Category Archives: Homosexuality

Homophobiaphobia

Posted by on November 9, 2010 50 comments

There’s a lively discussion underway at Daniel Kirk’s blog in which he has called for a moratorium on the use of the word “homophobic” as a descriptor for folks whose theological and/or political positions on same-sex relationships is non-affirming. Now of course I’ll be the first to admit that I believe there are many who aren’t irrationally afraid of gay sex who have disagreements about the theological status of same-sex relationships. But the ensuing conversation around Daniel’s post brought some stuff back up for me that I think merits mention.

First, it seems incontrovertible to me that when the gay community calls certain positions or behavior from others “homophobic” they are stating something about the way in which they experience those ideas and behaviors. In other words, it is a relational term. What they experience from how these others relate to them is an experience of being reflexively feared and viewed as a source of revulsion. As such, I don’t see how it can be up to others to tell the gay community when and whether they can use the word to describe others. What they are describing is their experience of being treated a certain way by others. Now I suppose people could argue that they are wrong about all that, and they have, in fact, been being treated with love and dignity when they thought they were being treated with fear and revulsion, but it seems to me that that would have to be a pretty convincing argument. In my experience people tend to have pretty good sense of when others are afraid of them and find things about them repulsive.

Second, I’m really perplexed by why people are so desperate to avoid the term “homophobic” being applied to them. Now of course, no one wants to be accused of having an irrational fear, which is conjured up by the term “phobia.” But let us leave that aside, especially since it seems to me that the most common connotation of “homophobic” is not irrationality but simply revulsion. If same-sex activity and relationships are sins against God and nature, why would anyone shy away from despising those acts? If gay sex is just as wrong as pederasty or incest, why should we be so concerned to make sure we’re all polite about the one and not the other? Why all the fear of “homophobia” if that is, in fact, what taking sin seriously is supposed to mean?

I always find it interesting how the anti-gay sex position always wants to insist on a polite, measured, and properly ordered civil dialogue about the issue. They claim that to toss around terms like “homophobic” is to distract from the “real issues” and inhibit conversation. Honestly I’m pretty convinced that the real diversion from substantive dialogue is the insistence on keeping everything all tidy and polite. To try to sanitize everything in advance and make sure no one gets called any names sounds innocent enough, but it is hardly a neutral move. To insist that things never get heated and self-involving is to cast the argument, in advance, as one in which all participants are good, honest, basically forward thinking folk that just need to speak more clearly to each other. But its an open question whether that is in fact that case. The gay kid who got the shit kicked out of him all through high school, often by Christians, may not feel like he can extend that sort of open hand of politeness, and who are we to say that he has to?

Anyways, my main point is that the desire to sanitize this discussion is itself an ideological move. If we’re really talking about things as important as both sides think we are, there’s no reason to assume that this should be some sort of polite conversation. According to traditional Christian teaching, non-heterosexual sex is a sin against God and an nature, which, like all sins can send you to hell. That’s serious. According to the movement for same-sex rights today the traditional view of homosexuality is degrading, oppressive, and inhumane. That’s serious too. If we’re talking about things that really are that serious, lets let them be serious rather than trying to keep everything nice and contained for the sake of appearing polite and agreeable. To do that is simply to be dishonest about the nature and severity of the disagreement. And that serves no one, at least in terms of furthering discussion and understanding.

12 reasons why gay marriage is wrong

Posted by on February 3, 2010 94 comments
  1. Homosexuality is not natural, much like eyeglasses, polyester, and birth control.
  2. Heterosexual marriages are valid because they produce children. Infertile couples and old people can’t legally get married because the world needs more children.
  3. Obviously, gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
  4. Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage is allowed, since Britney Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage was meaningful.
  5. Heterosexual marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all; women are property, blacks can’t marry whites, and divorce is illegal.
  6. Gay marriage should be decided by people, not the courts, because the majority-elected legislatures, not courts, have historically protected the rights of the minorities.
  7. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in America.
  8. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
  9. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
  10. Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why single parents are forbidden to raise children.
  11. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society. Heterosexual marriage has been around for a long time, and we could never adapt to new social norms because we haven’t adapted to things like cars or longer life-spans.
  12. Civil unions, providing most of the same benefits as marriage with a different name are better, because a “separate but equal” institution is always constitutional. Separate schools for African-Americans worked just as well as separate marriages for gays and lesbians will.

via: TheDailyWhat

Homosexuality Trumps the Homeless

Posted by on November 13, 2009 47 comments

This is shocking, at least from the standpoint of the gospel. Apparently there is some legislation in DC that would require employers to not discriminate against same-sex couples (i.e. they’d have to give them medical benefits). In response to this the Catholic archdiocese has threatened to shut down their public social services to the homeless unless the legislation is changed.

