Religion?!

The Old Testament story of the destruction of Sodom, which occurs in Genesis 1:19, is often brought up as an example of God's wrath toward homosexuals. The men of Sodom tried to rape and kill two strangers who were visiting the house of Lot (the Bible suggests the foreign men were angels sent by God), and for this crime, the story goes, the city was destroyed. As time passed, the term "sodomite" came to represent men who craved sex with other men. When the biblical literalists identify lesbian and gay love as "sodomy," they reveal their ignorance of the nature of love as well as their misreading of the biblical text. They reveal their contempt for present humankind when they infer laws or regulations of behavior from some biblical stories and ignore implied laws present in other stories. A double moral standard can be easily seen in their interpretations.

The Bible must be understood, on one level, as a historical document that reflects the cultural thinking of a past time. It portrays God's experience with humankind in stories that must be translated and interpreted by those of our time or any future time. Consider these splendid texts that can give us courage and faith:

Ruth to Naomi (Ruth 1:16): "Where you go, I will go, and where you stay, I will stay. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried...nothing but death shall divide us." David weeping over his dying friend Jonathan (2 Samuel 1:26): "I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; dear and delightful were you to me; your love for me was wonderful, surpassing the love of women." And the speaker in Ecclesiastes (Ecclesiastes 4:9): "Two are better than one...because if one falls, the other can help his companion up again...And if two lie side by side, they keep each other warm. How can one keep warm by himself?" Don't these words speak directly to us?

In his Letter to the Galatians, Paul presents us with a truly universal concept of a Christian: "For through faith you are all sons of God in union with Christ Jesus. Baptized into union with him, you have all put on Christ as a garment. There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and free man, male and female." [If Paul were living now, would he have added "people of various sexual orientations"?] All persons are equal to all other persons in God's eyes. None of the apostles brings up the question of sexual orientation because none were interested in that matter at that time. The apostles emphasize that every person with all his or her peculiarities is still a loving copy of God and deserves respect. Every person is something special. Jesus reached out to people, touched them all, and blessed them. Jesus blessed the best of men and the supposed worst. All humankind deserved to be free of the pain of loneliness and worthlessness. Intolerant and radical religious groups should cease their perversion of the message of Jesus Christ and embrace rather than attack the homosexual community.