catapult magazine

i just read an associated press article about how conservative fox news talk show host, bill o’reilly, is in a “fight” with conservative groups over gay rights. i guess he called a minister who speaks out against the adoption of children by gays and lesbians a “religious fanatic.” now, conservative groups are freakin’ out, telling o’reilly he’s going to go to hell.

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2002/09/15/oreilly/index.html

i do believe that homosexuality is sinful. but i don’t know if that means we, as christians, should be campaigning against the rights of gays and lesbians politically, especially homosexuals in monogamous relationships who are seeking to adopt children. o’reilly said he couldn’t understand why the pastor would object to a troubled child in foster care for six years being adopted by a loving gay couple. and personally, i think it’s a valid point.

i tend to think that if we are to be a catalyst for changing the hearts of sinful people (any sin), we’ll do it through love and not through judgement. and, we’ll be doing it through personal relationships with people, not through enacting laws against sin.

do you think christians in political campaigns against homosexual rights are helpful or harmful in showing Christ’s love for the world?

This is a good discussion and one that’s been going on in my head for some time, as Steve & I visit various liberal churches in Seattle. Thanks for bringing it into real-life.

I don’t have anything brilliantly insightful to add. I just noticed, Grant, what you said about Paul’s view of homosexuals perhaps being different from the current situation of homosexual culture. I had always heard that in ancient Greek & Roman culture, homosexuality was a pretty common activity for men in general, not just those who identified themselves as exclusively homosexual. I found this site that sums up what I was thinking:
http://hometown.aol.com/GraceEACA/chapter2.html
(It’s an Anglican church’s website. I give no guarantees of its accuracy, but it seems pretty well laid out in historical terms. Jump to the Greek & Roman eras for Paul’s environment.)

It contains, for instance, this about Greeks: “The Greek military attitude toward homosexuality was that it brought a sense of comradeship. … Greek society only negatively defined homosexual activity when it was exclusive or related to prostitution by a citizen.?In nearly every other instance, homosexual conduct was considered acceptable and practical. … Women were restricted in their sexual activity because they were needed in order to bear children.?Men could have sex with either women or men, so long as they met their societal obligation to reproduce.”

And this about a typical Roman man: “Although one could easily have sex with his wife at home, a man in the baths, a prostitute in the brothel, and a slave in a dark corner, he would have only been criticized if he were not able to keep everything in its place.”

So what’s my point? I just wonder — if the homosexual activity Paul is thinking of is male bonding and/or temple prostitution (that required by pagan rituals), might his negative attitude toward homosexual activity be because of its promiscuous nature rather than its actual male-on-male/female-on-female nature?

Romans 1:27: “In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.” http://bible.gospelcom.net/bible?passage=Romans+1 Then again, it says that men “abandoned natural relations with women,” suggesting that these are exlusive homosexuals?

And the Old Testament seems to condemn the act itself: “‘Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable’” (Lev. 18:22).
http://bible.gospelcom.net/bible?passage=Lev+18

And yet I can see where some homosexual Christians would argue that a loving, committed, marriage-type relationship is different from the promiscuous sexual encounters mentioned in Greek & Roman times.

Yup, really don’t have a point. Just wondering where to stand on this one. But I don’t want to be accused of not discussing the political issue, so onward: On the political end, I don’t see a reason to deny rights to any group of people, including adoption rights. There are so many children waiting for a home. Of course, does that mean I would deny adoption rights if there were a limited number of adoptable kids available and plenty of heterosexual couples or singles?

I think Christians’ lobbying against the rights of a group that they dislike is wrong. Should Christians then lobby for homosexual rights? Well, if it’s a question of gays and lesbians being denied basic human and U.S. rights, I think that would be a great thing for Christians to do. Maybe open to misinterpretation, but then so was Jesus. http://bible.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?passage=MATT+11:19
(I’m Bible-quoting girl today! Can that be a new superhero?)

I’m not as certain in my heart as I am in my mind about these issues of political rights. I’ll admit, for instance, that it does seem…weird, for lack of a better word, to have a gay couple raise children. But what do I mean by that? I’m not going to come up with an answer at 1:30 in the morning, so I’ll quit for now.

Yeah, there’s so much to think about here.

I just want to make sure you’re clear, however, on what I meant when I said there were no “homosexuals” during Paul’s time. Certainly, same-sex intercourse was more a part of Greek and Roman society than of our own society today, but it was just a behavior—a thing people did. People were not divided into categories at the time, i.e. as homosexuals, bisexuals, lesbians etc. This is a product of Modern thinking and is prevalent in our society today because it gives “people who have sex with people of the same sex” the same sort of status as women, blacks (minorities) Christians etc. As “homosexuals”—as a community of people—they can now demand RIGHTS. This would never have been possible (it wouldn’t even have been possible to think this way) in a Greek or Roman society.