The fear is that they would be forced to “extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples” which they feel is an unacceptable encroachment of the state into their religious freedom. Note however that they aren’t concerned that they’d be forced to employ homosexuals, only that they’d be forced to give medical benefits to current employees who are in same-sex relationships. So, apparently its ok to employ the gays as long as they don’t have to recognize them as such in some official sense.

Now, lets just bracket the issue of whether or not Christians should accept same-sex marriage or not on the basis of Scripture. What should be outrageous to all Christians, regardless of their perspective on that issue is the way in which the poor and the marginalized are simply a bargaining chip in an ideological game over homosexuality. Is it really more important to the church that it be able to not give medical benefits to those in gay relationships than that it care for the poor as Jesus commanded us? Because that’s what’s really be being said here. This is no heroic moral resoluteness that refuses compromise. Apparently, at least for this archdiocese, being able to keep their hands clean of “endorsing homosexuality” is more important than caring for those whom the powers are making nothing. All Christians should be horrified by this callous casting aside of the poor for the sake of ideological posturing. Truly disgraceful.

The Easiness of Being Against Homosexuality

Posted by on August 14, 2009 7 comments

Matthew Yglesias has some rather trenchant remarks occasioned by Ross Douthat’s column on Funny People. Agreeing with Douthat that the reason American audiences haven’t enjoyed Apatow’s new film is that it portrays the conservative choice (in the case of the movie not ruining a marriage) as difficult, and indeed as something which doesn’t make it all work out. Americans want to be conservative–except when it is hard.

He makes a good point about this phenomenon in regard to homosexuality:

I think this explains a lot about the appeal of anti-gay crusades to social conservative leaders. Most of what “traditional values” asks of people is pretty hard. All the infidelity and divorce and premarital sex and bad parenting and whatnot take place because people actually want to do the things traditional values is telling them not to do. And the same goes for most of the rest of the Christian recipe. Acting in a charitable and forgiving manner all the time is hard. Loving your enemies is hard. Turning the other cheek is hard. Homosexuality is totally different. For a small minority of the population, of course, the injunction “don’t have sex with other men!” (or, as the case may be, other women) is painfully difficult to live up to. But for the vast majority of people this is really, really easy to do. Campaigns against gay rights, gay people, and gay sex thus have a lot of the structural elements of other forms of crusading against sexual excess or immorality, but they’re not really asking most people to do anything other than become self-righteous about their pre-existing preferences.

Idolatry and Sexuality

Posted by on July 14, 2009 14 comments

In the comments thread on the McCabe quote I posted yesterday, Charlie directed us to a fantastic article deserving of a close reading by James Alison which deals with the difference between idolatry and worship, particularly as this relates to questions regarding homosexuality and Christian doctrine. It is definitely worth the time to read. Here’s just a couple quotes:

I take it for granted that when we talk about God we are not talking about a god, a large and powerful member of the genus ‘gods’ who just happens to be the only one. We are talking, in the wake of the great Hebrew breakthrough into monotheism in the post-exilic period, of God who is not one of the gods. Of God about whom it is truer to say that God is more like nothing at all than like anything that is, because God is not a member of the same universe as anything that is, not in rivalry with anything that is. God is not an object within our ken; we find ourselves as objects within God’s ken. God is massively prior to us, and God’s protagonism is hugely more powerful than any possible action or reaction which we might imagine. Or, in the phrase my late and beloved novice master, Herbert McCabe, used to enjoy saying: God and the Universe doesn’t make two.

