When the topic is homosexuality, political activism is almost always a cover for religious opinion.
Deeply felt feelings don the robes of religious righteousness and masquerade as the "Word of God." The Bible becomes the supposed bottom line "reason" for opposing so-called "special rights." But this "reason" is a fiction of blind conviction. So it is with the Oregon Citizens Alliance.
Taken on its own terms, read in its own historical context, the Bible ho-hums homosexuality—unless, as with heterosexuality, injustice and abuse are involved. To use the Bible to condemn homosexuality, the religious right must depend on mistranslation, faulty interpretation, and a large dose of emotionalism. The religious right takes the Bible as if it has been written in English yesterday and reads into it late twentieth-century concerns that are simply absent in the original texts. Consider some specifics:
Sodomites
Genesis 19:1–11 tells the story of Sodom, destroyed by fire and brimstone. What was the sin? Ezekiel 16:49 names it outright: "They had pride, excess of food and prosperous ease, and did not aid the poor and needy." No mention of sex at all! Same thing in the deuterocanonical book of Wisdom 19:13: "hatred toward strangers." When Jesus sent out his disciples, he told them it would be worse for a town who rejects them than it was for Sodom and Gomorrah (Matthew 10:5–15). The common link is not sex acts but rejection of divine messengers, hardheartedness, haughtiness, and meanness. It is simply mistaken to read "Sodom" as a biblical reference to homosexuality. Indeed, this approach misses the Bible's sacred teaching on kindness and encourages people to do the very things those texts condemn. In many ways the strident religious right has become today's true Sodomites.
Abomination
According to Leviticus 18:22, "You shall not lie with a man as with a woman: it is an abomination." Abomination sounds pretty bad in contemporary English, but the Hebrew and the ancient Greek translation both use words that mean a religious violation: unclean, impure, taboo—exactly like eating pork or shellfish, sewing two kinds of cloth into one garment, or having a menstrual flow of blood or a seminal emission. In the Hebrew Scriptures, abomination means religious taboo, ritual impurity; it does not imply inherent wrong or sin.
Penetrative male-male sex violated an idealized order of creation. According to the ancient Jewish conception, males are to penetrate and females are to be penetrated—just as sea creatures are to have fins and scales, and land animals who have cleft hoofs are to chew the cud. So according to this logic, pigs and lobsters are aberrations and thus unclean and not to be eaten, and penetrative sex between men is taboo and not to be done.
To us that understanding may sound like sheer superstition. But for the ancient Hebrews, to depart from Jewish belief on these matters was to act like a Gentile. Such behavior was abominable, unclean. It was a violation of religion, but not of the inherent nature of sex as we might think of it. In proof of this claim, consider that sex between women, necessarily non- penetrative, was not forbidden. And as rabbinical commentary shows, other kinds of non-penetrative sex between men were not forbidden.
It used to be mortal sin for Roman Catholics to eat meat on Fridays—not because eating meat is itself somehow wrong but because doing it on Fridays denied one's Catholic identity. Likewise, the ancient Hebrews forbade penetrative male-male sex for ethnic and religious reasons that have no relevance to today's discussion of homosexuality. The reason it was forbidden to the early Israelites no longer applies today—and especially not for Christians. Jesus rejected the Hebrew purity laws: sin is in the heart, not on the unwashed hand (Mark 7:1–8).
The religious right makes two mistakes in decrying "abomination": they read "homosexuality" any time the Bible says "abomination," and they think abomination is always the same thing as sin, injustice, wrong. Not according to the Bible!
Unnatural
The most difficult passage on gay sex is Romans 1:26–27: "Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another."
The Greek words translated as "unnatural," para physin, would more accurately read "atypical" or "uncustomary." The early Stoic philosophers used these words to mean unnatural, but the words imply no ethical condemnation for the apostle Paul. In Romans 11:24, he applies these same words to God's actions. God grafted the Gentiles into the Jewish people, a wild branch into a cultivated vine. Not your standard modus operandi; rather, an unusual thing to do, i.e., "atypical," nothing more. The whole anti-gay "unnatural" hullabaloo rests on this mistranslation.
