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I'm curious, as a fellow Christian, how you're able to reconcile loving God and loving your neighbor with being against gay marriage. I don't mean this in a confrontational or hostile way, at all. I'm genuinely intrigued.
Well, I think it's bad, and I don't think it's very loving to encourage people to do bad things. That's the short answer.
Does that say something about government policy? Not necessarily.
But I think it's worth bringing up that I do think the bible is pretty clear that homosexual sex is wrong. First, I think it's pretty clear that sexual sin is a big deal. This appears often! One of the clearest passages, for example, is 1 Corinthians 6:12-20, where it argues specifically that it's wrong for Christians to hire prostitutes. Of course, this is different from our case in two ways: the people we're talking about aren't necessarily Christian, and prostitution looks different from monogamous gay relationships (we'll ignore the high rates of gay promiscuity). But it's still wrong if we change either or both of these. See, for example Romans 1 (where it's non-Christians), or the several cases where homosexual sex is specifically condemned, like 1 Timothy 1:10. There are more passages, of course.
Homosexual sex is not the only seemingly victimless sin that was condemned, and the early Christians seem happy to condemn sins while also advocating for love. I think both of those are important! We should be keenly aware of sin (or else, how will we truly appreciate how undeserving we are of what Christ gave for us), and also should walk in love. They go together.
I suppose, then, I'll ask you:
Do you think the bible condemns homosexual sex?
If it did, would that sway you?
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Sodomy is a horrible sin and allowing it’s official sanction will convince more people to experiment, leading to their own damnation.
That doesn’t mean we should break out the construction cranes to rid ourselves of them. But from a Christian paternalist perspective a duty of the government is to discourage gay sex.
When you say that sodomy is a sin, why do you say that? Because the Bible says so? Or because you have some logical arguments? I think that "the Bible says so" is worthless as a moral argument.
I hope you understand why Christian paternalism would have a different attitude towards the Bible?
But in any case, gay couplings are incapable of performing the action that we can tell their organs are meant to do- the telos of the sexual act is PIV. It is quite trivially obvious from the design of the relevant anatomy that any natural law morals have to condemn sodomical acts; the consequences of routine sodomy make this doubly obvious. To say nothing that the sexes are different and meant to cooperate; the usual complaints about lesbian dating or the observed behavior of the gay male community make it clear that what they are missing is the opposite sex. The sexes complement each other not just in the design of their bodies but in their essential temperaments and inclinations, and a well ordered person is designed to seek out this complementarity through bonding with the opposite sex. Attempts to engage in the sexual act without this complementary bonding are trainwrecks, heterosexual sex without a unitive bonding experience is the basis for the legions of issues with modern heterosexual dating as criticized by almost literally everyone. Finally, we can tell that sex is meant to make babies, both from desire(contraceptors often report a drop in libido, women are both most attractive and most interested in sex during the most fertile time) and from results- the action these organs are clearly designed for makes babies without specific intervention to make it not do that. Homosexual sex can’t make babies inherently.
The normative sexual experience and telos for human sexual desires is clearly heterosexual, committed, fecund, and PIV. Everything about the act and everything involved in it tells us this. Moving too far from the norm and ideal for something important and public is probably a sin, even when the health consequences of sodomy or general bad behavior in the gay community are left out. Those are simply the nails in the coffin.
And sex is important and it is public. If you have sex with your coworkers all of your other coworkers will gossip about it and not feel bad about it. The same is not true for grabbing lunch- unless, that is, your having lunch is perceived as starting up the kind of relationship which usually leads to sex! Thinking of sex as a toy or mere private act is a childish mistake that one could only make having no familiarity with its social consequences.
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I'm not the person you asked, but Jesus seemed to encourage sexual abstinence for those who could not handle the consequences of His strict teaching on marriage:
It's not very clear to me what the connection between loving your neighbor has to do with the definition of marriage. Marriage simply is the exclusive conjugal union of a man and a woman, open to life, vowed till death do them part. It is a vocation, one of the schools of love that only some people are called to. A vocation creates the conditions of heroic self-sacrifice, so obviously not everyone can do it.
Even from a non-Christian sociological perspective, there is no reason to have a codified sexual-partnership without the potential to generate children. This used to be widely acknowledged and uncontroversial.
I once had a long discussion on this and still stick to what I wrote here.
Well, in most Western democracies its the exclusive conjugal union of two adults, but I get what you're saying. The second sentence I completely agree with. Some people are either not fit for marriage or not called to it.
