God Hurts Fags: Homosexuality and Catholicism
Friday, August 5, 2011 at 8:06AM | by Otter In the comments section to my post on The Soul Triptych, a small thunder broke out on homosexuality.
Thus Victoria:
As far as the Catholic Church's stand on homosexuality: I feel the need to clarify their position before I either confirm or deny it.
The Catholic Church says that homosexual tendencies are not sinful; acting on them is. If you think you're gay, just stay single and you're good. I think that they think that this stand does protect love: the love of a sanctified, Catholic union between man and woman, which is both economically and socially useful and a sacrament (which, by definition, is a grace-bringing visible sign of God's loving presence).
[snip]
...but to tell these people that they have to ignore the ones they love and stay alone for their entire lives is wrong. And I'm sure we could say something about "You're never alone when you're with God," but face it, we were made to search for love in all its forms, not just theoretical theological love.
So the Church is right" but also wrong?
And it can't admit it's wrong because it's so right?
That would not be only a Roman Catholic problem: but science, for example, is self-correcting this way simply because it acknowledges that our impressions of the truth in any given time and place are not infallible. Victoria addresses this insofar as the Catholic Church is concerned:
The Catholic Church is supposed to be "infallible but not impeccable", a neat little way of admitting to human error without admitting to being wrong, without being able to admit ever being wrong. But I also think that that's something the Church needs to do. If they don't claim to be right all the time, how could the world at large accept their authority? And humans need authority when gathered in such large groups. Otherwise there would be heretics left and right and the Church would have no power to argue against them. But then, the Church does also teach that you can't do evil in order to accomplish good.
I'm not sure how this is different than saying that tyranny is bad but chaos is worse: "the Church might be wrong on homosexuality, but, hey, it's the Church, and the alternative is a world without ANY church." If that's what you're saying, why bother reflecting on right and wrong? Just toe the line for Roman Catholicism, and admit that, even if you're right and the Church is wrong, it's better that you be told you're wrong!
You'd be in good company, here: G.K. Chesterton writes often and eloquently of his belief that the Church will be found in the end to be right in spite of how wrong it seems at times:
With all this human experience, allied with the Christian authority, I simply conclude that I am wrong, and the church right; or rather that I am defective, while the church is universal.
But that's a really, really big moral chasm you're leaping with him. Because sometimes you do know right from wrong. Victoria again:
One thing I do know for sure: those people that say that God hates gays go against everything Christianity stands for, even assuming that homosexuality isn't right.
Right, but consider something Mark, an Orthodox deacon, writes (also in the comments section to the Soul Triptych post) to my question about whether in the end he comes down saying homosexuality is wrong:
Of course for me it is "Yes" [i.e., homosexual behavior is wrong] in the end. I am not intending to hide that at all. But to say yes demands the second part of your question...why?
He (unlike Victoria) declines to answer that question, at least here in these web-pages. Fair enough: this isn't school, and I'm sure he has good reasons for not getting into it.
But I think part of the reason why it's uncomfortable for Christians to answer that question about whether homosexuality is sinful is because the logic of resistance to homosexuality doesn't have to be "hateful" to be "damaging." In the absence of any clear reason (apart from the Bible's thou-shalt-nots), what possible reason could one have for damaging homosexuals by insisting on their celibacy?
If you ask Christians why gossip is wrong, the answer is clear and forceful. Adultery? The logic is clear. Theft? Murder? Sloth? Anger? Malice? Christianity is beautifully clear.
Homosexuality?
Well, the best answers revolve around a vision of Eden in which humanity was created male and female, and Victoria does a fine job of working out some of the metaphorical importances for Catholicism: the marriage as emblem, symbol, or metaphor for God's love.
But as she very trenchantly and beautifully points out (and I'll risk making her repeat a bit from above):
I don't necessarily agree with [The Roman Catholic Church]. It's a nice theory, but I don't think it works in practice. Human nature just isn't that simple, as I keep learning the more anthropology classes I take. When I was a younger ('cause, y'know, I'm so old now) I agreed with it, but then I went through that age where everyone's starting to date and starting to figure out who they want to date, and several of my friends made their life "choices", putting faces and personalities and lives into the theory. As the Catholic Church says, you can't always choose who you're attracted to; but to tell these people that they have to ignore the ones they love and stay alone for their entire lives is wrong. And I'm sure we could say something about "You're never alone when you're with God," but face it, we were made to search for love in all its forms, not just theoretical theological love.
So Christians don't like to hate: it doesn't come naturally to them, and their New Testament and their Lord do not lend direct support to hate (though their Old Testament does).
