Part I

Miss Poppy has better things to do than to imagine, and worry and fret about, what other consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedroom. There is, for instance, feeding the poor: three million children in the United States go to bed hungry every night. Then there is sheltering the homeless: the average age of a homeless person in the United States is nine. And there is companioning the sick and lonely: which, luckily, Miss Poppy can do in any cocktail lounge in America any day of the week. And finally, there is ministering to those imprisoned. Miss Poppy chooses the last of Jesus' commandments, from the end of Matthew 25, to justify adding one more essay to the plethora of writings explaining why homosexuality is not a sin. Miss Poppy does this to minister to those imprisoned by fear and ignorance, who come to Christianity expecting a stamp of approval on their prejudices.

I've discussed this issue (yeah, I'm tired of the third person) for more than eight years, with every yahoo with a keyboard. I say "yahoo" not to be insulting but to describe the quality of the arguments which, when confronted with logic, have quickly devolved into "I know you are, but what am I?" and other such puerile rejoinders. Not one argument has been able to keep its head above water when pushed to its logical ends.

Most arguments revolve around the "seven texts of terror," as described in Reverend Nancy Wilson's book "Tribe." These are Genesis 19, Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13, Romans 1:26-27, 1 Timothy 1:9-10, 1 Corinthians, 6:9, and Jude 7. Those who believe in a selectively literal interpretation of the Bible will occasionally toss in the other odd verse, verses that require the most extreme stretching of the imagination to correlate to an early 21st century conception of "homosexuality." As tedious as it is, I'll address each of these texts—doubling up on those that basically say the same thing as another.





GENESIS 19

This is the story of Sodom. In a nutshell, two angels visit Lot and he treats them to dinner and convinces them to stay the night. Outside a group of men gather asking to "know" the men staying with Lot—to "know" them in the "Biblical" sense. Lot discourages the crowd by offering his daughters, telling the men they can do whatever they want to them. The daughters are refused. A tense evening ensues where the angels strike the men outside the door blind and in the morning Lot and his family escape unharmed.

First, what is interpreted by conservative Christians as potential "homosexual" acts are not the worst "crimes" that occur that night. The fact that Lot offers his daughters to be gang-raped by a mob of violent men is abhorrent and supports the idea that God considers women to be of the same worth as farm animals, definitely of less value than two strangers who have stopped by for a visit. Remember, Lot was considered a righteous man, and the offering of his daughters for gang rape passes without Biblical comment, or the ruffling of angelic feathers.

That conservative Christians use this passage to condemn loving, consensual same-sex relationships while they remain virtually oblivious to the crime of offering one's daughters to be gang-raped by a violent mob speaks volumes about the upside-down world that harbors their priorities. Because this crime against humanity (women being, in my own mushy liberal-Christian point of view, part of humanity) is completely overlooked, conservative Christians miss the fact that these men would have raped women, or men. They weren't particular.


In fact, in a strikingly similar story, in Judges 19, a woman is offered to a mob of men to be gang-raped, in lieu of the man they originally asked for, and the offer is taken. The woman is raped all night and later killed and dismembered by her lover, the twelve pieces sent to the twelve tribes of Israel


It is a distinct injustice that conservative Christians link the act of rape with sexual preference. The Pope, in addressing the rape of young boys by priests, suggests as a remedy a more stringent screening out of "homosexual" priests, ignoring the fact that many of these priests rape young girls in their charge, as well. Again we see the mistaken notion that the rape of a male is more serious and damaging than the rape of a female. The rapes of young women by priests are virtually ignored. Sexism is one explanation, another is that "homosexual rape" captures and titillates the conservative Christian imagination to a greater and more prurient degree than does the rape of a young girl. It's almost as if rape is what females are there for, so why make an issue of it? Every 60 seconds a woman is raped in the United States. Yet what captures the headlines? A priest raping a young boy.

The gender of a rape victim does not determine the sexual preference of the rapist. If that were the case we should disallow both homosexual and heterosexual men from becoming priests and ministers. Rapists are rapists, not because of their sexual preference, but because they rape. The linking of the act of rape with sexual preference leaves unassigned the sexual preference of the man of God that rapes both boys and girls and illustrates how lacking in merit this linking is.


The "Sin of Sodom" Accoding to God

As I live, saith the Lord GOD, Sodom thy sister hath not done, she nor her daughters, as thou hast done, thou and thy daughters. Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good.
Ezekiel 16:48-50


Sodomites

Verses in the Bible that refer to sodomites reflect an English translation of the Hebrew word qadesh, as in 1 Kings 15:12,

"And he took away the sodomites out of the land, and removed all the idols that his fathers had made."
1 Kings 15:12

"And he brake down the houses of the sodomites, that were by the house of the LORD, where the women wove hangings for the grove."
2 Kings 23:7


The Roman temple to Baal Shamayim at Kadesh

The Hebrew term asherah is translated as for the grove in the latter verse. Asherah is described, in Strong's Exhaustive Concordance, as "a Babylonian (Astarte)-Canaanite goddess (of fortune and happiness), the supposed consort of Baal, her images; a) the goddess, goddesses; b) her images; c) sacred trees or poles set up near an altar."

These verses have to do with idolatry, not homosexuality. Even Strong's Exhaustive Concordance defines the term translated as sodomite as male temple prostitute. The qadeshim were the holy ones, devotees of the goddess Asherah. In Job 5:1 and 15:5 the qadosh are referred to, meaning sacred, holy, Holy One, saint, set apart. One must remember that there are no vowels in the original Hebrew, that these are added based on context and tradition. The qadosh could easily be the equivalent, in terms of holiness, to the qadesh.

The term sodomite was imposed upon this priestly, yet rival, class of men by translators with no compunction about correlating them to a completely unrelated event, the destruction of Sodom.