How would you feel if two asexual people got married and didn't have a kid through intercourse or adopt?
I don't think I noticed what you meant by this the first time. Two adults can only have a conjugal union if they are of opposite sexes. They can only have their organs work together and perform the action that produces offspring if they are of opposite sex. That is what is meant by conjugal union. I don't care that many countries are using an absurd definition of marriage. I don't believe in "gay marriage." Whatever they are doing, it's not marriage as the word is understood by myself and everyone in history before the last thirty years. It's like "Trans-women are woman" to me.
Thank you for clarifying that. And to the rest of your comment, whatever floats your boat, I guess. I'm not going to try and change how you feel about it.
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This would closely resemble a Josephite marriage, which still has the potential of one of the partners saying, "I feel called to have sex now" and then the other partner owes the marriage debt. It works because they can still perform the action (a conjugal relationship) that makes a marriage a marriage.
So it sounds like we have two definitions of marriage here: the legal and the spiritual/religious. If two people are legally married but are neither spiritual nor religious, what does it matter if they choose to never have sex?
Firstly, the original question was how, as a Christian, someone could reconcile Jesus' teachings with being against Gay marriage. So the conversation from the start was religious.
Second, I don't see the distinction in my response. If the couple is not religious and never chooses to have sex, it's the same. They are married because they can still perform the action (a conjugal relationship) that makes a marriage a marriage. (even if they never want to)
You are correct. My apologies for diverging.
You're right. Upon a second glance, you didn't make that distinction.
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"Love your neighbor" does not extend to "normalize your neighbor's erotic proclivities at the cost of broader society" or "you must erase the distinction between things."
Christians have traditionally believed that marriage is permanent bond between a man and woman for the purpose of forming a household and raising children*, where the duties of the man and woman are asymmetrical. For a man to "marry" another man is a contradiction in terms, the same as when your boss tells you, "I want you to think of me as your friend, not your boss." The male-female relationship has elements that are inherently asymmetrical, and inherently different than male-male relationships, and different things deserve different words. Furthermore, the male-female union is a core building block of civilization and therefore deserves special recognition by the state and by the church. It deserves to be considered normative. One of the things that has especially turned me against gay marriage is seeing how so many institutions (eg public schools) no longer feel empowered to teach the male-female marriage as being the default or the normative institution. Legalizing gay marriage was not just "allow different people to do their own thing" it was, "change the basic way every child is taught about the basic institutions and building blocks of life."
Now part of the problem for modern Christians is that many already have given up on the idea of marriage being permanent or that the husband and wife have different roles and obligations. Once those distinctions have been erased, resistance to gay marriage then looks very unprincipled. But for traditional Christians the argument is very straightforward and consistent.
There is furthermore the argument that homoerotic behavior is a vice, a sin. And if we love our neighbor, we want to save them from sin. Sin ultimately makes us less happy. Vices give momentary pleasure but leave us empty and wanting more, no more happier than before. The glutton eats a lot of junk food, but ultimately that makes the glutton less happy. If society does things to make the glutton less likely to engage in gluttony (eg, banning advertising of junk food) or I do something to make my loved one not engage in gluttony (eg not keeping junk food in the house) then I am doing good for them. If I teach them "fat acceptance" I am actually harming them.
Now I am straight and speak from personal experience about whether for a person who experiences same-sex attraction forgoing homoerotic activities makes that person more happy. I do think though, that forgoing sexual promiscuity and other sexual vices that a straight person has tempted by has made me more happy. So I can see how that argument is plausible. Given the very high rates of promiscuity and sexual experimentation reported among gay populations, seems like gay sex is leaving something empty, like eating a cookie or potato chip, not like eating a steak.
* But what about old/infertile couples? First, never say never. Second, such couples are still modeling the relationship form.
Awesome, thanks! Some things you said that I'd like to explore further:
So, you believe that normalizing non-hetero relationships is a detriment to society? How do you reconcile that with non-hetero people who are in happy, healthy relationships?
I understand what you mean. I try to keep my private life separate from my work life, too. Although, I have a second job at the church I attend, and my pastor is of course, my boss, but he's also my friend. I play in a DnD campaign with a bunch of other church friends, and he's the DM. Would your suggestion to me be that I break the friendship off because he's technically also my boss?
It certainly has been that way throughout the course of history. However, along with that, we've historically treated women separately from men and for along time, women had fewer rights than men. We have also marginalized people of different races, religions, and sexual orientations. Sexuality aside, we've also oriented our social policies to strongly benefit married people over single people. All of this has been "normal" for thousands of years. How does this fit into your definition of loving your neighbor? Also, would you agree that what is "normative", even within the context of Christianity, is fluid and varies over time?
