More thoughts on gay rights...

Recently, I had the occasion to watch a show on the History Channel called “The History of Sex.” The first 1.5 hours I saw would be more accurately called, “The history of sexual confusion and hypocrisy in Christianity.” It was accurately noted that in the Gospels, Jesus makes few mentions of sexuality and when He does, it is to express non-condemnation. He makes no reference to homosexuality whatsoever. So called Christian teachers on sexuality are drawn from Paul’s letters and a convenient “cherry picking” reach backward into the Hebrew Bible with little to no attempt to embrace the larger truth of Hebrew tradition regarding sex and procreation, in a single word, “blessing”.

Homosexuality as an “abomination” presents itself again and again during periods of time when homosexuality overran the priesthood. At those times, prostitution was not only tolerated but at times encouraged in the hope that it might stem the ride of homosexuality. At times, either or both homosexuality and prostitution overran the Church, reaching all the way to the Papacy. In my own experience of being born and beaten up Catholic, I took the “abomination” teachings to heart. They were underwritten by a feeling of revulsion for homosexual behavior. I argued that homophobia was a misnomer in that I felt no fear or samesex-ness! I felt disgust. Homo disgust seemed more accurate. Well, I had a genuine awakening upon finishing the History Channel show.

This awakening has come in three parts. The first came over me when I wrote Chapter Twenty-Nine in my book The Modern Christian Mystic. The second came when I wrote in my Godblog about considering homosexuality “at the species level”, a term coined by Thomas Berry. The third came following the above-mentioned History Channel experience. As I sat in the dark thinking, my thoughts came like this: “Well it’s clear that the Christian Church has zero authority regarding sexuality and clearly never has had any. I am grateful to have Gene Robinson as a Bishop and when I saw him the other night on MSNBC with Rachel it was clear what a good guy and genuine teacher he really is. But what about that gut feeling of revulsion? It really does feel like an abomination! Wait a minute! It is an abomination if you are truly a heterosexual; it’s repellent in the way that trying to force two positive or two negative poles of a magnet is repellent. But… what if at the species level there are two kinds of men and two kinds of women?”

I’ve had gay men who were hitting on me trying to convince me that “heteros” were in denial, that we are all gay but some of us repress that truth. “Heteros” like myself who tell them again and again that they have never had a homosexual encounter… nor have they had even a single homosexual fantasy even when no one else would know. We “heteros” all the while want to gag with the thought of having a sexual encounter with a buddy… literally, want to vomit! What if we have all been wrong because we are projecting our own experience on others?

In that case, it would not be an abomination when two samesex people male or female are drawn together into love, sex and marriage not would it feel like one. It would be as natural for them as it is for men and women to enter into bothsex unions. The problems lies in thinking that the experience of the other sort of human is as our own.

So here’s the deal. I am asking all my gay brothers to please not try to convince me that I’m in denial when I tell you that I have no interest in you sexually. I have deep, very deep, friendships and it is precisely the absence of a sexual motive which makes them such a comfort. In return, I will not think of your sexual behavior with other samesex men in the way that it would be for me as a “hetero”. If we can both do that, we can accept each other as different and equal. If that boundary became secure enough, we could be friends. In any case, at sixty-three, I am convinced that samesex unions are not abominations. They are a different form of human love.