Concerning another of the issues you brought up, I don’t like the idea that Paul merely disapproved of promiscuous sexual behaviors. I still want to hold onto the idea that same-sex sex is contrary to God’s created order. However, this does not have to mean that “being a homosexual” is a far worser sin than anything else we do. All sin is against God’s creational order (if we agree that there is such a thing).

Paul says in Romans that if we want to be free from the slavery of sin, we must obey God. We obey (worship) God when we offer all the parts of our bodies (the members of our physical bodies and our communal body) to Him. Maybe it’s not our job to define sin or to judge the sinner as sinners ourselves, but the Spirit surely gives us guidance as to what is a pleasing offering of our bodies. And I’m not ready to say that same-sex intercourse is a God-pleasing offering.

One of the things that makes rational discussion so difficult on this topic is heterosexual fear and heterosexual Christian fear in particular regarding the whole topic of homosexuality. It is strange to me that Christians, who claim to have more of the big picture than anyone else, who claim that their God is God over everything, and that they know how all of history will turn out, are afraid to the point of irrationality about even discussing the issue (present company excepted, of course). Several years ago my church had a conference to simply discuss the issue and how the church ought to respond and we were attacked by another minister in our denomination for having heretical views. It was an open discussion, you see, and some of the people there held opinions that ran counter to our official denominational stance on the issue. Some christians don’t even know how to talk about something.

Ahem. Sorry about that. I just had to get that little tirade out of my head. Okay. There.

Nobody’s said anything here for a while, but I’d like to start talking about this again.

Something someone mentioned a while ago, Norbert maybe, is the idea of loving the sinner and hating the sin. How does that play out in real life though? When someone has an entire lifestyle, or worldview if you want, that is seen as sinful, how do you separate the sin from the sinner? For a lot of the homosexuals I know, they believe that it is not a choice, but how they were made. How does Christian love work practically in this situation?

I think that when a group (made up of any category of persons) is lobbying for rights, we want to
1. verify where and how their basic human rights are being infringed. That is, we verify their claims. (Or the group offers significant proof that they are being treated worse than t he general public.)
For instance, I was able to verify my claim to a former boss about my salary being substandard…I had stats from the government in that case.

2. Maybe do triage…amongst all the groups clamoring for rights…whose cause is worthy? Work for the most needy groups???

Actually, we should look for groups whose basic human rights are being seriously infringed upon

• because they have no voice**.
  Bonhoeffer, a prisoner of the Nazis for his resistance, also called Germans to speak for those (the JEWS) who had no voice at that time (quoting a verse in Prov. I don’t have here)…A command of GOD.

(One of my regular “rants” comes from my exposure to the foster care system. THEY HAVE NO VOICE. Many of foster care kids (and indeed a number of kids in poverty ) come out of the parent (s) rotten choices. Sleeping around without protection, doing drugs/alcohol, other abuses…And many of these kids are abused (some before birth—-some after birth). When I see yet another baby come in with some kind of parent-inflicted abuse, I ask

….how many talk shows in the last few months spoke for them?
How many news articles?
How many mainstream college profs? Anyone hear a college prof speak for abused kids such as I’ve mentioned?
Who lobbies for their rights?
How many TV showa about them and their plight???
More churches marketing the concept of foster parenting would be invaluable.

3/ What do we KNOW of parenting? Is it no big deal if two persons are same sex? If we ignore a few thousand years of culture, and some of the research which supports male-female heads of household, we can sign off on gay adoption as it otherwise sounds reasonable.

4. I have found gay men (haven’t been around lesbians) to be more kind in certain ways than hetero men.
Yet if I accept the plain Greek of the New TEstament and the Old testament texts, the Bible (if I hold its precepts as binding, which I do) flatly contradicts our culture’s teachings, our profs, our talk shows, our articles, of the last 15-20 years. Paul has a big list of sins in Romans, one of them being homosexual actions. (He lived in a Roman culture where homosecual practice was indeed an accepted, sometimes even considered superior form of relationship. . And yet he says that some of you (his audience) once were bound up in t hese sins.)

I know, I’m homophobic scum. Maybe in Canada I would be in legal trouble. But I say this with pain in my heart for a family member who has messed up his kids’ lives to some respect with his conversion to the homosexual lifestyle. (Previously, he was a practicing Christian.)

