Mike Foster, Staff Writer
During my freshman year of college, spent at Reinhardt University, a new friend sent me a text late one night outlining why she was so upset with her roommate. She told me she was appalled when finding out her roommate was gay, and was even more outraged because she didn’t tell her (as if that would have made it better). She moved out within a week.
Kennesaw State University was my target transfer school for many reasons, but one of the main reasons I was glad to leave the private school just a county north of KSU was to join a school unaffiliated with the church. I got sick of hearing religious students talking about homosexuals as if they were lepers.
How naive of me.
This week, The Sentinel discovered that the GLBTIQ Resource Center in the Student Center was vandalized on Oct. 22., an idiotic stunt that reeks of a hateful, phobic assault of property. I’ll take this as a queue to speak up about the fact that, while KSU is much greater in terms of its diversity and open avenue for ideas, I’ve still met many students who stigmatize homosexuality. Almost all of them do it behind the bound-back of their Bibles.
Let’s make this clear: Homophobia, or any phobia, is a personal problem—not a valid stance that deserves public attention. Now, I don’t know for certain whether the vandals identified with a religious doctrine, but for the sake of opening up a can of worms, I’d like to take up some print space to help the general homophobe—often a reader and believer in Scripture—what can of worms they open for themselves when they speak out against homosexuals because “the Bible said so.”
The most explicit abominations of homosexuality in the Bible come from the book of Leviticus, which is a list of some of the most hilariously discriminative orders in the history of humankind.
Leviticus 20:13 reads, “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”
Read a little bit further, and Leviticus 21:17-18 says that those with blemishes, flat noses, blind, and are, and I quote, “lame,” must be shunned. That’s terrible news for Drew Brees, Helen Hunt, Ray Charles and Adam Sandler.
Leviticus also tells us not to mix crops in a field, and that crossing dairy and meat is a no-no.
That’s right: it’s time to give up your Farmville accounts (if you have not already) and your late-night Steak N’ Shake stops.
Oh, and I know college is where we all like to amp up our sexuality, but just know that Deuteronomy 22:13-21 tells us that marrying after giving up your virginity is punishable by execution.
The common response from homophobes who will reel from the Old Testament will say something along the lines of “it’s not the word of God (the Ten Commandments) or Jesus Christ.” Guess what? Neither says anything about homosexuality. They then respond with, “Well, I just believe that…”
Bingo. In the United States of America, you can believe whatever you want, as long as you don’t try to push it on the public. This means not vandalizing the GLBTIQ Resource Center as if the door hit you.
You cannot have it one way or the other. You cannot cherry pick. Defending homophobia with scripture means, for all logical purposes that you must abide by it.
Keep your legs crossed. Make sure your clothes are all one material. And, whatever you do, don’t get the Wendy’s Baconator (Oh! Now I get why Chick-fil-A exists!).
Call me preachy for writing this. It’s pot; kettle.
Homosexuality is observable through centuries, cultures, and even animal species. It’s natural, and as someone who does believe in a God, it’s a part of God’s creation.
If someone has the audacity to deny this in a wake of a line of scripture they believe is law, they better be ready to play by all the rules.
Thank you for writing a piece that covers the unfortunate vandalism of the LGBTIQ Center on campus. It is a wonderful Center on campus full of some amazing people, and it makes me sad that people would want to do it harm.
I wish there was more room for this article, because the argument on Christianity/the Bible and homosexuality is not nearly complete and there is so much more that could be said to inform people on this topic!
Still waiting for the day where people will take “love thy neighbor” a little more seriously than “hating on the fags.”
Unfortunately, some of your observations of Christians are
spot on. One of the greatest challenges for Christians today is treating
homosexuals with the dignity and respect that they, as fellow human beings,
deserve, while at the same time standing firm in their conviction that
homosexuality does in fact go against the created order.
I can tell that you are an intelligent person with a sharp wit
that makes your points clear in a convincing way. That being said, I find you
at fault. You have completely mischaracterized Christianity with your lazy
understanding of what Christians believe. It is not totally your fault, for
often times Christians have not spent enough time studying not only what they
believe, but how to effectively articulate those beliefs.
You ripped a few verses out of one of the 66 books that make
up the Bible, and pretended to know something about the whole story. An
analogous situation would be if I had quoted a few lines from the Harry Potter
series and told everyone that it was about a homicidal tree located on school
grounds that targets children. What if I said that Mark Twain’s “The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn” was about rafts?
To address your “common responses from homophobes,” what is
there to say? It would take much more than a comment to explain how wrong you are, but I will offer the abridged version. First, neither Jesus Christ nor the
Ten Commandments addressed child molestation or beating your dog, but by your logic that means neither considered those types of offenses as morally wrong; Jesus does not need to address every possible moral wrong that you can think of in order to make it wrong. Second, Jesus did in fact speak about marriage, and how it is to be between a man and a woman (see Matthew 19). Third, Christians believe that Jesus was in fact God, a member of the Trinity. If that is true, then it was also Jesus who handed down the Mosaic Law you cited in Leviticus to the Israelites. So he did in fact talk about homosexuality directly.
There are at least six locations (off the top of my
head), found in BOTH the Old Testament (generally inapplicable to Christians,
but still historically important) as well as the New Testament.
Even if the Christian worldview were false, you would still
be doing a disservice to truth by erecting straw men of what you think they
believe. Also, your charge that homosexuality is natural, and therefore morally
acceptable, is logically fallacious. A thing’s naturalness has nothing to do
with its morally positive or negative attributes.
I am a Christian (with a degree in Christian theology). I am not a homophobe; I have no irrational fear or prejudice of homosexuals. I believe they should be treated with dignity and respect, and valued as human beings made by God. Consistent with Biblical imperatives, I also believe that homosexuals (and everyone else) should humble themselves before God, and live according to
those principles. That is real tolerance.
If you do not agree, that is your right, but do not misrepresent my beliefs and label me a monster when clearly I am not. That’s crap journalism, as well as real intolerance.
How is ripping content from The Bible out of context different than what people do to damn homosexuals? Because that was the point of the way I presented the material. What you call “lazy,” I call what Christians do on a daily basis.
Being a devout Christian in all literal terms and being one that cherry-picks favorable scripture are two different things. The vast majority of hate that comes from the religious is a result of the latter.
I hate to write such an abridged response on what should be a 10 minute conversation. The fact is that the Levitical laws were given to the ancient Israelite people by Moses as a contractual obligation from God, the majority of which served a temporary purpose. The majority of universal moral absolutes that guide a Christian’s life are restated (from the Old Testament) within the New Testament.
I called it lazy because you never once cited that you were addressing Christians that do not accurately represent Orthodox beliefs. To the contrary, you are charging Christians with being hypocrites for not condoning homosexual behavior while also “ignoring” the other 613 laws of the Mosaic Covenant. I am telling you that you have misinterpreted Christian belief. You are correct, many Christians are lazy in their beliefs, but that does not then mean that you can make hasty generalizations concerning Christianity proper.
I would also agree that the majority of people that “hate” are those that have not yet learned that Jesus commanded us to speak the truth, but do so with a loving heart. I obviously do not condone the vandalism, but I do believe that the words of you article do more harm then good. Ravi Zacharias once said that “you should never judge a philosophy by its abuses.”