The question then arises of the relationship between everything that is and God who is utterly prior to it. Is that relationship something like a symptom, such that from things that are, including ourselves, we can glean something about the One who brings them into being and sustains them? And if that is the case, do we have any criteria at all for what is a reflection of God’s creative will and power, and what is a defection from it? And this for me is the central point in any discussion about monotheism and idolatry: what is the criterion by which we can learn the difference between idolatry and worship? The answer which the Catholic faith gives me is this: the reason why it is possible to be non-idolatrous is because God has given us God’s own criterion for what it looks like to be non-idolatrous. And that criterion, given that God has no parts or divisions, and in every movement towards us is One, is also God. The criterion took the form of a lived-out fully human life story, that of Jesus, whose meaning was the reverse of all the human criteria that are usually brought into play in such stories. God gave, as God’s own criterion for God’s own power, not the power of Emperors, legislators or Priests, but the ability to occupy the space of losing, curse, shame and death without being run by them, in such a way that that space and the whole anthropological structure of human existence that depends on it, is able to be relativised. Idolatry is seen to be an involvement in the human cultural reality of death from which God longs for us to be free.

Compassion, Homosexuality, and Platitudes

Posted by on April 23, 2009 12 comments

A USA Today opinion piece on Christianity and homosexuality strikes me as rather boring–and a little annoying. The author is a young Southern Baptist who writes about faith and culture and appears to be into Christian environmental advocacy. What we have here is a plea for evangelical Christians to stop being ridiculously homophobic and love gay people even if they don’t agree with their lifestyle. Well that’s just dandy and I’m sure there are plenty of neanderthal evangelicals out there who have a visceral hatred of all things gay who need to hear it.

But. Is anyone else getting tired of this kind of semi-progressive evangelical way of talking about this stuff? Why on earth is it so earth-shattering for Christians to be saying that we need to be loving towards people, irrespective of their sexual exploits and identities? All too often these sorts of “pleas” come off as far too self-congratulatory and confident. They assume that the issue is closed, settled, and certain and all we need to do now is be nice and loving about how we deploy our settled correctness. What looks like sensitivity and opposition to bigotry is, in fact false humility.

At least the crazy fundamentalist bigots that the author derides are quite obviously unsettled by homosexuality. The author is placidly unaffected by it. He is secure in his belief that its wrong to have gay sex, but the presence of gay people doesn’t bother him. He is enlightened, patient, and loving, undisturbed by the presence of the otherness of gays. This posture makes alarmingly clear that the problem of homosexuality–or the issue of Christian sexual ethics more generally–is just not a problem for him. Its all something that he can easily handle, processing it in a paternalistically compassionate and calmly measured manner.

But shouldn’t we disturbed by issues like this? Isn’t a total lack of conceptual unsettledness a glaring sign of ideology? This is why mainline liberalism and mature compassionate evangelicalism are two sides of the same coin when it comes to the issue of homosexuality. For both the actual presence and issues of gay Christians are an afterthought. What counts is ideological advocacy for the correct, settled, true position. This is precisely why, to my mind, Rowan Williams is taking precisely the right course in regard to these issues. He is refusing to allow ideological advocacy, in either direction, to determine how the church faces these issues. Only by starting there, and by taking seriously the challenge of actual gay people in the particular reality of their lives can we begin to address this issue in a way that doesn’t fall into ideological platitudes that do little more than validate us in our sense of self-certainty and correctness.

What Gives with Milbank?

Posted by on April 23, 2009 31 comments

Ok, Milbank obviously rejoices in being esoteric. Like all the time. But, there seems to be a serious about-face that has taken place in his thought regarding sexuality. Consider this recent article on Milbank’s current theological-political work:

He urged the movement’s followers to “grasp the hands of labour unions, feminists, gay and lesbian activists”, and warned that “if they remain content, as I fear some of them do, to carp and posture before gatherings of the anointed, then the movement will become at best a beloved clique and at worst another academic vaudeville show”.

The groups mentioned may not want to shake Milbank’s hand: he opposes gay marriage (“I don’t want to get into the situation where we deny there is something special about being attracted to the opposite sex”).

He says he is concerned about working-class women being left to raise children alone, “in part – alongside economic factors – because of the collapse of the male ethos of supporting the woman”, and has written most stridently in opposition to in vitro fertilisation treatment for single women.

Or again, the somewhat older piece from The Other Journal:

So by supporting the total disjuncture of sex and procreation, the left is really supporting a new mode of fascism. ‘Women’ are lined up with science and choice in order to produce a new kind of ideal human subjectivity—male and autonomous and yet pliant in ‘female’ manner. The newly envisaged female body is the final site of the coming together of scientific objectivity and absolute freedom of choice. Perhaps one could even speak here of a new racism of the human race as such—it’s to be made the object of an endless ‘objective’ improvement and expression of a will to freedom/will to power. Of course this also means that the specific phenomenology of the female body is destroyed. It’s denied that this body is inherently linked both to the male body (as also vice-versa) and to another body that is itself and yet becomes not itself—the baby. Having denied the link of babies to men and also to women save as objects of their (‘male’) choice, babies thereby become pure consumer objects and all human personhood is abandoned.