The foundational question isnot really about homosexuality.

It’s this: : What’s your highest authority for deciding what is right & wrong?
A scientific study?
A college prof/text/subculture? Or???
Why do you or I believe what we believe?

If the culture’s current mores are the highest authority, you are right to push past the Biblical references.

If I see the Bible (especially where it defines a behavior as sin) as something that can be molded to the mores of the current culture, then of course I would not see homosexual practice as wrong since many leaders in the culture are shifting in that direction.

Hold on, I just reread this whole thread. Danrueck, are you saying Paul and Moses wouldn’t have liked Veggie Tales? I always figured they would have laughed their heads off.

How could you not like Veggie Tales?

I had never read this thread before-thanks for bringing it back up (even if it was only to prove the validity of the veggie tales).

I agree that an attitude of grace in public policy is necessary—that’s why I agree that there should be civil rights protections for all Americans, not just those that are Christians. Domestic partner benefits and adoption are both part of that, I think.

However, it has been posed to me that if the definition of marriage is changed (from one man and one woman), we will have sexual anarchy, not stable “diversity”. There is no principled distinction between same sex marriage and polygamist marriages or polyamorist “group” marriages. Soon a bixexual will need to marry both a man and a woman to totally fulfill his sexual orientation. It seems like all of the emotional pleas for rights could be made in these situations, too. Does a line need to be drawn, or do we extend rights in any situation?

Well it’s a little hard to predict how Moses and Paul would have reacted to veggie tales, but I’ve always imagined them to be rather humourless people who took themselves very seriously. Moses seems like the sort who might order the makers of veggie tales stoned for irreverance. Paul was more of a new-age guy who might respond by writing mean things about them in a letter to a church or maybe cause them to go blind. But maybe they were actually really funny, easygoing guys whose followers omitted their 3-dimensional personalities from the record.

Regarding the ‘slippery slope’ theory espoused by amy, I’m can’t see that happening. There are oodles of examples of longlasting, stable gay relationships, whereas I’ve never heard of a longlasting, stable threesome relationship. There might be one or two people out there asking for threesome marriage rights, but if you asked around you’d find that just about everyone in the western world agrees that ‘marriage’ is between two people. Not three. So that’s something our society still agrees on in general, I think.

This is a really important question in Canada right now as the supreme court has given the federal government 2 years to change the marriage laws to allow for gay marriages, as they found current laws to violate the charter of rights and freedoms. Ontario has already done so, but it’s still controversial. The Alberta premier said his province won’t comply with the supreme court ruling. The prime minister said he won’t hold a referendum because he doesn’t want the rights of minorities to be determined by a majority vote. Personally I think Moses and Paul might be a bit baffled by the whole thing.

Just to add a little stream of consciousness diversity to this thread. I don’t agree that homosexuality is natural. Homosexual relations are called unnatural in the Bible. We are held to a higher standard than animals by our creator. Furthermore, aren’t we living in a fallen world – where sin affects creatures’ innermost drives and desires?

If we are talking about living in a democracy where popular vote and representation make the law, why is it wrong to lobby for something you believe in? In many cities around the country, it is illegal to smoke in public, or smoke marijuana anywhere. Now, this is by popular decision. I personally support laws against sodomy. If I want to live in a community without this “annoyance” and threat to my family’s health, I can vote accordingly. I don’t see how this is inconsistent with Christianity.

The major agenda that I see being lobbied for is the mainstream acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle. The percentage of homosexuals in our country (USA) is miniscule, however, by looking at television programs, movie plots and media coverage, a casual observer would think that as much as 25% of the population was homosexual. While the media lobbies its acceptance, it ignores the growing numbers of AIDS cases in the population as a whole in communities where homosexuality is rampant.

Before my ideas are dismissed as “homophobic,” let me tell you I work with homosexuals on a daily basis. All of our clients are retailers where the ratio of gay to straight men is higher than any other industry (except maybe porn??) in the country. I lived for a year south of market in San Fran. I would contend that all of my clients have felt my respect for them as coworkers and concern for them as people. Much as my coworkers who are adulterers, or the family man who doesn’t know God. Phobia is a fear – I’m not afraid of homosexuality, I’m just against it.

A healthy discussion is brewing here. I’m just going to take issue with the homosexuality=AIDS argument. The parts of the world where AIDS is wreaking the most havoc are overwhelmingly heterosexual. Only 10% of AIDS cases are related to homosexual behaviour. I think it is a bit difficult to argue that homosexuality represents a health hazard to your family. If you think it’s wrong or annoying, that’s fine, but I found your health argument hard to swallow.