God and gays
Oliver “Buzz” Thomas writes in USA Today: (via Andrew Sullivan)
What if Christian leaders are wrong about homosexuality? I suppose, much as a newspaper maintains its credibility by setting the record straight, church leaders would need to do the same:
Correction: Despite what you might have read, heard or been taught throughout your churchgoing life, homosexuality is, in fact, determined at birth and is not to be condemned by God’s followers.
He presents several points to buttress this opinion, several of which I think are fallacious. Not that his conclusion is necessarily wrong, you can be right for the wrong reasons, but his reasoning is not very sound here. Only one of his arguments is convincing, although he leaves some things out. I don’t have a God in this fight, but as I am fascinated with both theology and the culture wars, I think it worth commenting here.
Thomas first contends that homosexuality is natural, and therefore cannot be a sin. In making this judgment, he is in company with those who make the opposite claim, that homosexuality is a sin because it is unnatural. That has always seemed to me to be a very curious argument, and one that is not theologically sound. Natural does not equate with sinlessness, indeed a better case can be made for the opposite proposition, that most of man’s natural urges are sinful, and only through the intervention of supernatural forces can mankind overcome this fallen nature. It is ‘natural’ for us to be glutinous, vain, jealous, greedy, wrathful, lazy and of course lustful.
Probing further along these lines, there is also of course good evidence that pedophilia is ‘natural,’ in that for whatever reason some people have an involuntary sexual attraction to children, that it is a ‘natural’ desire is of course no reason to consider it not a sin, or approve of its practice.
A good part of religion, and culture and law in general, is an attempt to control what is natural.
After the natural argument, Thomas moves on to Leviticus and using the well worn, but effective argument that if you are going to take that verse seriously, you have to take all of the other prohibitions that exist right along side of it seriously as well. This argument is I think quite effective in regards to this particular verse.
His argument weakens though when in discussing the Pauline injunctions against homosexuality he makes a claim that Paul is merely talking about pederasty, not homosexuality in general. I expect that pederasty was the specific practice that Paul was condemning, however I don’t think one can justify the idea that Paul was merely condemning sex with those who are too young. There is no record of him making similar condemnations of relations with underage girls. If, as Thomas would have us believe, it was the youthfulness rather than the gender that Paul was objecting to one would think that this would be mentioned.
Thomas then move on to another fallacy, that since Jesus specifically didn’t condemn it, it must not be a sin. To the best of my knowledge, Christ didn’t mention rape either. I would presume that Oliver Thomas nonetheless regards rape as both a sin and a crime.
He then moves on to talk about how Christ said that we shouldn’t judge, and that we should love everyone. There are certainly clear accounts of Jesus consorting with sinners of various types, and that he loved them is incontrovertible. That this means didn’t consider their behavior sinful though is clearly false. One of Christ’s most frequent sayings was to go and sin no more.
Most puzzling though, is that after considerable effort that results at best in a weak case that homosexuality is not a sin, Thomas’s description of why this is such a wrong way of looking at things has little to do with that:
So, I ask you. Would you want to be discriminated against? Would you want to lose your job, housing or benefits because of something over which you had no control? Better yet, would you like it if society told you that you couldn’t visit your lifelong partner in the hospital or file a claim on his behalf if he were murdered?
Presuming that most people would agree that they would not like this, it is a great reason to argue that homosexuality should not be a crime. Whether it is a sin or not should not, in my opinion be all that relevant.
Once again, I think Thomas shows himself to be in the company of those who are most active against homosexuality. If, instead of a quixotic attempt to prove that it is not Christian to believe that homosexuality is a sin, he instead made a case that just because something is a sin does not mean that it is a crime, he would be on much stronger theological footing. Instead, he seems to agree that if something is a sin, it should be a crime and then uses the argument that because homosexuality should not be a crime, it must not be a sin.
This line of thinking I believe is particularly dangerous.
Crime and sin, as concepts do have intersections, but they are not identities. Sometimes it is easy to confuse this, as some sins (murder for example) quite clearly should be crimes as well. Other sins though, for example not keeping the sabbath, are things that our culture, with the backing of most of our religions, have clearly decided should not be crimes. Equally there are some crimes (perhaps most famously polygamy) that some religions do not view as sins.
I do think that Christians often err in their theology by being insufficiently loving to some sinners, particularly homosexuals, and all too often they err in confusing something they can justly determine is a sin with something that should be a crime. Oliver Thomas I fear does more to reinforce, than reduce, this tendency with his essay.
I don’t claim to know what God thinks of homosexuality, or if he thinks anything particularly of it at all. I suspect that promiscuous behavior, whether straight or gay, is not a particularly wise choice for us to make (not that I have any particular moral fortitude in this regard) and that it might be justly regarded as sinful. Whether a committed gay relationship is more like that, or more like a straight marriage in the eyes of God is something I am agnostic about.
That doesn’t really matter to me though as far as our secular laws go. While our religious beliefs may inform our values, we should have a stricter requirement for our laws.
