Homosexuality

[fpb]

When I heard of the well-named Mrs.Robinson's lust-crazed behaviour and attempted suicide, I was disposed to sympathy. After all, I know better than most the situation of someone who warns against sins he knows - all too well. But when I heard one remark made by her husband - to which, one assumes, she fully submitted - then all sympathy flew away. I have no pity for someone who could so falsify Christian moral teaching as to say that "I did not say that homosexuality is an abomination, God did."

What shallow, ugly nonsense. Do not expect from me a defence of homosexual practice as such; the Church teaches against it. But the Church also teaches that the impulse as such is not a sin; only the practice is; and what is more, the Church teaches, and has always taught, that homosexual fornication is bad in no other way than any other form of fornication. That is what makes Mrs.Robinson's great sin so ironic: she fell into what, according to age-old Christian teaching, was the exact same sin - only a different specification - that she and her husband were busy pushing beyond the boundaries of the human (that is what "abomination" means). And to add to the irony, it was exactly in Ireland that the equivalence of all forms of fornication had been clearly formulated. The earliest Celtic penitentials (the systematic study of morality and guilt is one of the great contributions of the Celtic Churches to Christianity), though ascribed to two saints, Gildas and David, who were notoriously at the opposite end of doctrine and practice, nonetheless fully agree in this: the penances inflicted for homosexual practice (and for homosexual practice only) are exactly the same as those imposed for fornication with women.

If that is the case, where does the peculiar savagery with which the West has long since treated homosexual practice? The answer is simple enough; it is, in fact, present, black on white, in some of the best known and most widely studied documents in history. It came from Roman law, and specifically from the changes wrought in it by one of the worst tyrants in history. The murderous Justinian I, would-be restorer and effective destroyer of the Roman Empire, codified the whole of Roman law in an enormous Code called after him; but in codifying the law, he also put in some enactments of his own, one of which featured the death penalty for homosexuality. He needed it in order to get rid of undesired clergymen and aristocrats.

It must be understood that for most of our history, everything Roman has had a kind of glow placed on it. Ancient Rome was always taken to be a model, however it was perceived. And when Roman law was rediscovered in the twelfth century - after centuries in which Europe, including Italy, had developped a different customary law of Teutonic origin - its superiority was taken for granted. And so judicial murder for sodomy became part of the law of the land. That was not the only horror that resurrected Roman law brought to Christendom: its prestige also covered the codification of torture as a normal instrument of police investigation - which it remained until the eighteeenth century and Cesare Beccaria - and the codification of slavery. Slavery had disappeared from Europe during the Dark Ages; from the moment Roman law was resurrected, there were constant attempts to reintroduce it in various ways, or to alter serfdom into slavery, according to time and place. It was because of one such bright idea that the English peasant rebels fo 1381 had intended to "kill all the lawyers"; they knew, all too well, that legal ideas being pushed included their own enslavement.

I do not feel bound to any of this kind of heritage. It has nothing to do with Christianity. Let us remember one basic point: to a Christian, everyone is a sinner. Including, most certainly, himself, or herself. If I say that a practicing homosexual is a sinner, it is no more than I should and do say about myself, for the practice of a myriad sins none of which I am going to tell you about. I certainly do not mean that the practice should be called an abomination, any more than any other sin is an abomination. Some sins certainly are, beginning with murder and abortion; but I am myself guilty of so many things that I should be the last to condemn others. I walk as a sinner among sinners, and if I ever say that anything is an "abomination" - something from which human beings should flee as from the plague - it will certainly not be the insanitary and rather sad practices with which some people try to ease a desire that cannot be eased. Try murder, or abortion, or the oppression of distant peoples; those, not these, deserve to be called abominations.

There are sins, and there are sinners, whom one should reject; crimes that really are abnormal, that affect the sane human being with a sense not only of anger but of misery, enormous wrongs that cannot be altered. Abortion is an abomination; Nazism is an abomination; Communism is an abomination; Leopold II's conquest of the Congo was an abomination. These evils subvert the very order of society and involve an infinite number of attendant evils, themselves monstrous enough to damn a man's soul, as states and professions are perverted, rank by rank, office by office, person by person - till everyone is guilty of something monstrous. The railway clerks and signalmen who kept the trains running in Nazi Germany made sure that cattle trains loaded with prospective murder victims were efficiently driven to Auschwitz or Sobibor. This is what abomination looks like. To extend that to homosexual practice - let alone to "homosexuality" - is an insult; an insult to the dead who were its victims, and to the damned who let themselves be swept away with its flood, and damned their own souls in consequence.

