Religion’s bottom line
What is it with religious fundamentalists and homosexuality? We all know why non-religious homophobes hate gays – they’re frightened of the wildly unlikely prospect that a gay person might find them irresistible and attempt to take them up the wrong ‘un. It’s rape anxiety, pure and simple.
But what is it about homosexuality that led hundreds of Christians to protest outside Parliament this week against the Sexual Orientation Regulations, which makes it illegal to discriminate against gay people?
Is it thanks to St Paul, the Norman Tebbit of his day, who in the New Testament told the Romans of men who ‘burned in their lust one toward another’, castigated the ‘unchaste, practicing homosexuals’ to Timothy, and warned the Corinthians that ‘sodomites’ will not ‘not inherit the kingdom of God’? Paul also railed against adulterers and ‘drunkards’ but we’ve yet to see Christians picketing John Prescott or Charlotte Church.
(Lesbians, both now and then, have been left out of the argument for some reason. I’d welcome thoughts on the matter – is, to reverse dear Oscar, the only thing worse than not being talked about being talked about in this instance?)
Lord Tebbit, as ever, brought it all back round to the mechanics of the issue in the debate in the House of Lords:
Black is about being. Sexual orientation is about being. [W]e would not wish to discriminate against people for being black nor on grounds of their sexual orientation. The concerns which are being expressed […] are primarily about sodomy rather than about sexual orientation - that is doing, not being.
Norman, like the Christians protesters, doesn’t mind you being gay, he just doesn’t want you doing all that business of pleasuring someone you quite like. He wants to legislate for where consenting menfolk stick their cocks, in other words. Being a prurient bigot with an obsession about bumming is also about ‘being’: there’s no problem with him and the rest being bigots, it’s them being practicing bigots that’s objectionable.
Just think of what these people could achieve if only they could divert their inexhaustible energies away from demonising people doing nice things to each other. Obviously fewer gay people means more procreation which means more people in the pews on Sunday and more cash in the collection plate but, really, where’s the harm in it all? After all, Jesus himself was known to ride an ass himself now and again.
Posted on January 12th, 2007 at 10:21 am
| See also • And everyone seems that they’re acting a dream • Robert Sharp: That hypothetical B&B • If I had somewhere to go, I’d go. |
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Rape anxiety may be responsible for some homophobia, but I think most homophobia is caused by fear and embarrassment about the homophobe’s own homosexual nature. It’s been scientifically proven! I just wish I could find the reference.
Anyway, the experiment went like this. A questionnaire about homosexuality was given to a selection of men, the results of which were graded according the the degree of homophobia shown. Then sensors were attached to their nobs and they were shown gay porn.
Lo and behold, the nobs of those men with the highest homophobia rating also registered the highest degree of tumescence!
QED
Found it.
‘The homophobic men showed a significant increase in penile circumference to the male homosexual video, but the control [non-homophobic] men did not.’
Ha. Excellent - thanks for that, David.
Is Tebbit as agitated about consentual, hetrosexual anal sex, within a marriage? Is it the act of buggery itself or simply the gender of the people partaking?
Paul was a self-hating closet homosexual himself. He also hated and feared women. This is why when Jesus was crucified (if he was) he took the role of deciding what Christianity was to be. What they ended up with was a gay hating woman hating religion. It is still operating today, 2000 years later. Yukk!!
Of course, in the time that St Paul and his biblical chums were writing Sodomy was defined as a) Any non-procreative sex act or many cases b) Any sex act not carried out in the missionary position with the man on top. If these are the sodomitic acts that norman tebbit and his hypothetical christian B&Bers are concerned about then why on earth are they content with stopping at preventing teh queers from staying, surely they should be ensuring that all sex acts under their roof are carried out in the true and proper sense. And if they have a slightly more narrow definition of sodomy then it says less about their religious convictions and more about their barely concealed homophobia.
To go back to the original question, fundamentalists deride homosexuals because its always easier to comment on others’ supposed faults than to actualy tackle your own. For fundamentalist, read spiritualy lazy person. Any of the religious texts seem to be generously loaded with messages about love, compassion, peace and redemption, but if you already think you have these qualities in spades you might just be tempted to look first for other people’s shortcomings.
By the way, if homophobic men do happen to get off to homosexual imagery, who are we to spoil their fun?
I can’t claim to be any sort of biblical scholar, but I believe a significant part of the Bible’s supposed opposition to homosexuality is contained in the book of Leviticus. Doubtless someone could steer the curious to the right chapter and verse. This is often quoted by Christian bigots to justify their hatred. The problem for them is that Leviticus also descibes as sinful the eating of shellfish, as well as other nonsense.
When I see Christian hate-mobs picketing fish-mongers then I’ll finally believe that they are at least consistent in their targets for hate!
But even then, they’ll only be consistently wrong!
Neil: yes, I usually go for Leviticus myself but I seem to remember someone telling me that, for Christians, the message of the Old Testament (where Leviticus resides) is superseded by that of the New Testament.
So I went a-hunting to see what the new book had to say and turned up the Norman Tebbit of his day, St Paul.