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Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly - Vol 4, #3, 2003 http://www.haworthpressinc.com/web/HLFQ/ |
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The Roman Catholic Church's jihad against women and gays is now and always has been a threat to U.S. democracy. Religions in our country are guaranteed every right to practice and believe. But Catholic Cardinals have sat on presidential AIDS commissions where they lobby and set policy against both HIV and sex education.
And the Church worldwide effects theocratic policies against reproductive autonomy which result in hundreds of thousands of annual deaths from illegal abortion. Concurrently the Catholic hierarchy opposes civil rights for lesbian and gay people, decrying as "Catholic bashing" any objections to their illegal lobbying. And it should be noted that members of religious groups are already protected by federal, state, and local legislation. Yet they lobby against similar protections for groups they vilify with astonishing regularity. Now, as the various bishops, and other largely white men in black dresses, scapegoat gays for their current pedophile scandal, rights-minded American Catholics should come out and get out of the Church. This scapegoating is appalling in its dishonesty. The overwhelming majority of child molesters are heterosexual men; and of course the priests' abuse victims are not all males. It is the Church's antigay dogma that is the problem, not anyone's sexual orientation. Official Catholic teaching, which in papal encyclicals describes gay orientation as "intrinsically evil," thereby creates an area of "sin" which imposes on civilians a celibacy to which the Church is clearly incapable of holding even its own priests. And yes, it is not just from priests but from all gays and lesbians that the Catholic Church demands lifelong celibacy, under pain of whatever is the current description of divine retribution. Then, through absolutions and various other machinations, the Church becomes a protection racket for all the sins it has created. None of this will end until Catholics stop buying it. Change from within won't happen. Rights-minded Catholics must get out, and rights-minded gay Catholics must come out and get out. They must either leave en masse with a BIG press release, or become visible and loud enough to earn excommunication. They must stand up to the foreign lobbying sovereignty that is the Vatican, which would deprive women and gay men, a group totaling some sixty percent of the population, of civil rights and reproductive autonomy. These silly old Newspeaking men in dazzling gowns should not be planning our families, setting our AIDS policies, and/or restricting our civil rights. In truth, the Bible is silent on the subject of same gender orientation. Most supposed references to things gay are simply mistranslations. As John Boswell concluded in his 1981 American Book Award-winning Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, "In spite of misleading English translations which may imply the contrary, the word 'homosexual' does not occur in the Bible: no extant text or manuscript, Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, or Aramaic, contains such a word." The business at Sodom (Genesis 19) was about the mistreatment of travelers seeking shelter. This mistreatment was probably in the form of gang rape, and was definitely not about consensual same-gender relationships. As for Pauline musings, Paul was phobic on all things sexual: "he who marries...does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better" (1 Corinthians 7:38).
Finally, the Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 passages prescribing death for men who lie with men is about "abominations," or ritual uncleanness. It should be noted that Leviticus also advises from which groups to take one's slaves. These writings were about ritual actions, like bull slayings, in the Temple. They prescribe death for any number of transgressions and furthermore, any women who are parroting scripture against gays are explicitly prohibited by that same scripture from speaking in public at all. Although such texts as Leviticus are clearly sacred as religious history, they are certainly not morally relevant today. And as a matter of fact they were not even relevant when they were set down in print, which was after the destruction of the Temple to which they refer. The Church's antigay teaching does without doubt direct gays into the priesthood. Indeed, what better place could there be for a prospective lifelong celibate? That same antigay dogma prevents some gays from developing the capacity for loving adult relationships. But most of the many gay priests are not child molesters; and many priests are molesting females. So the outrageous attempt to blame "homosexuals" for the criminal investigations under which the Church finds itself, is profoundly deceptive. The Church well knows that without gay men there would be very few priests indeed. Meanwhile youngsters are taught and some believe the Church's pseudoscientific psychobabble about changing orientation through therapy. Such cases contribute greatly to the accelerated suicide rate for lesbian and gay youth. Lesbian and gay Catholics, please Come OUT Of The Church. Nothing will happen except you will have perhaps saved the next generation of G & Ls from this absurd, unworkable rubric. There are several denominations that are much closer to the spirit, and indeed the letter of scripture. Just perhaps the young rabbi from Nazareth would ask in this situation: "Why don't you judge for yourselves what is true?" (Luke 11:57) © Sandy Rapp 2003 Sandy Rapp is a musician and author of God's Country: A Case Against Theocracy. Her CD We The People features a song about the Roman Catholic Hierarchy "White Men In Black Dresses." Rapp's books and CDs are available through Amazon.com and at SandyRapp@aol.com |
In Romans 1, Paul conceives of same-sex activity as a punishment effected on naturally heterosexual people because they "served the creature rather than the Creator." He does not address gay orientation and at any rate Paul explicitly exempted his ideas about sex as "not of the Lord." Jesus of Nazareth was completely silent on the subject of homosexuality.