Myself, I really am not interested in my neighbour's sins. My own are quite enough to be getting on with. And to condemn one man for one of his sins makes sure that all of us will be condemned, always. The experience of Mrs.Robinson ought to be instructive in this regard. If you condemn a man for this "abomination", you condemn some of the finest people who ever lived. You condemn Plato, Virgil, Michelangelo and Tchaikovsky - something that should occur to no civilized man.

Comments

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

You always provide very relevant and very well thought out and considered food for thought, good sir.

[elise-the-great.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear.

As usual, I suspect that the continued support of anti-homosexual sentiment-- not personal beliefs and Church teachings, but the idea of homosexuality as an 'attack' on morality-- is fed by not only the ideas of ancient Rome, but by an attempt to validate one's own moral systems without sacrifice and effort on one's own part.

I see a lot more condemnation of gay marriage, for instance, than I do of botched and un-Christlike heterosexual marriages, let alone divorce. Sometimes I'm downright insulted by the focus of sanctity-of-marriage groups on reserving marriage for specific groups without working to eliminate domestic violence and spousal abuse, the verbal and emotional assault that are almost considered a natural part of marriage, and the imbalance of pressure to marry vs. pressure to stay married.

And in the same vein, I see a terrifying lack of sex ed in the church; in America, where we're currently laboring under the appalling ignorance of abstinence-only sex ed, Christians have an unprecedented opportunity to fundamentally alter the violent, promiscuous and disturbing views of sexuality that are prevalent right now-- which opportunity we are staunchly ignoring. It's embarrassing; it's too much work; it's just icky, and it's so much easier to condemn people who have fallen victim to media portrayals of sex, or who engage in sexual practices not condoned by the Church, than to offer any resistance to the rewriting of societal norms.

In short-- ARGH. There are far, far more dangerous and wretched-- and preventable-- things happening in the world. If we were to devote resources to rotavirus vaccines and clean water systems in disadvantaged countries.....

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

I'm so out of the loop - I thought you were talking about Anne Bancroft.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It's in Northern Ireland, so the scandal probably never made it to the USA. Besides, over there it would be fairly unremarkable - self-righteous female politician is found to have had lust-driven affair with boy young enough to be her grandson and to have used her position to finance his business plans. The most interesting thing is that this happens only days after the leader of Sinn Fein - Mr. Robinson's allies and rivals in a very uncomfortable joint ministry - has been struck by a far worse scandal (covering up for the incestuous child abuse performed both by his father and by his brother). It sounds almost as though one party did not want to let the other get away with an advantage.

[hejjhog.livejournal.com]

I also thought of Anne Bancroft =)
And, I'd think a scandal like that would make quite a splash in the US media, too. Remember all the hype about the Monica Lewinski mess...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Ah, but she was American. If Americans cared about the sexual adventures of politicians from other countries, Paris and Rome would be thick with American journalists.

[hejjhog.livejournal.com]

Well, America is an America-centered place. It's ususally made a joke of, but in many respects, it is sad.
What I meant was that Americans have as much taste for scandal as pretty much any other nation (or, well, in Russia, everyone knows everyone in politics commits amoral stuff, but we (as in, most people) just don't care). No one could understand the Lewinski hype over here, and many people said: "So, the guy cheated on his wife. Who cares? How the heck does that influence his ability to be a good president?")

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The issue was not to have cheated on his wife, but to have lied on oath to Congress. In Britain and America, false statements in Parliament/Congress are among the most serious crimes in the calendar. Clinton, in fact, got off easy, just because it was widely felt that his was mostly a private misdemeanour, but - for instance - it was a false statement to Parliament - not, as it is generally said, that he had an affair with the Soviet attache's girlfriend - that doomed John Profumo.

[hejjhog.livejournal.com]

Well, you made me look it up, and from what I gather the issue was that he lied under oath in regards to having sexual relations with Lewinsky, which he defined as penetrative sex, while the court included oral sex in this.

