Couldn’t help but notice Amy Becker’s post about the Westboro Baptist Church’s picketing of the funerals of soldier’s who have died in Iraq. Disgusting and morally revolting as that is, surfing around on a number of their sites—godhatesfags.com, godhatessweden.com, godhates…well you get the idea —one really gets a sense of the bile and venom these shoddy excuses for human beings are capable of. The mindless vulgarity and cruelty of the WBC just set my stomach a-churning.
Cleaning up the vomit off my computer screen and keyboard, I began wondering to myself why religious extremists of all stripes have such a problem with homosexuals. How are the sexual and emotional interactions of consenting adults—gay, straight, and everything in between—even in the same ethical category as, say, theft or lying or murder? Why is a religion ostensibly devoted to selfless love and benign toleration so obsessed with the ethical status of people’s sexual practices? How is it that they are not equally exercised about real evils in the world that actually affect quality of life and how a society functions—crime, genocide, racism, economic injustice, environmental degradation, etc. These things are REALLY evil and demand compelling ethical—if not religious—responses. Good old-fashioned sodomy never hurt a soul.
The more you think about it, and the more you dip into the holy scriptures, the more you, on the one hand, see how hypocritical and selective the Bible nuts are and, on the other, understand how logically incoherent and ridiculously backwards the texts are to begin with. Let’s look at some examples.
Ok. So, based on scriptural directives sodomy is an abominable sin, worthy of death (Leviticus 20:13 and Romans 1:32). Fair enough, but religion is not a buffet. If you invoke the Bible to justify one particular moral position, you have to acknowledge the equal legitimacy of the Bible’s other prescriptions. And—just like the gay bashing—they’re mostly primitive, foolish, atavistic, and just plain wacky. See:
Want to sell your daughter into slavery, no problem, Exodus 21:7 says it’s cool!
Watch out for women on their period. Leviticus 15:19-24 says you better stay away lest “the impurity of her monthly period†makes you unclean, at least until evening that is.
Want slaves? Well, according to Leviticus 25:44, you can only get them from neighboring nations. So free-for-all on the Canadians and Mexicans!
Do you work on Sunday, the holy Sabbath? Well, you will have to die, according to Exodus 35:2.
Know someone who cusses a lot? Do they say “God damn it†or “Jesus Christ†when things don’t go their way? Then let’s get together and stone them to death!!! (Leviticus 24:10-16)
I could go on (check out this link for my sources). Homophobia is a brainless anachronism. Our society has jettisoned the long list of Old Testament barbarisms, why do we persist with the vacuous Puritanism that portrays homosexuality as a sin and not a longstanding trait of the human race.
