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85 lines
4.1 KiB
Plaintext
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The following is a column taken from the April 26, 1994 San Francisco
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Chronicle. The author's name is Scott Marley.
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Scott Marley
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THE BIBLE TELLS ME SO
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--The `sin' that obsesses some Christians did not rate a mention by
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Christ himself.
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Why do Christian fundamentalists hate gays? Because (so they tell
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us) they believe the Bible is infallibly true. And the Bible (so
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they tell us) condemns homosexuals.
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I've heard that over and over again all my life: The Bible condemns
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homosexuals. And I accepted it without question -- until the last
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couple of years when I've started reading the Bible for myself. And
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I'm more than a little surprised at how little it actually says about
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homosexuals -- and how much it says about those who condemn them.
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The Bible's alleged condemnation of homosexuals boils down pretty
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much to three passages: the story of Sodom, two verses from
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Leviticus, and the first chapter of Romans.
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The Sodom story is Genesis 19. Some angels came to Sodom to visit
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Lot, and the men of Sodom gave the angels a hard time, so God
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destroyed the city. If you think the word "know" in verse five means
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"have carnal knowledge of" (which it occasionally does in the Bible,
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though not nearly as often as people seem to think), then maybe the
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men wanted to rape the angels, and I suppose that's a homosexual act
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of a sort.
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But there are dozens of later references to Sodom, and not once is
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any kind of sexual behavior mentioned. In Ezekiel 16:48-49, God
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Himself even spells out the sins of Sodom. Homosexuality is not on
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His list. And the Bible is infallibly true.
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Leviticus condemns homosexuality twice, in 18:22 and 20:13. It's
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part of the Mosaic law, a long list of foods and acts that were
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considered unclean, from eating shellfish to cursing your father.
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And one of the big themes of the New Testament, I've been
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discovering, is that Christians are not bound by Mosaic law. If the
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Bible is infallibly true, then Christians may use their own judgment
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in choosing whether to follow the Mosaic law, and should stop all
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this fretting about those who choose differently.
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And there's the first chapter of Romans, where Paul describes people
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who worship idols instead of God, "wherefore God also gave them up to
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uncleanness," and they turned to homosexuality and a long list of
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other wrongs running the gamut from murder and deceit to whispering.
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I've never heard any of these fundamentalists quote this passage all
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the way to its punch line: "Therefore art thou inexcusable, O man,
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whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another,
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thou condemnest thyself." Paul isn't telling this story to condemn
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the homosexuals: He's condemning the people who condemn the
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homosexuals.
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Read Romans all the way through and its hard to miss Paul's point:
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He's writing to a group of Jewish Christians who have been
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criticising gentile Christians for not keeping the Mosaic law, and
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Paul is telling them, politely but firmly, to knock it off. If the
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Bible is infallibly true, it's wrong to use Leviticus as a basis for
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condemning homosexuals.
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Jesus wasn't faced with AIDS, of course, so we can't be sure what he
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would have said or done about it. But he did know another disease
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much like AIDS, both in its incurability and in the way that society
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shunned its victims. I've read the New Testament a couple of times
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through, and I just haven't come across the passage where Jesus goes
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to the funerals of lepers carrying a picket sign.
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So it seems to me that a real fundamentalist would be preaching that
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it's wrong for a church to exclude people solely because they're gay,
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and it seems to me that a real fundamentalist would be following
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Jesus' example and trying to bring comfort to people with AIDS, and
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perhaps even working toward a cure. The more I get to know the Bible
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for myself, the less I think these so-called fundamentalists are any
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such thing. I think they're wolves in Lamb of God's clothing.
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--Scott Marley is a writer and editor in the Bay Area.
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THE PRECEDING WAS A COLUMN WRITTEN BY SCOTT MARLEY AND PRINTED IN THE
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SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE. IT DOES NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS
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AND OPINIONS OF THE PERSON WHO ENTERED IT IN THIS ECHO CONFERENCE.
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