Now, this is a pretty conservative framing of Christian sexual ethics coming from Milbank. Žižek, in a brief conversation mentioned to me that he believes that the reason for Milbank’s current trend against gay marriage and toward a broadly Roman Catholic theology of the family stems from recently falling under the influence of Pope Benedict. Perhaps so.

However, no matter what the reason, the anti-liberal Red Tory Milbank is a far cry from the Milbank of Being Reconciled with its talk of the “trancendental homosexuality” of angels. Its not every day you see high-profile theologians getting more conservative on sexual issues these days. Any idea why Milbank is swinging that way?

Shades of Gay

Posted by on April 2, 2009 2 comments

William Saletan has an incisive article in Slate on a recent survey of the number of therapists who, at the request of their clients have attempted to help them change their sexual orientation. Obviously the cultural orthodoxy of the day is outraged by any such notion. Saletan–no conservative evangelical by any stretch of the imagination–has some hard words for the zeitgeist of our sexual sensibilities, however:

But therapy isn’t about the big picture. It’s about lots of little pictures: the worlds unique to each of us. You and I may have the same sexual orientation, but our lives are very different. You know nothing of my family, my religion, or my community. You don’t even know how straight or gay I am. If I tell my therapist that I’d rather try to modify my feelings than give up my faith or my marriage, who are you to second-guess her or me?

In the British study, the therapists who admitted to collaborating in such cases weren’t anti-gay. “A very small number of those advocating intervention in this area had discernibly negative views about the same sex relationships,” the authors report. But for most intervention advocates, “The qualitative data suggest that they made therapeutic decisions based on privileging client/patient choice where there was a wish to avoid the impact of negative social attitudes to same sex relationships.”

The therapists also distinguished between clear-cut and borderline homosexuality. “I am sure there are cases of bisexuality or sexual ambivalence where counseling could be offered to motivated individuals,” one respondent wrote. Another argued that “some clients/patients are unsure of whether they are really homosexual—particularly young adults under 25.” A third ventured, “Some bisexual individuals may wish to choose an orientation that is comfortable for them and their lifestyle choices for example. This is a therapeutic issue to explore and support if that is their wish.”

The idea of heterosexuality as a valid “lifestyle choice” turns the argument for sexual acceptance on its head. If a patient prefers to adjust his orientation to family or cultural circumstances, rather than the other way around, should the therapist challenge him?

In some cases, the answer may be yes. “In many societies/cultures expression of sexuality out [of line] with cultural norms can cause huge distress,” one therapist wrote in response to the British survey. “Given the balance between biological and developmental determinants of sexuality it is valid for an individual to value his cultural norms and to try and reduce the distress caused by transgressing these.” Maybe the therapist should question those norms. Maybe the client should be told that his distress is a symptom of cultural ignorance and injustice—and that changing his orientation would be even harder than changing society.

But what do you do when the distress is rooted in the client’s deeply held values? One therapist, answering the survey, said it might be OK to help a patient try to modify her feelings if she wanted to stay married. Another argued that the “client ultimately knows best and may have deep religious beliefs that influence them enormously.” A third wrote that if the patient “had a strong faith, then working to help the person accept their feelings but manage them appropriately may be the best approach if [the] person felt they would lose God and therefore their life was not worth living.”

Would you tell such a patient that her understanding of God is wrong? Are you sure her attraction to women is more fundamental than her religious beliefs? Is peace with the lesbian part of her sexuality worth the destruction of her family or her faith? And most important: Do you think you can answer these questions without knowing more about her?

Michael King, the professor who led the British study, tries to do just that. When gay people seek therapeutic escape, he argues, “Mental health practitioners and society at large must help them to confront prejudice in themselves and in others.”

Help them confront prejudice in themselves? Isn’t that just the substitution of one inner war, one purification quest, for another?

That’s the thing about therapy: It’s about real people, and they don’t necessarily fit your grand theory or mine. Conservative evangelists are arrogant and wrong to assume that therapy can alter a patient’s sexuality. Don’t repeat their mistake by insisting that it can’t.

