I'm not really sure where to begin this one, as it's something that bothers me entirely too much and I tend to lose objectivity when I talk about it.
Recently Republican senator Roy Ashburn, who adamantly voted against gay rights, was caught drunk driving from a gay bar in Sacramento last week. For a while there was some speculation as to whether or not he had been at the bar and whether or not he was actually homosexual. Today I read an article on the MSNBC(1) stating that this man had publicly apologized for endangering people by driving under the influence, but also admitting that he was gay.
This man is a married senator, father of four. And yet, he had the courage to say "Yes. I am gay." Many people in his position would admit to drunk driving and perhaps make up some shoddy excuse as to their presence at the gay bar or deny it entirely. This man, who voted against a day honoring Harvey Milk, against recognizing out of state marriages (which I think is unconstitutional under faith and full credit but is irrelevant) admitted he was gay.
The actions of Senator Ashburn are a prime example of the sort of self-hating behavior homosexual people will exercise. The abject hatred, shame, or sorrow caused by this fundamental, undeniable aspect of themselves seems, to me, to cause absolute rejection and even fear toward any who identify as homosexual. Homophobia is an intensely irrational thing, but horribly sad as well. Often times its just a cover up, especially with men. If a man is accepting of homosexual behavior, he may think people assume he is homosexual as well. Instead they feign repulsion- or truly believe that those feelings of nonacceptance should be the norm for everybody. Its emasculating to be homosexual, so to preserve machismo homosexuals are shunned like lepers.
However, leprosy isn't really that big a deal any more. If you lived around 550 BC, it was, and so was homosexuality. In fact, they're even listed in the same book of The Bible only 3 chapters apart! The words on same-sex relationships, though, are almost the only thing modern American society really holds to out of Leviticus. Chapter 11:5-28 lists all that we can and can't eat- outlawed are pigs, rabbits, and shrimp. Chapter 12 lists the purification ritual for a woman after she bares a child. She is unclean for 1 week if a boy is born, 2 for a girl, and after this waiting period she must bring a burnt offering of lamb as well as either a pigeon or turtledove "sin offering" to the church.
Chapter 13 regards the treatment of lepers. Anyone with a scab on the skin is quarantined for a week. If it gets better, you're free to go. If you have it but it goes away, wash your clothes and put them in quarantine for a week. Chapter 14 is all about how to cure leprosy.
Chapter 15 uses the word "issue" repeatedly to cover any and all bases of fluid- blood, snot, drool- that come out of the human body and how all contact with it makes the object or person unclean. Of course I'm so immature I keep substituting "issue" with "semen" as I read.
15:19-30 depicts how a woman is unclean during menstruation. She is not to be touched, nor is anything she touches. Once her period is over she still must wait seven more days to be considered clean. Then she can go ahead and offer lambs and birds to the church. By this system a woman is only considered clean for half of a month at most.
Chapter 16 is all about weird atonement rituals that, under any other context, a normal Christian would call satanic.
And then we have good ol' chapter 18. Don't look at your relatives naked (18:6-15) Your brother's wife's naked body belongs to your brother. It his his nakedness (18:16)
Don't get relatives naked together even if you're not related to them (18:17-18)
You can't see your wife naked if she's menstruating (18:19)
Don't sleep with other dudes or animals if you are a man, and a woman isn't allowed to let an animal have sex with her (18:22-23) The only thing I like here is that they don't explicitly say two women shouldn't sleep together. Even back then they knew lesbians were awesome.
Out of all these things listed, why is the treatment of homosexuals really the only thing that has lasted, and even outside a religious context? I've had it told to me in school that it is America's Judeo-Christian history, but most of our founding fathers were deists at worst. Is it because we think, deep down, that it is unnatural? Surely homosexuality is a deviance that occurs only withing the sexual perversion of the human mind. Not so. There are a reported 1,500 species that exhibit homosexual behavior(2). This includes sex and spans all the way to parenting. A pair of male black swans will form a temporary three way relationship with a female until she produces eggs, and then scare her off.