Likewise, Paul's other words describing gay sex, "degrading" and "shameless," carry no ethical connotation for Paul. They merely imply social disapproval. Paul is talking about impurities, taboos, uncleanness. He has the ancient Jewish Law about impurity in mind. He says so outright in 1:24.
If Paul was not condemning male-male sex, why did he make an issue of it? And why so at the very beginning of a letter to the Romans, among whom such sex was a commonly accepted practice? Paul was playing on the sense of moral superiority among the early Jewish converts to Christianity. True to Leviticus, they called the Gentile converts unclean and impure, a dirty lot—perverts!—because of the Gentile sexual practices.
The whole point of Paul's letter is to insist, with Jesus, that impurity is irrelevant for Christians. He uses gay sex as his example, and he is indifferent to the matter: "I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself" (Romans 14:14). In mentioning homosexuality, Paul was merely echoing the Jewish Christians' prejudice in order to win initial approval and a hearing from them. Then he went on to rebuke their self-righteousness.
The religious right makes the mistake of reading their own preoccupations into Paul's terminology. They make the further mistake of uniting verses 26–27 of Romans 1 with verses 28–32. But verse 28 changes topics. Paul is contrasting impurity with real sin. He is not identifying homosexuality, as the Fundamentalists would, with "evil, covetousness, malice, envy, murder, etc., etc." Far from condemning gay sex, Paul was reprimanding the Jewish Christians for dividing the Christian community over it. Every textual consideration supports this conclusion.
Heavenly Sex
This is one for a laugh. Jude 7 condemns sex with celestial beings. Absolutely foreign to our worldview. But then again, remember Cocoon, City of Angels, and Galaxy Quest? This text does mention Sodom (the visitors to Sodom were really angels in disguise), so it trips off the religious right's preoccupation with gay sex. Scholars long ago abandoned that interpretation.
Biblical matters are subtle; they require study and thought. That's too bad. Simple answers have popular appeal. Thus, the Fundamentalist bandwagon rolls on honking and blaring—down the wrong road.
Further Reading
For a fuller explanation in a readable text, see Daniel A. Helminiak's What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality (Alamo Square Distributors, P.O. Box 2510, Novato, CA 94948; 415-898-7956; fax 415-892-7479; alamosqdist@publishersservices.net; 152 pages, revised edition, $14 plus $4 postage and handling) as well as his Web site at www.visionsofdaniel.com.
Daniel Helminiak shows that top Bible scholars reject the argument that God opposes homosexuality. Information on this matter has been accumulating for decades, but it is hidden away in technical books and obscure professional journals. Helminiak has summarized this information in accessible form, popularizing the work of scholars such as the late John Boswell of Yale University, Daniel Boyarin of the University of California at Berkeley, Bernadette Brooten of Brandeis University, L. William Countryman of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, Victor P. Furnish of Southern Methodist University, Saul M. Olyan of Brown University, and Robin Scroggs of Union Theological Seminary.
What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality addresses a wide audience that reveres the Bible. The basic principle behind Helminiak's book is to read the Bible passages for what the original authors meant to say. The result often differs from what those ancient texts suggest to the contemporary reader of an English translation. The book will help people who were raised in a strict Bible tradition and want to be able, in good conscience, to find compassionate teaching on homosexuality in the Bible. It will challenge biblical literalists to understand how others, in good faith, can insist that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality. And it will offer consolation and instruction to lesbian and gay people who respect the Bible and want to live by it.
Short and powerful and understandably controversial, this book from Alamo Square Press has been on the best-seller list since its publication in 1994; a revised edition was issued in 2000. Unlike the scholarly writings behind it, anyone can read it in one or two sittings. Bit by bit in lucid form, it dismantles the predominant opinion about homosexuality in the Bible.
About the Author
Roman Catholic theologian Daniel A. Helminiak was ordained a priest in the city of Rome and holds two Ph.D.'s—in theology and psychology—and has taught on the graduate level in both these fields. As assistant professor, he currently teaches psychology and spirituality at the State University of West Georgia. He has published four other books, all from university presses, and numerous scholarly and popular articles on religion, psychology, sexuality, and spirituality and their interrelation.
Copyright © 2000 by Daniel A. Helminiak. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the author.