The Linker-Dreher-Sullivan Exchange

Posted by on March 30, 2009 4 comments

There’s been a multi-part exchange of posts between Rod Dreher and Damon Linker over the issue of gay marriage these last few days. Andrew Sullivan has also weighed in on the matter. Makes for some interesting reading.

The Gay Marriage Issue: Solved!

Posted by on March 16, 2009 7 comments

Let’s just cut the Gordian knot and get rid of marriage:

Give gay and straight couples alike the same license — a certificate confirming them as a family, and call it a “civil union” — anything, really, other than “marriage.” For those for whom the word marriage is important, the next stop after the courthouse could be the church, where they could bless their union with all the religious ceremony they could want. The Church itself would lose nothing of its role in sanctioning the kinds of unions that it finds in keeping with its tenets. And for non-believers or those for whom the word marriage is less important, the civil union license issued by the state would be all they needed to unlock the benefits reserved in most states, and in federal law, for “married” couples.

H/T: Andrew Sullivan

Moving Thoughts on Homosexuality

Posted by on March 15, 2009 12 comments

Some heartfelt, honest, and poignant thoughts are shared about the struggles of one homosexual Christian here.

With every year that passes, I realize more and more that I don’t want to live life on my own.

More than anything, I would like to have a life partner. But I keep circling back to the conclusion Nouwen arrived at: fulfilling that desire seems impossible, so long as I continue looking to Scripture to guide my moral choices.

Perhaps the greatest unresolved question of my life is, How can I give and receive love, how can I experience intimacy and mutual self-giving commitment, if I am not permitted to marry a person of the gender to which I am attracted?

In a recent reflection on contemporary society, novelist Marilynne Robinson posed the simple question: “will people shelter and nourish and humanize one another?” Read in light of the Christian Church’s relationship to its gay members, her question takes on an added poignancy. Will the Church shelter and nourish and humanize those who are deeply lonely and struggling desperately to remain faithful?

I may have more thoughts on this later, but for now, read the article.

Oliver O’Donovan & Homosexuality

Posted by on July 18, 2008 7 comments

In light of the ongoing discussion at Faith and Theology over the issue of homosexuality and the church, allow me to plug a book we’ve just published at Wipf and Stock by Oliver O’Donovan, Church in Crisis: The Gay Controversy and the Anglican Communion.  This book is perhaps the most erudite treatment of the current controversy in the Anglican church that I have yet read.  What is most helpful about it is the way that O’Donovan lingers over the questions, taking the time to explore them with the care and patience needed for true theological inquiry.  There is just the right sort of patience in his work, that neither descends into timidity, nor boils over into belligerence.  In and of itself, O’Donovan’s methodological patience serves as a significant corrective to the haste and feverish zeal that characterizes nearly all sides in the debates over homosexuality and the church.

Doubtless the book will not be well-received by everyone — what could be so received in a controversy like this? — but, it is definitely a landmark study one theological ethical methodology in dealing with questions as serious and as fraught with ideology and emotion as that of homosexuality and it deserves a wide reading.  Here’s what Rowan Williams has to say about the book:

“Oliver O’Donovan’s reflections on the current troubles of the Anglican Church are quite simply of unique significance. He consistently takes us to the questions others are not asking and refuses the ready-made questions and answers that paralyze our thinking about the sexuality debates. Anyone wanting to understand what is most deeply at stake theologically ought to read and meditate on this invaluable book.”

And here is what John Milbank said of the book:

“In tones of characteristically elusive profundity, Oliver O’Donovan forces the reader of his new book to realize that contemporary “gayness” represents an enigma which demands a long period of sustained cultural, ethical, and theological reflection before the Church can hope to reach any well-grounded consensus on this issue. He hints that the latter might well be at once more conservative and yet more radical than the political moralizing and prudishness theological liberals might desire. Yet if campaigning for “gay rights” is dismissed as both inappropriate and premature, the schismatic reaction of certain evangelicals is roundly condemned. Indeed, O’Donovan has here achieved nothing less than an indication of just how Anglicanism can in the future reconstruct itself through a recovery of a Hooker-like sense of Episcopalian Catholicity, and the Patristic integration of Platonic wisdom with Biblical revelation, on the part of more discerning evangelicals like himself.”

