A Christian argument for homosexuality

So my little-brother-who-is-in-college decided to stop going to the church he had been going to, in large part because they are Not Okay With Homosexuality and he is Not Okay With That. (In other news, I am really quite proud of my little-brother-who-is-in-college.) Anyway so my dad (whom, let's be clear, both my brother and I love and even occasionally admire) emailed my brother saying, hey, you're not going to that church anymore, is it because of their position on homosexuality, and my brother was like, yeah that's definitely a big part of it, and my dad then proceeded to lecture my brother and my brother proceeded to forward that lecture to me. It was...an exceptionally predictable lecture, to me at any rate, and that may not say a whole lot since I grew up with the guy and know how he thinks. I'll spare you the details, but the short version is that my dad is upset because my brother is making his own moral judgments rather than relying on the Bible.

So here's why, from an evangelical Christian perspective, my dad's position and, more importantly, the position of a very large number of evangelical Christians (on homosexuality specifically and moral judgment generally) is both morally reprehensible and logically indefensible. (And I should say that I am not, myself, Christian, but I have endeavored as far as possible to argue from Christian premises, as well as premises derived from general experience. This is not an atheistic argument. It is a Christian one. Also, I've restrained myself from using my typical profane and offensive style, as a courtesy to the intended Christian audience of this post.)

First off, let's talk about what my dad is actually doing when he claims to be relying on the Bible for moral guidance. In a nutshell, he's relying on his own interpretation of the Bible (specifically, the English Standard Version translation, or in the case of the Old Testament, mistranslation, of the Bible.) Now, this isn't some total relativist argument where I wave my hands like a jellyfish and go "it's all interpretation! nothing is true! it means whatever you want it to mean!" No. That's not the level we're operating on here. Rather, what I am saying is that there is no language, and certainly no literature (this, by the way, includes the Bible), without interpretation. Some interpretations definitely seem better than others - they're better supported by the text, better reasoned, and so forth - that's fine. But it's still an interpretation.

And the thing is, I'm not certain my dad would disagree. He (and evangelical Christians generally) behave as though the Bible needs to be interpreted - at least when it suits them. For instance: evangelical Christians do not adhere to the strictures of the Mosaic law. That's all well and good, but it means you need to deal with verses like Ecclesiastes 12:11-12a ("The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd. My son, beware of anything beyond these."), or Matthew 5:17-19 ("Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.") Now, it's not stupid to say that, when Jesus says "until all is accomplished", he means "until I fulfill the Law and the Prophets by my life, death and resurrection". It's less easy to deal with "whoever relaxes one of these commandments...will be called least in the kingdom of heaven", but there are workarounds I'm sure (most arguments I've heard follow the lines of, the Law totally still exists and is valid and true but we get to ignore it because Grace - which, there's a term for that sort of thing in programming: cruft. But okay, fine, not the most elegant solution, but a solution nonetheless.)

And of course you can look at other places in the Bible to support the claim that we need no longer keep the Mosaic Law - Peter chowing down on a hallucinated tref picnic from heaven in Acts, where God's all, hey yeah no forget the kosher thing, I get to declare things clean by fiat and you don't get to cling to your outdated codes of ethics (wait, this sounds familiar - did I mention that the point of the story was that Christians should stop treating a hitherto stigmatized and looked-down-upon group of people like garbage? Yeah, wow, that definitely sounds familiar but I just can't place it right now. Oh well.) or else Paul's screeds in multiple letters, most notably Galatians, where he says (Galatians 5:2), "Look: I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law." (Ironically, there are many in the evangelical community who circumcise their children, for who knows what reason. One possible interpretation of this verse is that they have thereby condemned their children either to hell, or to keeping the Mosaic Law - which reduces, in the evangelical mind, to being condemned to hell. Even if you don't interpret it this way, why, given this verse, would you even consider circumcision for your children? Anyway.) But the point is, you're using these verses to interpret the verses which would suggest that you should keep the Mosaic Law (instead of, for instance, the other way round).

Or we could get away from the whole Mosaic Law thing entirely: look at Paul's instructions about women in the church in 1 Timothy 2:11-12 ("Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.") or in his astonishingly incoherent rant in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, in which really the only clear point is that women need to cover their heads in church. (No, go read it, it's total gibberish. Women need to cover their heads "because of the angels". Also, 1 Timothy 2:15 reads "Yet she [the woman] will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control," which might just be the most misogynistic thing I've seen all week, and I read manboobz [TW for misogyny, obviously]. "Saved through childbearing." Seriously.) Anyway, the point is that, though some - indeed, many - evangelical churches do in fact make women remain quiet, many, including most charismatic churches I've been in and the one my parents currently attend, do not. And no church I've ever been in actually made women cover their hair. There's a variety of justifications for this, including, "it's just a cultural thing! it doesn't apply to us anymore!" (which is oddly relativist) or "it's okay, we just don't give women positions of authority, that's what Paul really meant!" (which, I guess I could see that?) or "long hair counts as a covering!" (which I'm pretty sure is just being bad at reading comprehension, but fine).

