
The following is a column taken from the April 26, 1994 San Francisco
Chronicle.  The author's name is Scott Marley.

Scott Marley
THE BIBLE TELLS ME SO

--The `sin' that obsesses some Christians did not rate a mention by
Christ himself.

Why do Christian fundamentalists hate gays?  Because (so they tell
us) they believe the Bible is infallibly true.  And the Bible (so
they tell us) condemns homosexuals.

I've heard that over and over again all my life: The Bible condemns
homosexuals.  And I accepted it without question -- until the last
couple of years when I've started reading the Bible for myself.  And
I'm more than a little surprised at how little it actually says about
homosexuals -- and how much it says about those who condemn them.

The Bible's alleged condemnation of homosexuals boils down pretty
much to three passages: the story of Sodom, two verses from
Leviticus, and the first chapter of Romans.

The Sodom story is Genesis 19.  Some angels came to Sodom to visit
Lot, and the men of Sodom gave the angels a hard time, so God
destroyed the city. If you think the word "know" in verse five means
"have carnal knowledge of" (which it occasionally does in the Bible,
though not nearly as often as people seem to think), then maybe the
men wanted to rape the angels, and I suppose that's a homosexual act
of a sort.

But there are dozens of later references to Sodom, and not once is
any kind of sexual behavior mentioned.  In Ezekiel 16:48-49, God
Himself even spells out the sins of Sodom.  Homosexuality is not on
His list.  And the Bible is infallibly true.

Leviticus condemns homosexuality twice, in 18:22 and 20:13.  It's
part of the Mosaic law, a long list of foods and acts that were
considered unclean, from eating shellfish to cursing your father.
And one of the big themes of the New Testament, I've been
discovering, is that Christians are not bound by Mosaic law.  If the
Bible is infallibly true, then Christians may use their own judgment
in choosing whether to follow the Mosaic law, and should stop all
this fretting about those who choose differently.

And there's the first chapter of Romans, where Paul describes people
who worship idols instead of God, "wherefore God also gave them up to
uncleanness," and they turned to homosexuality and a long list of
other wrongs running the gamut from murder and deceit to whispering.
I've never heard any of these fundamentalists quote this passage all
the way to its punch line: "Therefore art thou inexcusable, O man,
whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another,
thou condemnest thyself." Paul isn't telling this story to condemn
the homosexuals:  He's condemning the people who condemn the
homosexuals.

Read Romans all the way through and its hard to miss Paul's point:
He's writing to a group of Jewish Christians who have been
criticising gentile Christians for not keeping the Mosaic law, and
Paul is telling them, politely but firmly, to knock it off.  If the
Bible is infallibly true, it's wrong to use Leviticus as a basis for
condemning homosexuals.

Jesus wasn't faced with AIDS, of course, so we can't be sure what he
would have said or done about it.  But he did know another disease
much like AIDS, both in its incurability and in the way that society
shunned its victims.  I've read the New Testament a couple of times
through, and I just haven't come across the passage where Jesus goes
to the funerals of lepers carrying a picket sign.

So it seems to me that a real fundamentalist would be preaching that
it's wrong for a church to exclude people solely because they're gay,
and it seems to me that a real fundamentalist would be following
Jesus' example and trying to bring comfort to people with AIDS, and
perhaps even working toward a cure.  The more I get to know the Bible
for myself, the less I think these so-called fundamentalists are any
such thing.  I think they're wolves in Lamb of God's clothing.

--Scott Marley is a writer and editor in the Bay Area.

THE PRECEDING WAS A COLUMN WRITTEN BY SCOTT MARLEY AND PRINTED IN THE
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE.  IT DOES NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS
AND OPINIONS OF THE PERSON WHO ENTERED IT IN THIS ECHO CONFERENCE.