*I am not saying having sex with someone other than your wife without her consent is in any way morally justifiable!*

Now, maybe you'll disagree with me, and maybe I'm wrong, BUT let me ask you this:
Is it better (more moral) to lie in regards to having had oral sex to the nation or to risk a public scandal that will forever affect not only how you are perceived, but also your wife and daughter?

(it's sex, for what it's worth, not a war against terror or weapons of mass destruction where there are none, no lives lost, no hurt, economic or personal, rendered)

(many men cheat; I do not view this as good in any way. However, it is between a man and his wife, how they choose to handle this. When such things start getting discussed outside of the family unit, I think it's wrong. There's a reason for private things to be kept private.)

And, yes, I admit that my view may be biased by the fact that I live in Russia, where there is a very different overall attitude to such issues. Also, it may be that many of our problems could have been prevented if we took such a drastic stance on the matter. But one cannot change the worldview and culture of a nation, fortunately or not.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That is beside the point. If I'd been him, I'd have refused to answer. He chose to lie; and - I cannot underline this enough - you do not lie on oath to Congress, period. Not for ten thousand wives and fifty thousand children. It is a criminal offence, and Clinton was very lucky indeed not to be impeached.

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

I tried making this point over and over to friends and others during the whole Clinton fiasco over here, but everyone kept trying to tell me I was being prudish since it was "just about sex". That drove me up the wall. I kept saying "It was a lie under oath to Congress!", but just about practically everyone kept saying it was about the sex. They completely failed to grasp the magnitude of the actual offense.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Would it have been possible for him to refuse to answer?

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

Yes, but it wouldn't have looked good for him. It would've been a tacit admission of guilt on his part, and (to my mind about the man) that was unacceptable to him. As most politicians are masters of rationalization, he figured better to bullshit the way out of it than to refuse to answer. Again, that's my take on it.

Also, it could've led to a Contempt of Congress charge being leveled at him on top of everything else being thrown at him by the opposition. And the Contempt charge would've had real legs, quite unlike much of the innuendo and suspicion that was the rest of his opponents' arsenal.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Still better than lying on oath and being found out. For a smart man, Clinton behaved like a complete fool in this instance.

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

Yep.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Let me see if I can make it clearer. IN England, sovereignty belongs to what is called "The King/Queen in Parliament", and all the laws are built on that assumption. It follows that to lie on oath before Parliament is nothing short of blowing a rapsberry to your own sovereign body; and the results of that are all too imaginable. Even individual members of Parliament are not protected from the results of "misleading the House". It is just about the worst thing that a politician can do. Now, in spite of the Revolution, American law has retained a great many features of English principles, including sovereign immunity, and the special rank of Congress. Indeed, Congress have more power than the British Parliament, since the latter no longer uses the power of impeachment. To lie to Congress upon oath is a jailing matter. No matter what the cause; because if people were allowed to get away with perjury to Congress on small matters, soon they would be getting away with it on big matters. As indeed, alas, is increasingly happening.

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

It's there(here?), in the world news sections. It was on the front page of AOLnews when I logged on today.

[panobjecticon.livejournal.com]

'Communism is an abomination'
why so?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Where do I start.... the whole populations exterminated, the death camps, the death marches, the violations of the law of war, the extermination of the Churches, the corruption of everything it touches... Is it possible that there is someone left on this earth who has not read Robert Service or Solghenitsin?

[panobjecticon.livejournal.com]

service, who? no, i'll check him out. solzhenitsin, yes. but i'm inclined to think that none of the reasons given are specific to communism as an economic/political system of thought and are more a matter of individuals, their subordinates and the execution (to use an entirely inappropriate term) of that thought - corrupted or otherwise?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You are ridiculous. Or would be, if you weren't playing clever critic on the graves of (at a conservative assessment) a hundred million murdered dead.

[panobjecticon.livejournal.com]

'You are ridiculous.'
it's an improvement on vile.

'playing clever critic'
nah, i was hoping that you would have thought it through and discriminated between ideology and tyranny. unless you do, i must consider your statement to be nothing other than rheorical fluff - which is disappointing actually, because i believe that underneath all the noise and bile, there's actually a nice guy bursting to get out and be logical;-)

'a hundred million murdered dead.'
most definitely an abomination.