Here's my point: when you choose (subconsciously, no doubt) to interpret the Bible so that you have enough wiggle room to eat pork and to not have to wear head coverings, then why, for the love of Jesus, do you not afford the same treatment to human beings? You have lost any claim you ever had to be acting out of Christ-like agape love when your ability to eat bacon supersedes the rights and happiness of your fellow human beings. You might still love specific people of whatever sexual orientation, but when you act to reinforce the legal or social oppression of specific groups of people, you are not and cannot be acting out of love. You are acting out of hatred.

But okay, you think you have pretty ironclad support in the Bible for "Homosexuality is wrong and bad." You know what? I agree. There are very specific verses, in both the Old and New Testaments, that say, essentially, "Dudes macking on dudes? EW EW NO STOP." (I'm pretty sure there's actually no prohibition in the Bible against female homosexuality, incidentally, but I'm going to give your blatantly inconsistent applications of "literalism" a pass because that's not my argument.) There are verses that you could use to argue that we should love and accept homosexual people and homosexuality, but only in the very general "What God has called clean let no man call unclean" sort of way. Honestly, the argument from the Bible that homosexuality is immoral is more airtight than any other argument from the Bible...

...since the pro-slavery arguments of the American South. See, the Bible has actually quite a lot of things to say about slavery, and they are all along the lines of "Slaves, obey your masters." Paul does say that slaves should gain their freedom, if they can, but it is very, very obvious that he means "gain their freedom legally," which was possible, both in the Roman world, and in the antebellum South. If he had instead meant "by any means, legal or illegal," he would emphatically not have sent the runaway slave Onesimus back to his owner, Philemon (see Paul's letter to Philemon). In fact, there is no hint of the idea, anywhere in the Bible, that slavery should or even could ever be abolished. Galatians 3:28 reads "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus," but it would be as absurd to try to use this verse as evidence for the Bible's support for the abolition of slavery as it would be to try to use this verse as evidence for the Bible's support of the abolition of gender. It's true, you can use the Bible to support the idea that masters should treat slaves better while still keeping them enslaved, just as you can use the Bible to support the idea that Christians should treat homosexual people better while still keeping them socially oppressed - and you can cite general themes in the Bible of compassion, mercy, and justice to say, "hey, maybe we should not have slaves, that seems wrong," just as you can cite precisely those themes to say, "hey, maybe we should not socially and legally oppress homosexual people, that seems wrong." But the Bible itself isn't against slavery: it's very clearly for it.

And here is precisely my point: the abolitionist position is, Biblically speaking, much less well-supported than the pro-slavery position. It is, however, nearly universally acknowledged to be morally superior. Which means that the Biblical position is sometimes morally inferior. Which means that we need something other than the Bible to guide our moral judgments. For instance, we could try using our reason and moral intuitions, like my brother is doing. My father, and many evangelicals, would say that this is "leaning on our own understanding", which is bad. But I have shown that this is already precisely what they themselves are doing when they interpret the Bible - in fact, they are "leaning on their own understanding" in many ways far more than we are, since they have unconsciously (and, I might add, semi-idolatrously) set up their own personal interpretations of the Bible as the literal Word of God. This prevents them from recognizing that their beliefs might actually be wrong, and thus from ever achieving significant moral growth.

And I just want to emphasize again that what my father and evangelical Christians in general are doing is harming millions and millions of people in this country alone, and that they are just as culpable in this as were the slave-owners of the South, who, like them, took the Bible seriously, and believed they were acting out of Christ-like love towards the people they were actively oppressing (and, by the way, consider the oppressor who literally demands that those he is oppressing recognize that he is acting out of nothing but love for them - there are few things more viscerally repugnant).

