The Bible and gay people

Selective cherry-picking of Bible verses

When Christians use Scripture to claim that it is sinful for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people to sexually express love to one another, I believe that their brand of morality is, at best, selective cherry-picking of Bible verses and, at worst, unconscious projections of their own sexual neuroses upon one segment of the human family. Their attempts to write discrimination against this group into federal and state legislation and into the U.S. and various state Constitutions are said to be motivated by their faith as it is expressed in the Bible.

The Bible contains six verses that mention same-sex activity. One of them, in the story of Sodom, is not about same-sex activity at all; it is about the sin of inhospitality and uses homosexual rape as an example of such. Most of the others do not refer to loving, same-sex activity; again, the target is not homosexual sex but the practice of temple prostitution.

The Old Testament (Hebrew Scriptures) has as its second most prominent theme the poor and God’s response to injustice. In the New Testament, one in every 16 verses is about the poor or the subject of money. In the first three Gospels, the poor are written about in one of every 10 verses, and in the Gospel of Luke, it is one verse in seven. (See Jim Wallis’ God’s Politics)
One wonders why these Christians spend most of their time and millions of dollars trying to eradicate adult, loving, mutually consensual sexual expression between members of the same sex, and proportionally, so little eradicating poverty and the social injustices levied upon the poor.

There is nary a peep from this group of Christians as our government legislates hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks for the wealthiest of our society when over a hundred thousand of the poorest were left on rooftops after Katrina, spectacularly demonstrating the devastating poverty and vulnerability of millions of people in the wealthiest country in the world. Now that is real obscenity. (Claims about all our good works of charity and mercy toward the Gulf states and around the world sooth consciences but keep injustice firmly in place. We are statistically and proportionally-speaking the stingiest country in the world.)

It seems to me that this radical, right-wing contingent of Christians bases its moral agenda on something other than the Bible. Psychotherapists know the power and dangers of unconscious, neurotic projections. The extreme imbalance of Christian preoccupations noted above cannot be rationally accounted for in any other way.

Unconscious, neurotic projections can become shared societal projections onto a particular group that can be manipulated by unscrupulous political leaders for the sole purpose of concentrating power. History has many examples: Nero and the Christians; Hussein and the Kurds; Hitler and the Jews; (whomever) and gay people (see pg. A6, “Gay Marriage Debate Has Broader Import,” The Indianapolis Star, June 3, 2006).