I agree, there's an argument to be made. But that's just it -- an argument, a position, an opinion, a perspective. You believe non-hetero relationships are sinful, I do not. We both think our own opinions are the truth. There are many people who agree with either of us, and there are those who are not religious that pay no mind to the doctrine of sin. What does sin matter to them? Should we force our views onto them, or lovingly allow them to make their own informed choice on what works best, even if we don't agree?
Do you think that a majority of non-hetero people are more sexually promiscuous than hetero people? I identify as asexual, so maybe I don't have the best perspective on this, either.
There are many good things that are happy and beneficial that do not deserve special recognition by the church or the state. There are many vices that should be discouraged by the church and state, even though some people will practice said vice and seem to be happy in practicing it.
It's not a perfect analogy, I was just making a point about language. The "boss" relationship is inherently different than the "friend" relationship, different relationships deserve different words. It's not a perfect analogy because one can be a boss and a friend, maybe I'll think of a better analogy.
Christianity (until recent progressive Christianity) has always recognized the basic human reality that men and women are different, have different strengths and weaknesses, are complementary, and therefore have different spheres of responsibility, different rights and duties. It's hard to remember this now that as Americans we are so long removed from existential war, but the state is primary an agent of violent force, that is the state is an organization of men who use violence to protect their land and women from other organized violent men, and as such of course governance rights of the state are going to be of men. "Loving your neighbor" is an entirely different question than whether person should have say, "a vote", (ie decision-making power over the apparatus of violence).
Everyone believes in sin, secular people just have different words for it. A vice or a personal sin, is something that feels good but is ultimately bad for the person doing it, you don't need religion to understand the concept, it's just without religion you have to reinvent and throw out all the work done on helping people effectively deal with vices.
But specifically you asked how a "Christian" who loves their neighbor could not want to support their neighbor in X. Well if the Christian loves their neighbor, and their religion teaches X is a sin, that means that X is ultimately bad for that person, therefore if they actually loved their neighbor they would want to discourage their neighbor from doing X.
Apples, oranges, cheese and carburetors. These are entirely unlike phenomena and must be analyzed separately
I think that gay men are, yes. I'd recommend reading "And the Band Played On" by Randy Shilts. Lesbian women are different phenomenon.
Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. Women are the gatekeepers of sex, while men are the gatekeepers of commitment. So, naturally, gay men have tons of commitment-free sex, while lesbian women move-in with each other at the drop of a hat and promptly suffer from lesbian bed death. Hence the following joke:
Gay men are ridiculously promiscuous and have a culture based largely around casual sex. Patient zero for the AIDS epidemic, Gaetan Dugas, famously had over 2,500 sexual partners. Gay "marriage" looks like two gays cruising together for pickups, as wingmen (what Dan Savage calls "monogamish"), rather than anything a straight couple would recognize as a marriage.
Think about how much sex the average man would have if every woman he met was as eager to fuck as he was; that's what it's like to be a gay man. It's disgusting.
I mean, that just tells me the problem is men, not homosexuality.
Men are fine; their level of horniness is correct for dealing with female passivity and resistance. Problems arise when men redirect their reproductive impulses from their natural complement towards a union that can never bear fruit.
Women who do the same are not much better; moving-in together with a near-stranger, suffering from a dead bedroom because neither can take the sexual initiative, truly staggering levels of domestic violence, and doing it all over again immediately after a breakup because women are serially monogamous... lesbian dysfunction is different from gay dysfunction, because women are different from men, but it is still a dysfunction.
The only way to avoid dysfunction is to fulfill our proper telos by seeking partners of the opposite sex, as Gnon intended.
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I agree with this. The apostle Paul even said, "not everything is beneficial." Though, I suspect that you believe that non-hetero relationships fall into the "vice" category.
That's fair.
I would put it more generally, that everyone believes that there are things we do that hurt others or hurt others and/or the larger society. How is a healthy non-hetero relationship something that fits that definition?