Luke Timothy Johnson vs. Eve Tushnet on Homosexuality

Posted by on June 18, 2007 7 comments

I just came across a very fascinating and well-written exchange on homosexuality in Commonweal.  In it, New Testament scholar and theologian, Luke Timothy Johnson and freelance writer Eve Tushnet debate the current Catholic teaching on same-sex relationships.  Interestingly enough, Johnson, who is both a creative and theologically conservative theologian, argues against the current teaching of the Catholic church, while Tushnet, an openly lesbian woman takes the traditional position, arguing for submission the traditional teachings of the church and Scripture on marriage and sexuality.  Regardless of the position one takes on this issue, I think Tushnet’s peice is quite good and should give anyone much to think about in regards to this particular question facing so many churches.

Here’s a few paragraphs from her article:

The coming-out story is a quintessentially American story. It is self-discovery in opposition to societal regulation. It is personal liberation-as American as “lighting out for the territory.” There are ways to tell the Christian story so that it corresponds very well to this story of self-discovery and liberation: through Christ we are freed from sin and come to know ourselves; in Nietzsche’s phrase, we “become what we are.” But there are other ways of talking about Christian life-ways that focus on sacrifice, martyrdom, dying in Christ to live with him-which are perhaps less quintessentially American, and for that reason all the more necessary for us. There’s a reason all Catholic churches have a crucifix, an image of the tortured God.

Johnson, like many writers who oppose the church’s prohibition against all homosexual acts, points to the real virtues exhibited by so many gay couples: loyalty, caretaking, and compassion. Anyone who supports church teaching must still acknowledge that these virtues are real; that deep, often sacrificial love works through these couples like gold threads in cloth. The question is whether that is enough. How could it not be? How could Christ require more?

And behold, one came up to him, saying, “Teacher, what good deed must I do, to have eternal life?” And he said to him, “Why do you ask me about what is good? One there is who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments.” …The young man said to him, “All these I have observed; what do I still lack?” Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions. (Matthew 19:16-22)

The sacrifices you want to make aren’t always the only sacrifices God wants.

And so the central problem emerges: Whom do we follow? How do we follow love? Can a human beloved have the same ability to overturn us completely-to read and interpret and reshape us-that Jesus himself has? Can love of another person do the same work as the love of God?

Almost all the time, love of God will deepen and strengthen our love of others in obvious ways, rather than conflicting with that love or posing a dilemma. And so we are tempted to believe that our love of God and our love of others won’t ever conflict. But there will be times when it does seem like God is asking us to choose. At the very least, God may require us to radically reshape our understanding of what love of another person should look like. God may ask you not to stop loving your partner but to express that love without sex.

The analogy between God’s love for us and our love for one another is real but partial, and needs to be understood in light of the entire teaching of the church. The church does not teach that whatever anyone does out of a deep conviction and a desire to express love is always intrinsically good. We can sincerely seek to do good and yet actually act wrongly; this happens all the time. Even the saints get stuff wrong, as do all kinds of loving, sincere people. It might even be said that the reason we have church teaching in the first place is that loving, sincere people do their best and still sometimes get things very wrong.

Johnson begins by saying that his position “stand[s] in tension with Scripture.” But he then seems to use human beloveds as a kind of walking Scripture in themselves, able to contradict and correct the merely paper canon. So he writes:

I think it important [for the integrity of our position] to state clearly that we do, in fact, reject the straightforward commands of Scripture, and appeal instead to another authority when we declare that same-sex unions can be holy and good. And what exactly is that authority? We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience and the experience thousands of others have witnessed to, which tells us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us.

I’m not convinced this is how human love stories relate to the divine love story. Loving one another can be an echo of the love we receive from God; it can be the child of that love; it can be preparation for our own awestruck love of God. (I would argue that my erotic and romantic love of women has been all three of those things, at different times.) But our human experience, including our erotic experience, cannot be a replacement for the divine revelation preserved by the church. We must be careful not to let it become a counternarrative or a counter-Scripture.

When I was baptized and confirmed, pledging, “I believe all that the Catholic Church believes and teaches,” I did it basically as a leap of faith. I knew why I needed to be Catholic; I knew that as a Catholic I’d have to follow this stuff, faith seeking understanding and all that; I trusted that eventually I would understand the reasons behind the teaching a little better. And I do. Even so, I waver on how much I think I understand the teaching from day to day.

