The Extremely Stupid Question of Sexuality in Religion

Though my daily logovoraciousness leads me to consume liberal-skewing sites like Salon.com, I'm also a reader of conservative-leaning blogs like Instapundit and AndrewSullivan.com, and I found the following article through Andrew Sullivan's blog.

In case you didn't follow the link, the article details the "defusing" of a current flap in the Anglican Church. A canon named Jeffrey John, who is homosexual, had already accepted an appointment to the bishopric, which would make him the Church of England's first openly (heh) homosexual bishop. This, predictably, created an outcry in the conservative evangelical wing of the Church. John's decision to reject the appointment, for the sake of Church unity, is likely to pacify the conservatives (temporarily), but as the article notes, it may provoke a liberal backlash. Since the split between religious liberal and conservative opinion is nearly even, Andrew Sullivan is predicting a schism in the Church's future. Maybe so. I've been predicting a transatlantic schism in the Catholic Church for a few years now, and the more I learn about Anglicanism, the more I realize it's been anticipating a lot of the same problems that will soon afflict Rome as its priest shortage reaches a painful level, and the rupture between American and European Catholic thought widens into irreconcilability.

We Presbyterians of the PCUSA have also been through similar rounds of intense discussion about the possible role and place of homosexuals in our own church. Debate is intense, and little has been resolved. What defines marriage? Is it always a holy union between man and woman? Why is sexuality relevant to the ordination of priests, pastors, and other ecclesial authorities? (Note: as bloggers have pointed out, Presbyterians, like many Protestant denominations, have only TWO sacraments, baptism and communion, so marriage isn't a sacrament for us.)

No need for me to mince words here: I think the religious conservative argument is a bunch of horseshit. The argument, aside from being bigoted, narrow-minded, and oppressive, relies on two things:

1. Bad use of scripture, and
2. Faulty knowledge of biology.

What's funny is that, while I'm no Bible scholar or career biologist, I can formulate refutations to both prongs of the religious conservative argument with little or no direct reference to either the Bible or biology.

Arguments based on scripture are always immediately suspect, because they're inevitably selective, i.e., interpretative. I paid a shitload in Sallie Mae loans to Catholic University to take that hermeneutics course, and if it did anything for me, it made me wary of agendas. Everyone has them; not everyone admits to having them, preferring instead to cloak themselves in the false robes of Absolute Truth. "The Bible has no passage explicitly advocating homosexuality," one might argue. True, but it also doesn't have any passages explicitly advocating Mack trucks. By this reasoning, we should be wary of drivers of Mack trucks. (After all, they might be gay.)

The Bible also says things we conveniently ignore. When is a biblical directive to be taken literally, and when figuratively? This is what hermeneutics is all about-- exploring how we interpret things. "When your right eye offends you, pluck it out!" says Our Lord and Savior, Ted Nugent. Do I take this literally? Why, no! And who does? None of us has the balls to go through with such a thing literally, so it's more convenient to mark this verse as figurative. "A man can't serve two masters," we read. This is the "God and money" issue, but all you have to do is look at how rich-- and richly furnished-- our churches are to see we serve two masters all the damn time. Guess we conveniently ignore Lord Nugent's warning here, too. Women should keep silence in church, we read (1 Cor 14:34-35; 1 Tim 2:11-12, NRSV, in case you're wondering). What should I tell all those female pastors in my church, then? (Personally, I'm glad we ignore that one. Bunch of ass-backward cultural bunk.)

Making an argument from scripture is problematic from the get-go. You are by no means guaranteed universal acceptance of your position. Maybe that's not important to you, Brave Religious Conservative, but here's the thing. The person who quotes scripture is usually assuming that the scriptural quote is a one-two punch, an argument-stopper, the Ultimate Authority, the Absolute Inerrant Truth. "The Bible said it! I believe it! That's that!" So the assumption is, "It's plain as day, right here in black and white." But if it were truly plain as day, there'd be no argument.

Here are some statements that are, I'm pretty sure, beyond debate.

1. People need air to breathe.
2. Dogs need water to survive from puppyhood to adulthood.
3. A cat's internal temperature will rise when you squirt it gently with a flame thrower.

These things are so obvious that no one's wasting time debating them. As Robert Pirsig sagely noted, people aren't gathered outside shouting that the sun will rise tomorrow. When something is known bone-deep, there's no desire to prove its truth. But when a proposed "truth" rests on shakier or less obvious ground, people're gonna argue. SO: just because some idiot quotes from scripture doesn't mean the debate is over, or that the scripture quote is by any means convincing, or that the so-called "truth" of the quote is obvious or straightforward.

It is said that "the devil can cite scripture for his purpose" (a quote from Shakespeare, as I've learned; not from the Bible). This needs to be carved into a huge, heavy sign that gets suspended over the front door of every single church and mosque and synagogue in the world. Much prettier than "Intersubjective reality contains an irrevocably hermeneutical dimension."

By the way, I haven't tried to establish that scripture quotes perforce falsify an argument (after all, I'm a Christian and still likely to find meaning in scripture); all I'm saying is that they are by no means the one-two punch the scripture-users think they are. Scriptural arguments are most likely to convince the like-minded. They're useless as weapons to fire across the boundaries.

