front of me, no more than I would the sins and crimes of those who do what those ancient patriarchs are said to have done in Scripture and other enormous injustices to the least among us.
In so far as the various churches and individuals refuse to see what is right there before them because of their insistence that Genesis and other Scripture is set in stone, as, in fact, it never was, those are a hindrance of the progress of human beings in living according to the real Law, which is written on the heart not on paper, or so Scripture tells us. I think maybe in the current turn away from the churches, we are seeing a necessary abandonment of that use of scripture, necessary to admit what's bad in it and to stop allowing it to destroy progress towards equal justice under the Law of God. If that's the case, then let the churches change with the times or die. The real Law, the real Gospel will survive it as will those who follow those.
Given the choice between the injustice, the patriarchy, the inequality, the abusive use of other people, especially women (remember Tamar), especially children (remember Lott's daughters) especially those held in slavery (remember Hagar) or those who were not in the favored family or nation (remember Ishmael), I choose to judge the morality of sexuality on the different ideas of now, at least those ideas of now which hold all People are equal, have equal rights, and no one has a right to hurt, harm, abuse and enslave them. Compared to the "different times" and the sexual morality of the Bible I'll take the current development of that which takes such equality seriously and which elevates loving relationships over ancient legalisms. I'll take the examples that more moral gay men than Paul could imagine as my instructors in sexual morality even as I take the examples of those who use sex to harm, to hurt, to oppress, to enslave and to destroy as the real measure of sexual immorality, even when it is civilly legal (the goddamned First Amendment) or excused by corrupt religionists.
May God help us all to discern the truth and to live by it.
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