Pacific Views

Gomorrah Is In Ashes

Over at the Right Christians, Allen finds a Republican legislator that opposes the FMA because of a childhood friend.

Allen also drew my attention to a Mark Kleiman post that uses the topic to examine why Jewish political groups in the US tend to advocate for the disenfranchised:

...A quick check with a concordance showed that the formula: "Do X, because you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord redeemed you" occurs five times in Deuteronomy, in each case following a commandment about dealing fairly with the vulnerable.

...It seems, if you think about it, a rather remarkable assertion to put at the very center of a celebratory feast. What other group, instead of boasting about being nobly born, makes a fuss about being descended from slaves, and then personalizes it so as to say that everyone present was a slave until redeemed?

But linked to the commandments in Deuteronomy, that phrase comes to mean: "We were slaves" and therefore must never, never, ever act like slaveowners. That makes sense of the empirical link between Judaism and liberalism. ...

A Pandagon post, which sparked an interesting discussion in the comments, looked at biblical homosexuality and a possible reason why there was a 'thou shalt not' included regarding it in the first place (though others were discussed, and you should go read the whole post):

...Context, context, context. This falls within the so-called “Holiness Codes”; the set of laws designed to create a higher standard of behavior distinguishing the Jews from the Canaanites, whose land they were acquiring. Other portions of this Code that are punishable by death are infidelity, cursing your parents, incest, bestiality and being a wizard. Being with a woman on her period results in being expelled and being with your family member’s mate will make you die childless. ...

A further point from Catsy in the comments:

While I'm no scholar, I've done a bit of research into this subject as a matter of personal interest. The verse most commonly cited--Leviticus 18:22--does not support a blanket condemnation of homsexuality as sin. The word commonly mistranslated as "abomination" is, in Hebrew, "to'ebah"--which means "ritually unclean/impure". It is, like much of Leviticus, a reference to ceremonial and ritual purity, and has no relation whatsoever to sin. Had the authors wished to invoke sin, they would have instead used the word "zimah". The two words are not synonyms, nor is there overlap. I believe PeskyFly comes the closest to the truth above: it was a stricture to prohibit Hebrews from participating in the rites of the temples in Egypt and Canaan, in which ritual homosexual sex was common. This, in turn, is consistent with the language used--"to'ebah", rather than "zimah"--suggesting that the concern was with ritual impurity rather than sin. ...

Note that in Leviticus 14:21, it says:

...Do not boil a young goat in its mother's milk.

A considerable amount of perplexity has ensued over this commandment. Hardly anyone owns enough goats for this to be an issue, and boiling them in milk has fallen out of fashion. But it could be the case that this prohibition against a manner of boiling goats was meant in exactly the same spirit as the prohibition against homosexual relations.

The explanation I've always heard for the boiling was that it was the rite of a competing pagan religion. Anyone who's done even a cursory study (and having done barely more than that, I feel safe in that proclamation ;) of some of the ancient religious systems would know that homosexual sex was part of the rites of certain priesthoods.

This context based examination fits well with the rest of Ezra's argument that the other most obvious homosexual practices at the time of the writing of different parts of the bible were pederasty and homosexual rape. If you wonder where the consensual gay relationships were, it was an era where families picked people for their children to marry and pretty much everyone got married. (A state of affairs that lasted into the modern era, most famously, in the case of Oscar Wilde.)

No one would have thought it bizarre to be unhappy in an arranged marriage, and those with enough power or wealth to get away with it sought pleasure elsewhere. The Romans and Greeks were famous for the decadence of their aristocrats, which isn't strange if your only officially sanctioned sexual relationship was treated as a dutiful chore. Expectations of romantic love in marriage are kind of a modern addition to western culture, which isn't to say that it never happened, just that it wasn't typical.

And the existence of homosexuality in the military at the time wouldn't have recommended it to that portion of the public valuing any kind of virtue. Troops didn't always used to get paid on time and might spend the better part lives away from home. Rape, corruption, and looting weren't unusual, and prostitution around military barracks was as common then as now.

If the prevailing public context of homosexuality was prostitution, infidelity, and the use of force against the less powerful, it makes sense that someone would get knotted about it. This seems to be where the modern Christian Right is still coming from, and the public face they want homosexuality to retain. Certainly, Atrios found a passage that summed up part of the rabid fear of gays:

..."It's pure sexuality. It's almost like pure heroin. It's such a rush. They are committed in almost a religious way. And they'll take enormous risks, do anything." He says that for married men and women, gay sex would be irresistible. "Marital sex tends toward the boring end," he points out. "Generally, it doesn't deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that homosexual sex does" So, Cameron believes, within a few generations homosexuality would be come the dominant form of sexual behavior.

Anyone who hasn't been to a radical church would probably be amazed, actually, by how much time is spent discussing proper sexual practices. Not just from the pulpit, but in casual conversation and in sheperding conversations between church elders and those they're trying to mentor. As in the case of an elder who once thought it fitting to remark to me out of the blue when I was a teenager that a certain sexual practice was an offense to god. And my internal reaction was 1) eeewww, 2) why are you talking about this, 3) and of course, that I already knew that from previous church study discussions.

It was surprising having heard of the wilds of the world as a young person, to leave the church and discover that orgies and incorrigible seducers were in such short supply as to be too much effort to bother tracking down. The feverish fantasists of my childhood church would probably be shocked to know of the relative tedium I encountered instead. Homosexuality is just another piece of what they see as a culture where a decent person can't walk down the street without a besiegement of temptation.

But Catsy thinks this FMA stand ensures Bush's defeat in 2004, mainly because most people just aren't that extreme anymore. I'd have to agree, because I've yet to meet any non-fundamentalists that rank rampant seduction as a top peril in their daily lives.

The brave people who've been coming out for years now have given the gay community the public face of friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, and responsible citizens. Now, widespread media coverage has added the picture of happy, ordinary people on their wedding day.

There are no Roman garrisons outside our cities. The rites of Cybele exist only in books. Pedophilia is recognized as a separate and abnormal psychology that doesn't relate to consensual adult relations. The poor hospitality of Sodom and Gomorrah has been long punished. It's time to move past hysteria to mutual respect.