I find it interesting you use the bolded word to describe those things, because truthfully, they are concepts that humankind has made up to describe things. Paul famously said, "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." It would appear to me that the walls we use to divide each other are are not needed in God's Kingdom. Jesus even said that of marriage -- "For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven." (Matthew 22:30)
To put it bluntly, the problem is not a loving (caritas) relationship between two men or two women, which is all fine and good, the problem is using each other as mutual masturbation aids or sticking dicks up each others poopy holes. I would suggest that doing so is like eating that potato chip or masturbating to porn. It feels good in the moment, but ultimately leaves you empty and just wanting more stimulation/titillation while building a habit of mind that ultimately makes a person unsatisfied and less happy than they would be if the relationship was affectionate but not erotic.
I mean, I don't like any of those things because I'm asexual, but even if I wasn't, I wouldn't take such a hard-line stance against such things. I don't understand the fixation that conservative Christians have with sex acts that aren't PIV. I just don't get it. If you don't like them, don't partake in them, but don't try and make someone else's life miserable just because you ascribe to those beliefs.
What's you understanding of the role of the homosexual community (and also the hard drug community, similar arguments applied) in the emergence and spread of the AIDS pandemic? Wikipedia lists 42 million dead, among them something like half of the pre-AIDS male homosexuals in America.
Very little, to be honest.
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American culture and institutions are actively promoting experimental sex acts though -- from the books in schools to pride parades every June to media on TV to the State Department flying flags at embassies worldwide that have colors to represent erotic tendencies. It's not the Christians are not the only party who are obsessed. Christians think these things are bad, and thus, to the extent that we have common culture (public schools, parades, mass media) that sends messaging about sex acts, it would rather that message discourage non-martial non-PIV rather than encourage it.
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Is Paul saying there is no male or female on Earth right now as we go about our daily business of living and build institutions to govern our current Earthly society? Is he saying we are not to make distinctions between males and females, not to make different sets of duties and rules for males and females? This is very obviously not the case, because Paul himself does that all the time. What Paul is saying is that men and women, Jew and Greek, have equal ability to hear the word of God, be baptized, receive the Eucharist, and enter the kingdom of God. The Christian message and the Christian sacraments are not just for one nation, or one sex, or just for an aristocrats or priestly caste.
This is really, really obvious from reading the context around your quote and from reading Paul. Have you actually read Paul fully yourself, have you actually engaged with traditional Christian teaching on these topics previously, or are you just repeating talking points you have acquired second-hand?
I understand. Perhaps my argument there wasn't well-founded.
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I won’t comment on the rest of your post, but the answer to this seems to be unequivocally yes. Gay men have been (by hetero standards) ridiculously sexually promiscuous for pretty much the entire time anyone has been collecting statistics on it. This is true even for married gay men; the Dan Savage “monogamish” approach appears to be very common for gay male marriages. Lesbians, I’m not as sure.
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Out of curiosity, as a third Christian, and one who in the spirit of the topic counts gay marriage as something I was wrong about (i.e. I was in favour of it as a teenager, and have since come around to thinking that the traditionalists were probably right all along), do you not encounter many Christians on a day-to-day basis who oppose it? There's often a question of church communities here, it seems to me.
Aside from my partner, no. I'm the opposite of you; I had a traditionalist perspective as a teenager, but as I came back to to faith, I reunderstood for myself that accepting people who are not straight falls under the umbrella of loving your neighbor.
I think you have to distinguish between 'accepting' and approving or condoning any given activity. The church accepts sinners. That is its entire purpose. But that does not imply any acceptance of sinful actions.
I'd step back a bit from the idea of homosexuality specifically, and in particular I want to rid of any identity claims here. 'Gay people' as an identity are irrelevant. Rather, we should abstract back a bit and consider that what we're talking about is sexual morality broadly construed.
Now it seems pretty clear that Jesus, the Bible, God, etc., disapprove of sexual immorality. This is called porneia and it is condemned pretty much everywhere. Porneia covers categories as diverse as adultery, rape, incest, bestiality, prostitution, and more. Nobody seems to think that either being an adulterer/rapist/frequenter-of-prostitutes/whatever, or merely being tempted to any of those activities, means that a person is categorically excluded from the church or from the love of God. A person who has committed any of those actions would be expected to repent, seek forgiveness, do penance as appropriate, and so on, but given that, they are welcome in the Christian community. A person merely tempted to any of those things is, of course, totally welcome - the church is a community that encourages and supports people as they try to live a holy life, which naturally means being aware of and fighting against temptations like that.
The issue at hand is whether or not same-gender sexual activity falls into the category of porneia or not. That's it.
I think this framing is helpful because it lets us get away from toxic disputes about identity. It's not about 'gay people' or about 'homosexuality' or any posited intrinsic trait or categorisation. Those are beside the point theologically. It's only about actions.