But what has constantly surprised me about the Catholic Church is just how much there is for me here. There is a rich theology of friendship, helping me to express my love of women both sacrificially and chastely. There’s honor for both celibacy and married life, and resources for living fruitfully in either of these states. We have Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, we have saints who are possibly even crazier than I am, we have the Anima Christi and Thomas à Kempis’s rewriting of the Song of Songs as a hymn to the crucified Christ. I feel as if every week or so I discover yet another hidden treasure of the church that speaks to me in exactly the way I need in order to deal specifically with my struggles, resentments, longings, and strengths as a woman and a lesbian. We can make the church’s teaching believable by becoming more Catholic-which is, not coincidentally, what we should be doing anyway.

Sexuality, Personal Wholeness & the Church

Posted by on June 14, 2007 8 comments

I recently came across this post by Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic online.  It provides some interesting thoughts about homosexuality and the church.

Fundamentally, [being gay is about] one’s core emotional identity. It’s about whom one loves, ultimately, and how that can make one whole as a human being … a single person’s moral equilibrium in a whole range of areas can improve with marriage … because there is a kind of stability and security and rock upon which to build one’s moral and emotional life.  To deny this to Gay people is not merely incoherent and wrong, from the Christian point of view.  It is incredibly destructive of the moral quality of their lives in general…

You can’t ask someone to suppress what makes them whole as a human being and then to lead blameless lives.  We are human beings, and we need love in our lives in order to love others, in order to be good Christians!  What the church is asking Gay people to do is not to be Holy, but actually to be warped … no wonder people’s lives, many Gay lives, are unhappy or distraught or in dysfunction, because there is no guidance at all.  Here is a population within the church, and outside the church, desperately seeking spiritual health and values, and the church refuses to come to our aid, refuses to listen to this call.

What I find most interesting and theologically horrifying about this statement is its idolatrization of marriage and sexual love.  Sullivan makes plain what I think many gay Christian apologists most strongly assert, namely that their sexual orientation is one of, if not the most determinative aspect of their identity and as such, to deny them the full expression of that identity in sexual relationships is tantamount to asking them to be less the fully human.  As Sullivan says, being gay is a homosexual person’s, “core emotional identity”.  If that is indeed the case, I don’t know how a gay person could be a Christian.  On the same hand, if it is the case the being straight makes one’s heterosexual orientation their “core emotional identity”, then neither could a straight person be a Christian.

The gospel of Jesus Christ explicitly denies that our “core emotional identity” is something interior to ourselves.  What defines is not something which we possess, but rather that which happens to us extra nos in Christ.  A Christian, gay or straight in no way derives their “core emotional identity” from their attractional orientation, or from their sexual practices.  What constitutes Christian identity is the self-giving of God in Christ which brings us into communion within the Triune life and thus with one another as the body of Christ.  Put differently, it isn’t the union of sexual love, but the koinonial, kenotic communion of the Eucharist which defines and establishes our identity and humanity.

However, Sullivan is right when he says that “We are human beings, and we need love in our lives in order to love others, in order to be good Christians!”  Indeed we do, but God’s answer to that reality of human neediness and vulnerability is not marriage, it is Pentecost.  The church is the communion of love and solidarity that makes it possible for any Christian, gay or straight to live a life of virtue, fulfillment, and joy.  The good news about the life given to us in Christ is that no one, gay or straight need derive their identity from being married or having sex.  What Christians must explicitly deny is that it is in marriage that we are given this ”kind of stability and security and rock upon which to build one’s moral and emotional life.”  If that’s the case then Jesus had no foundation for his moral and emotional life and neither do I!

The source of our stability is not in marital union, but in the cross and resurrection of Christ and in his sacramental body, the church.  The challenge to the church is, then to live faithfully in such a way that the world may know that such lives of emotional and moral stability can be formed and nurtured in the common life of the church.  We are called as a church to deny the idolatry of marriage as that which “makes us whole.”  What makes us whole is the work of God in Christ, who reconciles alienated peoples together in one body.  Wholeness, for Christians is not that glorious cigarette after a good tussle in the sheets, it is Shalom. And that shalom is not found in marriage or in sexual expression, it is found in the cross, in the Eucharist and in lives lived in common, committed to reconciliation, support, and mutual love.  That is the church’s vocation, to be the space in which those things exist.  When that is indeed the case, and only then, does the church have moral credibility when it calls people to the peculiar sexual practices – which often involve great sacrifice – that characterize Christian discipleship.  That is not easy news, but I am convinced that it is good news.  And really, a cigarette shared with good friends over conversation and laughter is just about as good as one after sex.