The trouble is, inflicting hate and inflicting hurt often do not differentiate clearly. Injustice more often depends on ignoring the needs of a minority than it does on creating those needs.
Nobody had to be "hateful" to think that segregation was a good idea, that blacks in America should use a separate restroom. But Martin Luther King responded (in "Letter From A Birmingham Jail") that indifference to unequal justice of that kind is distorting and damaging to the human soul. "Hate" and "hurt" are a region of our experience with very unclear boundaries.
Having said all that, homosexuality can seem like a very complicated thing on the American table. The debate about gay marriage has lots of under-explored corners, most importantly whether there is a social and biological equivalence between gay sex and straight sex (or even whether gay erotic activity is "sex" at all, biologically speaking).
If not, there's a case that society (and law) is justified in responding differently to homosexuality than it does to straight sexual relationships simply because the functional effects of the two kinds of sex are different.
I'm not persuaded that's a strong reason in the twenty-first century, though I think it was urgent and compelling in the twenty-first century before Christ, when all sexual energy had to be channeled into the survival of the community lest the community become significantly weakened.
And it was in the second millenium B.C.E. and afterward that homosexuality began to be given its status in the Christian church, through the creation of some texts that were both hurtful and hateful. The man who lay with a man as one lies with a woman was "an abomination" or "detestable" (Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13).
The logic might have been clear then.
Christians are rightly shy of making that case now: to bring it out of the background and to look it in the face is to risk bringing "hurt" back into the region of "hate."
Reader Comments (7)
The sexual ethics of Christianity are intransigent across the board; there's no way around it.
Otter says:
and he is far, far from being alone when he presumes that celibacy is "damaging." I've had conversations with gay folks objecting that it is too harsh/unfair to say that gay sex is prohibited, conversations with divorced folks objecting that it is too harsh/unfair to say that remarriage is prohibited, conversations with single folks objecting that it is too harsh/unfair to say that premarital sex is prohibited, one conversation with a heterosexual, married woman objecting that, given the particulars of her marriage, that it is too harsh/unfair to say that extramarital sex is prohibited, and conversations with more than one heterosexual married woman objecting that it is too harsh/unfair to say that sex-on-demand with her husband (related to 1 Corinthians 7). Prohibitions on sex are widely regarded as anti-natural, oppressive, cruel, hateful. (I even remember one rather ironic conversation in which an older gay man, his body gaunt and ravaged by STDs, tried to make the case to my roommate that her celibate lifestyle was physically unhealthy for her.)
Nobody, apparently, really wants God in his or her bedroom. Which is another way to say, nobody wants God in his or her body. Just as apparently, that is where God longs to be.
Victoria did a beautiful job of outlining the theology of marriage in a single paragraph (in the comments of the Soul Triptych post, which I would link if I knew how). Christianity is incarnational, not just in that God the Father was made incarnate in the Son, but that the Holy Spirit lives in the flesh of believers. Every believer, regardless of his marital status or the intensity or nature or object or orientation of his sexual desires, is called to die to himself ("die to his flesh"). It is hard to find a metaphor harsher than that.
--On hearing it, many of his disciples said, "This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” . . . Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you? . . . The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe. . . .This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled them." From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.--
If you believe in the life of the Spirit, perhaps the weight of chastity is bearable. If you don't believe, it's really hard to know how it would be experienced as anything except unnatural and difficult. And if you believe that someone is forcing chastity upon you against your will, you can draw a straight line from unnatural and difficult to hateful and sadistic. In any case, I'd advise against spending too much energy searching for extra-biblical reasons to support chastity as prescribed for the Christian believer. It's not that they don't exist--some do--it's that they are entirely superfluous.
Susan, all good comments. But I think there's a difference between voluntary chastity, which I think is a highly energetic and amazing gift, and chastity enforced simply because one's "ungiftedness" for chastity involves people of the same sex.
Putting it another way, my issue isn't with chastity.
It's with the lack of clarity about why precisely homosexuality is "wrong." Not biblical, I grant you. But why?
If we said, "All people whose sexual tastes lean towards the predatory must be chaste," it'd be clear why we do it. Predatory sexual tastes damage others. But if we said, "All people with black hair should be chaste," it would be a random and strange ethic that served no purpose except our particular whims.
Gay people do not, I assume, choose to be gay. But neither is there a clear and necessary connection between homosexuality and damage done to other people. Is there?
