God 'n' Gays

[poliphilo]

The Biblical texts that are supposed to condemn homosexuality would- if I were to print them here- fill about half a screen. They come from the Old Testament Book of Leviticus (which also condemns the eating of shellfish) and a couple of the Pauline Epistles. There is nothing- but nothing- about homosexuality in the Gospels. If God really hates fags don't you think he'd have banged on about it at least as much as Jerry Falwell used to do?

Comments

[momof2girls.livejournal.com]

Good point. The people who seem to go on about homosexuality ignore the rest of the prohibitions in Leviticus.

Check out my icon. : - )

[dakegra.livejournal.com]

God didn't need to - he had Jarry Falwell to do it for him.

:-)

Doesn't Leviticus prohibit all kinds of wacky stuff?

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

I bet if one were to look it up, there's probably at least twice as much in the bible about how to treat your slaves as there are condemnations of homosexuality. And, despite the intersection of some US fundamentalism with racism, I just don't hear a lot about returning to institutionalized slavery from right-wing christians these days...

Not to mention that the terms for homosexuality in the bible are vague and very historically contingent and scholars debate about whether certain ones mean homosexual in any way close to the way we use it...

I just don't get what kind of a problem fundamentalist christians have with gay people. I mean, I understand it intellectually (they're afraid of things that destabilize their own strictly binarized and hierarchized ideas of gender and how it fits into society), but I just can't put myself in that mental position at all. How in the hell would the very existence of someone else's noncoercive sexual practice be able to bug me? (Although I guess that's why fundie articles and sermons so often depict homosexuality as coercive -- child molesters, people out to prey and convert -- because it is easy to see a rapist as a threat even if said rapist lives nowhere near your house...)

(sorry, a morning rambling)

know thy enemy

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, I made the "but there's no condemnation of homosex in the Gospels" argument to a fundamentalist christian a while ago.

I got this reply:

"Those condemnations appear wherever they are necessary, in my view, The evangelists were spreading the Good News; Paul was prescribing (and proscribing) behavior, which was his appointed job."

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

At the risk of having people jump all over me, I will suggest that one of the reasons Christians do not condone homosexuality is because of frequent Biblical injunctions to be fruitful and multiply. Lying with one's own sex does not create babies. :,

Probably TMI, but WTH

[solar-diablo.livejournal.com]

I remember going through puberty convinced I was hellbound, the way my mother's church went on about masturbation. Talk about a serious crimp in the teenager's sex life! It was only after doing some reading myself that I noticed Jesus never had much to say about the topic. Couple that with any number of adultery/divorce/money scandals that consistently rocked the congregation, and I figured God had bigger fish to fry than one horny kid. :P

[besideserato.livejournal.com]

Yay! Good point! <3