Three Quotes on Homosexuality & the Church

Posted by on June 12, 2007 6 comments

I’m not going to offer any commentary on these quotations, I only want them to stimulate thought.  For those who are interested in my own take on this issue, my theses on sexual identity and Christian ethics should give you a good idea.

Eugene Rogers:

The difference between members of a same-sex couple is not “merely psychological,” but also an embodied difference, if only because sexual response is nothing if not something done bodily. Difference cannot be reduced to male-female complementarity, because that would leave Jesus a deficient human being. Jesus did not need a female other half to be fully human. (This point raises the issue of what singleness is for, but that’s a question for another day.)

If this account is correct, then it turns out that conservatives wish to deprive same-sex couples not so much of satisfaction as of sanctification. But that is contradictory, because so far as I know no conservative has ever seriously argued that same-sex couples need sanctification any less than cross-sex couples do. It is at least contradictory to attempt in the name of holiness to deprive people of the means of their own sanctification,

Conservatives often claim it’s dangerous to practice homosexuality, because it might be a sin. I want to propose that the danger runs both ways. It is more than contradictory, it may even be resisting the Spirit, to attempt to deprive same-sex couples of the discipline of marriage and not to celebrate same-sex weddings. I don’t mean this kind of rhetoric to insult others or forestall discussion. I just mean that the danger of refusing to celebrate love is real.

 Robert Gagnon:

The call of the gospel will make different demands on different persons because every individual carries his or her own set of biological or social baggage and has a unique role in God’s overall redemptive plan. Was it Jesus’ “bad luck” to be the Messiah and to have imposed on him the “added burden” of dying on the cross for the sins of the world? Paul had the “bad luck” of being called to a life of hardship that few, if any, followers of Jesus have had to face. Was it fair of God to impose on Paul the “added burden” of denying, on a daily basis, his basic needs for food, clothing, shelter, and protection from severe social abuse and violence, all for the cause of the gospel? Some persons have the “bad luck” of turning out to be exclusive pedophiles, or of having seemingly uncontrollable desires for multiple sex partners, or of growing up without the kind of stable family environment that nurtures a capacity for lifelong sexual commitment, or of finding sexual stimulation only in coercive sexual activity, or of having a strong disposition for alcoholism, or of being afflicted with a strong sense of insecurity and distrust that makes faith in Christ difficult, or of being far more susceptible to feelings of covetousness than most. On and on we could go. It is wrong to be callous to the particular sufferings that people experience as they “work at their own salvation with fear and trembling” amidst God’s gracious work in them (Phil 2:12-13). But it is equally wrong to give the impression that one person’s particular “bad luck”… justifies a circumvention of the gospel’s call or to convey that a particular constellation of intense desires constitutes “who you are” and establishes an inviolable, God-given “destiny.” A person who does not experience homoerotic desires may be beset by other types of sinful impulses that impose even greater burdens on an obedient Christian life. Yet no one gets an exemption as regards death to self, whatever the particularities of one’s individual life experiences.

     The hope of the gospel message is that our identity is not found in “who we are” in the flesh but rather in who God is shaping us to be in the Spirit of Christ. Any other message, including a message of moral-biological determinism, is a false gospel.

Tim Otto:

Both sides of the church find themselves sick of the other side’s lies. The affirming church looks at the lies of the traditionalist church with its modernist “fix- it” techniques of orientation change, marrying the opposite sex, or the claim that homosexuals have a special “superpower” called “the gift,” and says, “If you’ve got to tell so many lies, how can you claim to have good news? You must have forsaken the gospel.” And the traditionalist church looks at the affirming church and says, “Gosh, if you’re preaching sex outside of marriage what you are preaching is just Enlightenment liberalism dressed in drag. You must have given up on scripture.”

… As both sides try to articulate an ethic that “everyone” can do, we end up telling lies and betraying the gospel. As both sides repent, and stop telling lies, then I suspect that the stakes won’t seem so high, and that may make it more possible to actually talk. But just as the Christian criteria for ethics is not that it be possible for everyone, a Christian ethic must be possible for someone, in some specific place. …So the question becomes, if you argue that a homosexual ought to be celibate, is that miracle more possible in your congregation than elsewhere? Or, if you argue for homosexual marriage, is that miracle more possible in your congregation than elsewhere?

Switch to our mobile site