So let's consider: you, as an evangelical Christian, have to my knowledge, five main ways of responding to this argument.
First, you could disagree with my premise that interpretation is a necessary part of reading any text. If you actually want to argue this point, I can more than adequately defend it, but it's so fundamental and obvious to me that I will question whether you can properly be called "literate" in any meaningful sense at all.
Second, you could disagree with my analogy of anti-homosexuality to slave-owning, in a variety of ways. You could claim that the Biblical argument of slave-owners wasn't as strong as I've made it out to be, perhaps pointing to the significant differences between the system of slavery as practiced in the Bible, and chattel slavery as it existed in the United States. The most you could claim with this position with any legitimacy, however, is that slavery in the US, though it should have continued to exist, should not have been quite as bad for the slaves as it in fact was. But the problem with slavery is not that slaves are treated poorly, the problem with slavery is that slaves are slaves.
Or you could question certain historical claims - did slave-owners really make these Biblical arguments? (Yes, they did, and this is easily ascertainable, so if this is a legitimate objection, I expect you to research it and reach a conclusion based on the evidence you find, not to use it as a stalling tactic so that there's always enough doubt that you don't have to make up your mind.)
Or, most likely, you could attempt to argue for your own exceptionalism - that while, yes, slave-owners made these arguments, and yes, they were wrong, you by contrast are making very very similar arguments but magically happen to be right. This I find unconvincing for a variety of reasons, which I really shouldn't have to spell out, but will if it is necessary. Suffice it to say that any argument you could make for the exceptionalism of your position, slave-owners could equally well have made. (This includes appeals to tradition, as well as arguments from pseudoscience.)
Third, I suppose you could accept that the stance against homosexuality you have adopted is the product of your own prejudice and the societal and cultural milieu in which you exist, and continue to hold that stance. This is at least honest - you display your fear and hatred of that which you consider Other, which is pretty repulsive, but again, at least it's honest.
Fourth, you could accept that, like the slave-owners in the antebellum South, you are wrong. You could get over your personal prejudices. You could learn to love and accept who people are. You could join the fight for equal treatment for everyone, and attempt to guarantee all people the "certain inalienable rights" of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, as well as, in the end, being a far better witness for Christ and Christ-like love than you could ever have been otherwise.
Or, fifth, you could ignore all of this, pretend I never said anything so that you won't have to confront certain ugly truths about yourself and your beliefs. Which, let's be clear, is cowardice.

Remember that I'm not even requiring you to give up your doctrine of Biblical infallibility. I'm merely requiring you to give up your doctrine of your own infallibility. That seems like a pretty Christian thing to do, all told. Good luck.

This is your zeitgeist speaking.

A young couple who go to my grandparents' church recently decided that, since I know Chicago, and since they will be in Chicago in a couple of months, they would take me out to lunch and in return I would tell them what is good to do in Chicago (Orange for breakfast, Icosium for crepes, fuck the Sears Tower, try the cocktail lounge at the top of the Hancock Tower instead, Shedd Aquarium is kickass, Adler Planetarium is, like far too many museums these days, almost exclusively geared for children, because apparently adults don't want to learn things?) and somehow we got on the subject of homosexuality and therefore I had a lot to say. Two major points from that discussion:

1) One of the couple brought up a member of her family, who was gay, and sketched out in brief the fact that they loved him but disapproved of his"lifestyle choice". So we talked about the hate-the-sin, love-the-sinner dichotomy so common to discussions with Evangelicals on this subject. I should note that I rather approve of this attitude, when directed at things that could legitimately be termed "sins" - theft, for instance, or alcoholism. But, and this is the point I made, no such dichotomy is even possible when discussing homosexuality. The "sin" in this case is an essential and inalienable part of the "sinner's" identity. If you claim to love someone while hating their homosexuality, you are wrong. You can't love the "non-gay" parts of them because there are no non-gay parts: identity simply does not compartmentalize that way. So you both hate and love this person, and let's call that what it is: fucked-up.

2) This couple was very gracious throughout the conversation, even though I was rambling on about gay rights while eating a very nice meal they had paid for. They had every right to ask me to stick to more comfortable subjects, but instead they listened and asked questions and made points. They were members of the very, very right-wing church I spent my earliest years in, yet they were perfectly willing to agree that homosexuality was neither a choice, nor even remotely comparable in its effects to, say, alcoholism. That may not sound like much to you, but to someone who grew up marinated in the conservatism of that particular subculture, that's the roar of progress, which I hear everywhere echoed: the thoughtful Christian kids I grew up with are waking up, and realizing that the current attitude of Evangelical Christianity towards homosexuality is fundamentally incompatible with a just and free society. Given the conviction inherent to being a committed Evangelical Christian, I should not be surprised if, in a generation, the Evangelical Churches were among the strongest supporters of equality in this country. For the old have wisdom: they see the world as it is; but the young have vision: they see the world as it should be.

After lunch, the woman mentioned in passing that talking to me reminded her of an old friend of hers, the one who had convinced her to take the one philosophy class of her life, and whose discourse often went over her head. I tend to get this a lot, I say not to my credit; often I am more concerned with backing up my opinions with the names of philosophers than I am with making myself understood. But what has been made abundantly clear to me over the past year is that what matters is not education or intelligence, but the ability to listen, the will to understand, and the drive to learn. The meek shall not only inherit the earth; they shall save it.