So with that in mind, what are the lines around sexual morality that we seem to receive from scripture and tradition?
There's a much longer discussion than I want to have in this post right now, but the short version is that I think that, taking scripture as a whole and putting its treatment of sexual matters into context, it's possible to discern the overall shape of God's intention for human sexuality - that it be monogamous (cf. Jesus on divorce), faithful (cf. any time adultery ever comes up), fertile (cf. OT fertility miracles, Gn 1:28), loving and joyful (cf. Song of Songs), male-female (cf. Gn 1:27 and its use in Mk 10:6-7, Mt 19:4-6), supportive (cf. Prov 31), and so on. There's a visible thread that runs through scripture and which we also see explored in the tradition of the church, though I'm not going to go into that for now. There are other concerns about sexual morality we also see in the Bible (I'd argue there are some to do with honour, violence, and equality, for instance), but you get the idea. There is, I think, a discernible pattern, and I don't see how you can revise it to include same-gender sexual activity without not only contradicting what scripture says pretty plainly, but also doing harm to the overall pattern itself.
You do find some progressive Christian thought on this issue (e.g. David P. Gushee) arguing that they're in favour of this whole pattern, this whole biblical vision of marriage, and they support same-sex marriage because they want to extend its fruits to gay people (notice the identity framing again), on exactly the same terms as with opposite-sex couples. But I don't think that can ultimately work, because these principles are all interconnected. You can't remove one part of the structure without weakening the whole house.
There's a secular argument you can have as well, in terms of some of the fruits of same-sex marriage, or the other social trends that it either encourages or detracts from, but I'd rather leave that to others.
On a final note, I'd like to clarify that I mean absolutely none of this as an attack, personal or otherwise, against Christians who support same-sex marriage, or Christians who may identify as LGBT. (Nor non-Christians either, but this is an intra-Christian discussion.) I want to disagree in a respectful, compassionate way, all the more so because I used to be on the other side of this issue, and it is far, far too common for people to be very bullying about it.
It is incumbent of those who are on the cutting edge to accommodate for those who aren't. Pretending not to know you're on the cutting edge, or [even worse] being proud of doing provocative things for the purpose of being provocative, is not acceptable.
Liberal Christians (and the gay ones that have relationships following that [what is to me, at least] self-evident visible thread of the way pair-bonding is supposed to work) tend to have
an identity of havingmore problems with this. And provided that isn't for selfish/pride reasons "just to see what you can get away with" [which is the thing traditionalists don't quite understand- because if they themselves were doing those things, it would be in the 'testing boundaries for selfish reasons'/'tricking God' category; this is the core of why some things can be sins for some people but not others], and you're conducting yourself by doing your job (and sticking to what a monogamous relationship is supposed to be) otherwise, there's nothing else wrong with it. Eating food sacrificed to other gods has the same inherent issues- where it's technically acceptable, but doing it thoughtlessly emits pollution that hinders your overarching goals as a follower of Christ.And that, complicating Christianity in a way the people you're supposed to be reaching can't handle yet, is a sin in the same way and for the exact same reasons as traditionalists misusing "wives, submit to your husbands" (generally as an excuse to be lazy in the relationship).
(Actually, those two verses in their respective contexts have a lot more to do with each other than I think most people realize, as does the 'women leading in church' thing. Leaders should cater to the default, and people who aren't the default should respect that, because the default is what we're after; your job is to work the margins, their job is to not stop you.)
The reason it's written down is because for most people it isn't self-evident. I think there are people who can do this, and have noticed that "wait a second, apart from fertility [which straight couples aren't getting condemned for the lack of, and traditionally at least there are a surplus of babies to take care of], this isn't actually different if it's 2 guys".
The inherent problem with that is that how sexuality between 2 guys [or 2 girls] usually looks (this is the "find me one righteous man and I won't destroy the city" argument) in a secular environment, but the thing about traditionalists is that the people who are doing that correctly are more likely to be hiding from them in the standard filter-bubbly way that Reds hide from Blues (and vice versa). Not that people who don't function correctly if they aren't doing that are common anyway, much like those mythical women-men that won't function correctly when placed in first-century relationship divisions. Which is why liberals criticize traditionalists for "turn your brain off, don't use your natural talents, you don't have a clearer picture of what is self-evident and what is not [because none of us do]", because all they see is the man burying his talent he was given to invest because he was afraid of doing something wrong with it.
If you Notice those whose houses are not weak yet lack a component claimed vital, maybe their circumstances actually are different?
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