In Which Religion and Sexuality are discussed in a Doubtless Unbecomingly Superficial Fashion

First up, it turns out that having a blog is weird: all sorts of people read them, and you never know, ‘less’n they post comments. This is obviously unimportant, but a couple of people apparently read this (or have dabbled in reading it) who it wouldn’t’ve occurred to me would number amongst my readership, which surprises, intrigues and sort of flatters me, so I thought I’d take a moment to go “Cor.”

I don’t know why this should seem like it’s of any moment, since this blog is very clearly just me blathering, which happens to any of my friends, acquaintances or innocent bypassers who stand still for long enough, but there you go, there’s no point second guessing it, since my childish irrational enjoyment presumably harms no-one. (If this is wrong, and somehow this is all, in fact, causing you any sort of pain, physical or otherwise, it might be an idea to let me know, and I’ll stop.)

Also, um, hi!

Anyway, back to it. All this Thinking-about-the-audience thing might be good for making your content appropriate, but since I don’t actually know who y’all are, it’s essentially only a way to make myself selfconscious when discussing sensitive issues, such as this evening’s. Wiser people might take this as a sign that the topic ought to be avoided, but since by definition, I can’t be “wiser” where the original benchmark for wisdom is myself, let’s pretend that I have some kind of reason for not acting with that hypothetical wisdom, and get right down to it, shall we?

I was talking the other day with a bunch of friends when someone made a (to me) fairly startling assertion. It was suggested (pretty forcefully) that Christian people (who were assumed to be a rather more monolithic group than I would like to think them), since they “all think that being gay is a sin” (which hopefully they, um, don’t all do, right? Reassure me, Christian friends), had no right to go around the place enjoying the music of gay people, and in general, blatantly accepting them in their lives and society. This seems, to me, to be pretty problematic, so I figured I’d discuss it here to sort it out, rather than getting it out of my system in a series of weirdly awkward conversations.

To start with, though, I wish to make it clear that I judge no-one for the views so far expressed to me. These people are my friends (no matter which direction their prejudices are aimed), and I pretty much dig all of you guys, foibles and all. It has long been my contention that we, all of us, have our own little “patches of crazy”, of which we are, ourselves, usually unaware. You’ll be having a conversation with a perfectly lovely, reasonable and rational friend and suddenly they’ll say “Well, obviously, Elvis is still alive” or “I mean, gay marriage would make REAL marriage meaningless, and would be an abomination, of course I’m against it” or “Aliens shot JFK, obviously, and the government doesn’t want us to know, so they faked the moon landings” or “The death penalty is totally a good idea! Sometimes you can just tell when someone’s guilty, I read it in the Telegraph!” or “I don’t know what possible drawbacks there could be in privatising the police force” or “I think lots of people would be interested to read my overlong, overblown thoughts on sexuality and religion and everything on a blog!”. Or something. The point is, you pretty much have to just nod, smile, try not to think about it too hard, and try to steer the conversation towards a neutral topic, like penguins, or something.

So, is it in any way conceivable that she could have been right? That it could actually be better in any sense (assuming for the moment that All Christians think that being gay is as serious a sin as the Old Testament would have us think it) to have them deny themselves the music of gay artists, to bar gay friends, and generally to unhypocrtically reject everything gay? Surely not, since this would pretty obviously cause a fair amount of suffering for the rejected gay people, even leaving aside the silliness of having to throw out CDs when it turns out that the singer quite likes other lads, or whatever. Also, that sort of thing would, in turn, be UnChristian, right? But this was maybe her point, that their position was untenable in the first place. But whose beliefs hold up to this sort of scrutiny? Not mine, I bet. It’s basically impossible to live an entirely unhypocritical life, I should think. Her atheistic how-dare-they-judge-people thing seemed pretty judge-y, to take the obvious example.

Moreover, isn’t it kind of problematic in this modern age to suggest that “being gay” is all there is to a person? That their sexuality taints and colours everything that person does? Call me crazy, but that seems kind of, um, wrong. Isn’t this why people are often afraid to come out to their friends and families? That people will think that their sexuality somehow Changes Everything?

Seems to me that being gay has about as much impact on someone’s identity as being Christian would, although obviously that old question of genetics vs. choice would weigh in there. Not that I’ve ever really approved of that discussion. Whether it’s Nature or Nurture, sexuality is pretty clearly a powerful imperative and it’s clearly silly to suggest it’s a choice or laziness or whatever, since it would, in that case, be easier not to deal with all the hassle of being “queer”. And even if it IS a choice, so what? What possible relevance could it have for anyone else?

Actually, this is what’s always bugged me about the conception of homosexuality as a sin; if it is, isn’t it essentially a victimless crime? If two gay people are happily in love, and both feel that their lives are the better for it, what harm does it do to anyone? Seriously, unless the girl you’re madly in love with is a lesbian, I don’t see how it should matter to you. And if that is the case, then there’s the strong possibility that she wouldn’t love you back even if she was straight.
Statistically speaking, Hypothetically Rejected Dude, what percentage of straight ladies are in love with you? Yeah, so your odds weren’t so great that the only obstacle was her being gay anyway. And if it were, then her being straight would kind of make her a different person (although not all that much, obviously, back to our there’s-more-to-a-person-than-their-sexual-orientation point), so maybe you wouldn’t be in love with her then. Maybe you just like people who are unavailable, have you thought about that?

... and so on. My point is, why all the fuss?

A far a precedent goes, the Old Testament was pretty clear about homosexuality. In the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, as I recall it, two male angels visited the house of Lot, who lived in Sodom (or Gomorrah, who can say? Who, in fact, cares?) to warn him of the impeding destruction of the town, and the men of the town came to his house and said “We hear you have some hot guests. We want to have sex with them,” and Lot, horrified said “No, but look, I’ll tell you what, here are my hot virgin daughters, have sex with them instead”, and the townsfolk went “nah, thanks all the same”, and Lot and his family fled, with his wife being pyroclastic-flowed into a pillar of salt en route, on account of how she glanced back at the town as fire was being rained on it.

Now, there are a bunch of problems with that story, but really, to me, the stand out question is “What the fuck kind of father are you, Lot? No wonder your town and wife got burned up!”.

The New Testament, happily, is rather lower on unconvincing stories of homosexuality and essentially random lashings of heavenly wrath, and considerably higher on “love thy neighbour”, including Christians, Jews, gentiles, tax collectors, prostitutes, betraying disciples, and, presumably, gay singer/songwriters. Better still, it is generally considered to trump the Old Testament. I’m given to understand that it still feels a little uncomfortable with Oxford St, but not, one suspects, any worse than with pre-marital sex, which is pretty ubiquitous.

I have more, even less well-organised, thoughts on this, but I would appear to have written almost 1,500 words, so maybe it’s time to stop. I guess my point essentially is, as my little sister’s ex boyfriend used to say “why you gotta be a hater?”