On to biology.

Most anti-homosexual arguments rely on some form of the "it's just not natural" line. Some Christians ascribe this to scripture and contend that God exhorted us to be fruitful and multiply. Therefore, homosexual marriage makes no sense since it violates God's edict. Of course, given that logic, ANY missed opportunity for procreative sex violates God's will, up to and including the use of condoms, pills, tubal ligation, vasectomy, and, sadly, sex with sheep. People who offer the "it's about procreation" line are often consumers of birth control products or veterans of birth control procedures. In other words, such people are goddamn hypocrites.

But that's still more of a scripture issue than a biology issue, so NOW let's talk biology.

First, there's the Carlin Refutation. As you can imagine, this was formulated by George Carlin. The argument (which I'm not quoting exactly) runs: if it occurs in nature or can be made via physical processes, then it's natural. Nothing exists outside of nature. We create a new chemical? So what-- it's formed through processes that also occur in nature. When we call something unnatural or artificial, we're really suggesting there's a human will that's helping the process along. For the eternally puckered of sphincter, this means we can discern some sort of moral (evaluative, axiological) aspect to anything unnatural or artificial: On the 8th day, Man created M&Ms, and Man called them Good. M&Ms are "unnatural" only in the restricted sense that they are products that arose with the help of human will. But every step of the formative process involved nothing from outside of this universe (unless you're going to argue that human will comes to us via the All-seeing Elephant Penis inhabitants of Clitlicus Prime, the universe next door), so in tune with the Carlin Refutation, M&Ms are too natural. Homosexuality occurs in nature, and requires no extra-universal explanation. It's natural.

Second, "It's not natural" is often synonymous with "animals don't act that way," which, if you knew our dog, the late Velcro, is empirically verifiable bullshit. Velcro was an outstanding member of not only the homosexual community (well, maybe bisexual), but also the interspecies pervert community. Velcro would hump the crap out of a pillow if you gave him the chance. He had a nice, gay relationship with the male dog next door (a fence is no obstacle to true love). He routinely tried to cornhole our cat, the longsuffering-- and very male-- Mozart, whose piercing meows from the downstairs laundry room alerted us, time and again, to another porn movie reenactment in progress. And I somehow doubt Velcro's the only dog out there with a, uh, sexually complex background. Doesn't happen in the animal world? Get your head out of your ass. If you've got a dog, and you're a guy, you KNOW the horror of canine love for your calves.

Man's best friend.

In all, this makes the issue of sexuality in religion downright stupid. Should the churches be ordaining homosexual priests and ministers and elders and all the rest? All I can give you is my opinion. Hell yes, they should. Homosexuality is not a choice, unless you're Anne Heche. It's a predisposition, like hating onions. A genetic trait distributed throughout populations all over the world, like left-handedness. It's not a disease, and it's not debilitating-- morally, spiritually, mentally, or physically. Granted, I don't like watching gay guys kiss. It's not my bag. But do I think, therefore, that they're going to hell? No. I don't like onions, and I don't think onion-eaters are hellbound, either. Should gays and lesbians be forbidden marriage rights? No, absolutely not. (I think we're working on that issue right now, as a nation, and some enlightened churches have bravely defied their authority structure to sanction homosexual matrimony.) I think it's time for the church, in all its forms, to stop deliberately misunderstanding homosexuality and marginalizing homosexuals in a way that, if I dare to cite scripture, throws a bucket of shit on the compassionate lessons to be learned from the good Samaritan story (Lk 10:25-37, if you're curious).

Sexuality in the Judeo-Christo-Muslim world has been fetishized, polarized, and obsessed over. It's one of the most divisive issues in modern monotheism. Unfortunately, religious conservatives betray an unrepentant 1st-century sensibility when they put forth their tired, ridiculous, troglodyte arguments. The religious preoccupation with sex is one of the main reasons Freudian-trained psychologists will be in business for a long time.

By the way, I've tried to be careful to note, several times, that I'm referring specifically to religious-- not political-- conservatives. Some African-American Christians who vote liberal-Democrat, for example, hold strongly conservative views on sexual morality. I have friends whose views skew liberal or conservative depending on what we're talking about; they're thinking people, and not given to a blind, party-line approach. This is only natural; humans are complex. So in this humble screed I've tried to concentrate on the detrimental nature of religious conservatism, but since phenomena are interconnected, I have to admit that political and religious views can overlap just as much as they can exist in separate spheres. Many religious conservatives are also political conservatives (Senator Santorum, anyone? President Bush?). I just don't see much merit to the religious conservative point of view.

I think a sensible church guideline would hold homosexuals to the same standards to which heterosexuals are held: no adulterous relationships, no banging the geese that just landed in the back yard, no setting 4-year-old Ginny or Billy on your knee for a little "lesson." Is that so difficult? A homosexual pastor/priest is no less capable, no less loving, no less spiritually gifted, than a heterosexual one. A homosexual marriage is no less a committed relationship founded on love than a heterosexual one. Why is this so difficult for some people to accept?

Too bad I don't believe in hell. It could use a few homophobes.
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