OP-ED COLUMNIST
God and Sex
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
 o when God made homosexuals who fall deeply, achingly in love with each other, did he goof?
That
seems implicit in the measures opposing gay marriage on the ballots of
11 states. All may pass; Oregon is the only state where the outcome
seems uncertain. Over the last couple of months, I've been
researching the question of how the Bible regards homosexuality. Social
liberals tend to be uncomfortable with religious arguments, but that is
the ground on which political battles are often decided in America - as
when a Texas governor, Miriam "Ma" Ferguson, barred the teaching of
foreign languages about 80 years ago, saying, "If English was good
enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for us." I think
it's presumptuous of conservatives to assume that God is on their side.
But since Americans are twice as likely to believe in the Devil as in
evolution, I also think it's stupid of liberals to forfeit the
religious field. Some scholars, like Daniel Helminiak, author of
"What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality," argue that the Bible
is not anti-gay. I don't really buy that. It's true that the
story of Sodom is treated by both modern scholars and by ancient
Ezekiel as about hospitality, rather than homosexuality. In Sodom, Lot
puts up two male strangers for the night. When a lustful mob demands
they be handed over, Lot offers his two virgin daughters instead. After
some further unpleasantness, God destroys Sodom. As Mark Jordan notes
in "The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology," it was only in the
11th century that theologians began to condemn homosexuality as sodomy. In
fact, the most obvious lesson from Sodom is that when you're attacked
by an angry mob, the holy thing to do is to offer up your virgin
daughters. Still, the traditionalists seem to me basically
correct that the Old Testament does condemn at least male anal sex
(scholars disagree about whether the Hebrew phrasing encompasses other
sexual contact). While homosexuality never made the Top 10 lists of
commandments, a plain reading of the Book of Leviticus is that male
anal sex is every bit as bad as other practices that the text condemns,
like wearing a polyester-and-cotton shirt (Leviticus 19:19). As
for the New Testament, Jesus never said a word about gays, while he
explicitly advised a wealthy man to give away all his assets and
arguably warned against bank accounts ("do not store up for yourselves
treasures on earth"). Likewise, Jesus praises those who make
themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven, but conservative
Christians rarely lead the way with self-castration. Theologians
point out that that the Bible is big enough to encompass gay
relationships and tolerance - as well as episodic condemnations of
gays. For example, 1 Samuel can be read as describing gay affairs
between David and Jonathan. In the New Testament, Matthew and
Luke describe how Jesus cured the beloved servant of a centurion - and
some scholars argue that the wording suggests that the pair were
lovers, yet Jesus didn't blanch. The religious right cites one
part of the New Testament that clearly does condemn male homosexuality
- not in Jesus' words, but in Paul's. The right has a tougher time
explaining why lesbians shouldn't marry because the Bible has no
unequivocal condemnation of lesbian sex. A passage in Romans 1
objects to women engaging in "unnatural" sex, and this probably does
mean lesbian sex, according to Bernadette Brooten, the author of a
fascinating study of early Christian attitudes toward lesbians. But
it's also possible that Paul was referring to sex during menstruation
or to women who are aggressive during sex. In any case, do we
really want to make Paul our lawgiver? Will we enforce Paul's
instruction that women veil themselves and keep their hair long? (Note
to President
Bush: If you want to obey Paul, why don't you start by veiling Laura
and keeping her hair long, and only then move on to barring gay
marriages.) Given these ambiguities, is there any
solution? One would be to emphasize the sentiment in Genesis that "it
is not good for the human to be alone," and allow gay lovers to marry. Or
there's another solution. Paul disapproves of marriage except for the
sex-obsessed, saying that it is best "to remain unmarried as I am." So
if we're going to cherry-pick biblical phrases and ignore the central
message of love, then perhaps we should just ban marriage altogether?
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