Otter asks:
and also
It sounds like you are looking for clear pragmatic or sociological reasons for the prohibition of homosexual behavior. I am saying that the primary reasons, the “real” reasons, for all restrictions on sexual behavior from the Christian perspective are theological or ontological or sacramental. Any secondary reasons for restrictions on sex would be (almost) pure speculation on my part.
For example: imagine an ordinary heterosexual couple. Let’s call them Ken and Barbie. They meet and fall in love while they are in their mid-twenties, move in together, and enjoy two or three years of monogamous, consensual sex. They conceive no children and contract no STDs. After a while, their respective careers draw them to different states, so they break up and move on with their lives.
I’m not confident I can come up with any truly compelling evidence that Ken and Barbie have harmed themselves, each other, or society . . . and yet I condemn their sexual intimacy as sin “merely” because it violates the theological/ontological/sacramental purposes of sex. To my way of thinking, “theological” does not translate to “abstract” (this is where, perhaps, Victoria and I would differ) or “ideal”. Certainly theology involves abstract thought, but theological truth is permeative, soaking throughout all aspects of life and reality. Beliefs about the universe that are developed out of scripture, Christian theology, teachings of the church, my experiences as a disciple of Jesus, etc—these are the basic or formative ones that lend shape and light to all I see.
Now, I think there is value in attempting to evaluate sexual behavior by beginning with its apparent effects on individuals and society and then reasoning backward from there to see what can be discovered—but it is an inherently limited value. It’s a pseudo-scientific way of going about forming sexual mores, which feels familiar and reliable. You can try to separate out all the diverse components of human sexuality and reduce them into quantities; organize people into groups and observe them in different situation; collect statistics and analyze them—there’s no end to the fun, science-y stuff to can do, and you’ll probably hit upon some useful information this way, which you can then use to shape your moral sensibilities, or, of course, to validate the moral sensibilities you had going in.
And if you are seeking consensus on sexual mores, you’ll still have to do a lot of work to form consensus with other people even to agree on what “damage” is when we ask “does this sexual act or pattern damage anyone?” Some folks will recognize physical damage but not emotional damage; some will count economic damage but not relational damage—although the reverse of both those examples is less common. Physical and economic damage are more easily quantifiable (read “science-y”) than emotional or relational damage, so they are easier to “believe in.” Issues of trust, mental health, personal identity, self-worth are harder to quantify (less “science-y”) and harder to believe in. Even if asked to justify a deeply rooted taboo such as incest, I suspect that if push came to shove, most folks would find it easier to defend the taboo on the grounds that breaking it results in genetically damaged offspring, as opposed to referencing psychological damage to the parties involved.
So, jumping back to your questions--and more direct answers to them :) -- Why is homosexuality is wrong? Wrong because it removes sex from its proper theological/ontological/sacramental context. Is there a clear and necessary connection between homosexuality and damage done to other people (why just “other” people, BTW? is it off-limits to talk about damage done to one’s self?)? Not clear, but necessary. Sin is anti-life and anti-health, and where it is present, damage occurs. Ken and Barbie, in my understanding, have damaged themselves and each other and that, of course, affects our community. But human sexuality is incredibly complex, and I don’t expect all damage to be equally extensive or equally visible. I do think that “evidence” of damage becomes more visible as sexual sin intensifies in certain directions. In other words, I would venture to theorize that an individual who has 20-30 sexual partners will show more visible damage than an individual who has one sexual partner for 20-30 years.
Well, I will disagree with that last statement, because it assumes that a person who has been faithfully married for 20-23 years is not being abused in any way: socially, emotionally, physically or sexually. That is not a safe assumption to make.
Heterosexual, faithful (sexually) marriages that do not reflect the uxurious love of Christ for his bride are no sacrament. They are a man-made marker of righteousness, while the Lord looks on the heart. He knows the pain of the abused spouse, and that the situation is actually a mockery of the union between Christ and his bride. There is nothing holy about merely being married.
But then the sort of reasoning you gave above defines theology: all theory, no substance. It's why the Pharisees, who loved their scripture and their traditions and in doing so believed they were loving God, missed the Incarnation though it happened right in front of their eyes. They had the same opportunity as the Apostle John, to see and touch the Living Word, but they believed with all their hearts that God was to be found in their sacraments, so that when the real thing which the sacraments pointed to was right in front of them- their hands could have touched him!- they were instead offended.
I think what makes marriage sacred is the love and willing sacrifice of each partner for the other. This does not require opposite genders-it does require a sacred, holy love that seeks the good of the other above its own good. In THIS picture of marriage we can see the love of God lived out. The fact that the marriage is heterosexual, or of long-duration, is irrelevant if that agape love is missing. Such a marriage is only a twisted mockery of the love Christ has for his bride; it is no sacrament.
