Why the Religious Right Really Hates Homosexuals
I’ve always wondered — and considered as a flaw in Christianity — what kind of God would forever condemn one gender (women) to be subservient instead of equal to the other based entirely on one single act.
For those who didn’t catch the story somewhere along the line: the Christian Bible maintains that their God created a man (Adam) and then a woman (Eve) out of the rib of that man. Instead of just having the chutzpah to out-and-out mandate that women should be considered lesser because they were created out of a man, the Bible launches into an entire narrative on how “sin” came into the world. Long story short, Eve made what God considered to be a bad decision, based on information from a (one assumes smooth-talking) talking snake. (Even though the man subsequently made the same bad decision.)
For that crime, women were forever sentenced to painful labour, a desire for her husband, and a subjection to him.
I’ve had rabbis try to explain this to me. I’ve read a decent amount on it during my time in Seminary. So maybe I’m thick, but I don’t see why a God — who would, by definition be able to see how much PAIN such subjection — would cause would allow such a punishment to stand against women for all eternity. (As if pain in childbearing isn’t enough? As if a desire for one’s husband, including those who would over the centuries, become incredibly abusive wasn’t enough?)
I’m obviously not the only one to think this way — but in the end, my thoughts on the issue only serve as an introduction to an article I read today — the article I’m blogging here.
It is almost axiomatic, I think, that men have used Genesis 3:16 as a weapon for thousands of years. They’ve used it to the point where it isn’t so much a PART of culture, but instead (sadly) still DEFINES our culture. But the gender-equality movement is changing that, with increasing speed. And that change, according to Michelle Goldberg, writing for Religion Dispatches, is seen as an increasing threat not just to American Christianists, but to Fundamentalists of all stripes worldwide.
To be more precise, it is homosexuality, with its tendency to bend traditional gender roles, that threatens the orderly society, ruled by one gender, that men have depended on for so many millenia. Ms Goldberg writes:
Such pressure from the developed world lets anti-gay leaders cloak themselves in anti-imperialist righteousness, in which gay rights become a decadent Western imposition that poor countries must be protected from. [...]
Beneath the globalization of the culture wars, though, lies something deeper—something that has led religious figures worldwide to project a torrent of fears and anxieties onto a small and often powerless minority. European Jews, once attacked as rootless cosmopolitans, have frequently been viewed as symbols of modernity. Today, homosexuality has displaced Jews as symbol and placeholder; as synecdoche for Modernism.
While it is true that plenty of traditional cultures had niches for people who didn’t fit neatly into one gender or another, it is also true that the dichotomy between men and women, and the hierarchy between them, has been at the heart of most human civilizations. “The differences between the two sexes is one of the important conditions upon which we have built the many varieties of human culture that give human beings dignity and stature,” wrote the legendary anthropologist Margaret Mead in her book Male & Female. “We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation; that otherwise in all respects they are simply human beings with varying gifts, no one of which can be exclusively assigned to either sex.”
The modern world undermines such orders, pointing towards just the kind of culture that according to Mead has never existed.[...] Modernity is the enemy of fundamentalist religion, and gender-bending is the hallmark of modernity.
Society today, led by Progressives everywhere, has endeavored to create a society in which genders are equal — a society in which a woman cannot just be tossed off as an incubator for male sperm. Her opinion is just as valid, her thoughts are just as valid, her leadership is just as valid, as any man’s.
I’d found myself wondering, increasingly, over the past year, about why legalizing homophobia had crept to the top of the “Political Action Lists” of many Fundamentalists, even edging out abortion issues to some extent. Goldberg’s insight provides the key. For a woman to be equal to man, but more importantly for a woman NOT to be defined simply in terms of her “contribution … to the creation of the next generation” leaves the Fundamentalists without the underpinnings of many of their abortion arguments. When a woman can be, must be, defined by something outside of her usefulness in procreation, in carrying out HIS line, the MAN loses his say in her ability to choose (defined/circumscribed by Genesis 3:16), and her ability to terminate a pregnancy.
And all this time I thought it was just about money and issue-fatigue.
And, in the end, it’s always nice to know that the Christians hate someone more than than hate Jews. So many enemies. So many threats to their “king-of-the-mountain” status. So much time looking for someone to blame for their own hated status that they don’t have any time to see that their own arrogance and heavy-handed hatred is what’s turning people off.
Even more important, I now have hope that I may see the end of the sort of enforced servitude I’ve hated since my college days, thanks to an unexpected ally.
You have really great insight and I found it unusual for a man to write about women like this, our rights’ the way we’ve been regarded, or disregarded. It was enlightening, thanks-