Of course, nature is no basis for extrapolating human morality, but I am not debating whether homosexuality is right or wrong, only if it is a biological, inheritable trait. Many people think being gay or lesbian is all in the mind, that one can be conditioned out of it. If this were true, it is my opinion that it would not occur in animals at all (or maybe just in the ones that have higher mental capacities such as dolphins, which actually engage in non-reproductive group sex- meaning they stimulate the genitals of others with their flippers, noses, etc for pleasure(2). Fascinating!)
With all the other biologically occurring "atrocities" that occur in life, such as mental handicaps and other birth defects like anencephaly, why do we pick homosexuality as something to be stomped out? Clay Aiken can't help being gay any more than Trig Palin can stop being retarded.
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Sources
(1) Anti-gay Calif. state senator: I'm gay
Associated Press. Mar 9 2010
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35781534/ns/us_news-life/
(2) Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and
Natural Diversity, St. Martin's Press, 1999;
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Dude it's me what up
ReplyDeleteThoroughly enjoyed this post, thanks much for it! I loved the run-down on the Bible; Christians care nothing for the context of the passages they pull some of this stuff from, unfortunately, only what they can use it for to make their point. Most Christians who'll wield Leviticus like it's ripped right out of Exodus 20 would scoff at those who interpret the bible so literally they are convinced the earth is a little over 2500 years old... go figure.
Regardless, the only note I have to add is that I agree with everything except the lesbians comment. As much as I wish this were a certain sort of tolerance for lesbians, I can't deny the fact that lesbians simply did not come up into the mix because they just weren't imaginable in that society. Women were, and to a not quite as extreme but very real extent still are, raised and sculpted to be out of touch with their own desire. Women simply do not want sex, according to society - we don't enjoy it, we don't think about it - and if we do either of the two, we are sluts and certainly a deviant minority from the better part of womankind that lays back and takes it when a man comes calling. But no, we don't enjoy it then either - we just enjoy the emotional bond we get to experience.
Homosexuality has been ingrained in humanity for much longer than "it's unnatural" folk like to admit, but the sad part is that lesbianism was not a part of it, at least on no socially-aware scale. When society came around enough to start asking the question as to whether or not lesbians were morally okay, society was first and foremost confused as to HOW lesbians could exist. Sex means sticking in your penis and wigglin it around (everything else is foreplay of course), so how could two people without penises even mimic sex? Surely no intimate physical act shared between two people could be called sex so long as it didn't climax with someone's penis ending up in some orifice of the other?
The repression of female sexuality is a very important topic to me, and that comment I made was just an off-hand remark. Of course the Bible didn't mention lesbians, women are not important enough to have sexual desires of their own and had to be prompted by a man! I just love taking things in the Bible out of context as much as the people who actually believe in it.
ReplyDeleteBut you definitely raise a lot of good points about female sexuality. I was digging around the internet for studies on homosexuality in biology, and nearly every study was specifically about gay men. Of course there were a few that covered LGBT people as a whole, such as studies about non-gender-conforming children and the likelihood that they would realize they were homosexual in adulthood. There was something like 18 lesbians who reported non-gender-conforming behaviour in childhood for this study and nine of them admitted to desiring sex reassignment. I believe this was called the "Exotic becomes Erotic" theory and find it applies heavily to myself.
Female sexuality and the repression thereof (in any form, straight, gay or anything else) is something that bothers me immensely. The belief that women don't enjoy sex persisted somehow up until the Victorian era, but at least the electric vibrator was invented before the vacuum cleaner and iron. Even today there is mutilation of female genitals carried out in less-developed or highly misogynistic countries because any parts other than a universal hole for menstrual fluid, urine and childbirth is considered the only thing necessary. Never mind the clitoris is the only part on either sex that has no other purpose than a sexual one. Seems like if it were such an unnecessary thing evolution would've selected against it and phased it out long ago.
And getting back to Leviticus a little bit, reading the parts about who you can and can't see naked. Each verse in 18:6-15 says each person's nakedness is their own, except for that of your brother's wife. 18:16 says "Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother's wife, it is thy brother's nakedness." In relation to men, women are allowed nothing. Not even their own naked bodies. Of course these people wouldn't expect two women to engage in any sexual activity any more than they'd expect it of two jugs of water.
Hear hear. I agree wholeheartedly as though I'd written it myself!
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