I believe that kind of sacred love can clearly exist between homosexual couples, and denying them the honor of loving one another so completely and faithfully is, well, unholy. If they do not all arrive at the uxurious devotion to one another that reflects agape love, well, few heterosexual couples achieve it. It is no reason to discourage couples from reaching for it.
Relying on the same book of scripture which also commands us to not charge interest on loans, return all property to its original owners every fifty years, damns lepers to isolation rather than treatment, treats women as inferior from the day they are born, etc. is the same mistake the Pharisees made. I don't want to choose to be in their crowd. I'll throw my lot in with the Syro-phoenician woman, the Samaritan woman, the man born blind from birth, the man waiting at the pool in Bethesda and all the rest who dared to believe that God cares more for the human heart than the rules of scripture that religion worships in place of God.
Wow. Shadowspring nails it, I think.
Shadowspring, thanks for your comments and reflections.
The story of the Syro-phoenician woman is a stunning example of a faith that, as you say, trusts that God cares for the human heart more than rules . . . but it is all the more fascinating then, that her faith is evidenced by her persistence and her humility in the face of “the rules”--not by her denial, renunciation, or repudiation of them. This blessed woman, first met with complete silence from Jesus, and then met with an insulting reference to her inferior ethnic status (a dog compared to the children of Israel), does not collapse into a teary mess of self-hatred and feelings of worthlessness, nor does she rise up in righteousness indignation and demand that Jesus repent of his shocking statement that smacks of racism. No: instead, she accepts the perimeters of her life as laid out by Jesus and then boldly and persistently argues with him on his own terms as she presses her suit in faith, lays hold of the tender love and mercy he had for her, and receives the desire of her heart.
As best as I can tell, Jesus has defined chastity with offensive narrowness. In faith, I believe that the restrictive, exclusionary “rules” surrounding chastity are a mask or blind that hides or covers the deep and tender love of Jesus for all people. Accordingly, I must press on through chastity toward Jesus in my own life (rather than rejecting it, or attempting to dispel it), and encourage my fellow sojourners along those same lines.
On the other hand, I do repudiate 1) the denigration of sex and 2) the worship of sex in our culture that leads people to believe that 1) sex has no meaning beyond physical desire and/or that 2) sex is the ultimate meaningful expression of love for another human being. As Shadowspring rightly points out, sex in a sexually faithful marriage is no proof of presence of holy, sacred love . . . but it almost seems that he or she doesn’t believe that holy, sacred love can exist in its fullness apart from sex.
Shadowspring writes
and
Did Jesus, in his celibacy, deny himself the honor of loving others completely and faithfully? Is the sexual love the best, most complete, most sacrificial expression of love a person can have for another? Does love without sex render it insubstantial and anti-incarnational?
If physical sex = ultimate expression of love—and this is totally consistent with the materialist reductionism of our culture—then, yes, any time the Church prescribes celibacy, we are relegating the individual to second-class citizenship and isolating him or her from love. In truth, though, Christianity upholds both celibacy and marriage as equally valid and holy ways to live out one’s love to Christ and community. Jesus literally personified love by his holy life and self-sacrificial death. His life and death were the ultimate expression of love, and he managed to pull it off without sticking his penis in anyone else’s body, male or female.
Why is homosexuality sociologically bad? When the anti-sodomy laws were being written way back in the day, life was harsher, shorter, and more unpredictable than life is today. Daily life was a much bigger risk than it is for most of us now--putting food on the table meant hunting it down, very few medicines and fewer surgeries were available to combat accident or illness, childbirth was a mortal hazard every single time. Populations were smaller, tribal societies smaller still, the continuity of one's own group was fragile. Offspring were a wealth and a necessity for economic reasons that may or may not have had anything to do with individual dynasties.
Any relationship that was not likely to "bear fruit" in a genealogical sense was a terrible waste of human resources. Homosexual unions, infertile women, "spilling seed on the ground" hurt the larger community by not contributing to its continuity and succession.
Homosexuality in non-humans tends to be less common than heterosexuality but hardly rare, and significantly to this question, tends to increase dramatically (or so I've heard, I haven't actually seen the studies) in overpopulated communities. That would support the idea, then, that when reproduction is crucial, sexuality must be overwhelmingly hetero for the good of society. But when reproduction becomes more of a social liability rather than an asset--more mouths to feed without substantially increasing the available resources to feed them--sexuality then is valued less for its reproductivity and more for its expressions of love, companionship, or (less altruistically) domination and greed.