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CHAPTER TWO

Deeper Than Scripture

Taboo, Shame and Sex-Negativity

Biblical, Cultural, and

Visceral Responses

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth;I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

— Jesus in Matthew 10:34 (NRSV)

Why are the issues of homosexuality and same-gender marriage so extraordinarily divisive and volatile in churches today? Why is the negative gut response to homosexuality so strong in so many people, including people of faith? Why are people rushing to defend marriage between a man and a woman as if it were under attack? What is the source of the panic, as if there are not enough marriage licenses to go around?

Long before the present controversy, the Rev. Eileen Lindner, a Presbyterian minister, once asked me questions like these. She has more than a passing knowledge of the church, then serving the National Council of Churches and holding a Ph.D. in American church history. Having worked on matters of race, women, and abortion, she has observed that the issue of homosexuality ignites passions the like of which she has not seen in these other arenas. This chapter is an attempt, not to completely answer such questions, but to put forward possible explanations. In the present storm of controversy, many Christians are like the disciples hounding the sleeping Jesus during a Galilean storm at sea to do something (see Mark 4:35–41). Why are we so anxious? What makes this conflict different from other recent storms?

When it comes to marriage and family, it must be noted that homosexuality and same-gender marriage are the divisions du jour. In his conclusion to his remarkable From Sacrament to Marriage: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition, cited earlier, John Witte, Jr. notes that “family crises on a comparable scale to those we face today have been faced before. And bitter jeremiads about the end of civil society and the dissolution of all social order have been voiced before— by Chrysostom and Augustine in the fifth century, by Aquinas and Hugh St. Victor in the thirteenth century, by Luther and Calvin in the sixteenth century.”¹

The Visceral: Taboo

What makes homosexuality and same-gender marriage gut-wrenching for many is not simply that they are believed to be unethical, or legislated by others as illegal. It is because homosexuality is taboo, a human custom virtually prerational, part of our cultural mores (thus morality). In my first book, Uncommon Calling, I described my sister guessing my carefully guarded secret: “You're a homosexual!” “How did you know?” I asked. “Oh,” she said, surprised that she was correct, “if you were a maniac going around killing people, you could talk about that, even write a book about it! But no one can talk about homosexuality.” She was accurate; homosexuality is more taboo than violence in our culture, evidenced by the violence that permeates everything from children's cartoons to the plethora of crime dramas on television and at the theater. In contrast, the first television drama about AIDS, An Early Frost, depicted little if any physical contact between the featured male couple—even as one lay dying from AIDS—out of fear of a hostile viewer reaction. In Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, the late Yale historian John Boswell wrote that the homosexual taboo was second only to incest.

To support heterosexuals trying to understand their possibly negative feelings toward homosexuals, ranging from discomfort to repugnance, I explain in my presentations that lesbians and gay men usually suffer similar antagonism toward our own feelings, though this is changing among younger generations. This is why some of the harshest attacks may come from individuals anxious about and repressing their own sexuality or from self-proclaimed “reformed” homosexuals, and why community-building among gays and lesbians is hampered by what most marginalized groups experience as “lateral violence,” negativity directed “ laterally” among members of the oppressed community rather than against oppressors. When combined with the rejecting attitudes of others, including churches, many LGBT people resort to self- destructive behavior or outright suicide, which in turn, is used as evidence of our pathology. Antipathy toward homosexuality is learned by all of us in a way that sexual orientation is not, according to contemporary researchers.²

This underlying feeling must be addressed in any discussion on same-gender marriage. We cannot value, let alone champion, an institution that embraces individuals or behaviors that at the least make us uncomfortable, and at the worst make us sick, sick to our stomachs or sick at heart. Let me give a somewhat comparable example. With the late activist pastor William Sloane Coffin, I am a recovering racist, sexist, and homophobe.³ My racism was never explicit or boorish in its expressions. But, for example, I somehow “got” that mixed race marriage wasn't “the way things should be.” This attitude did not come from my mind, it was ingrained in my gut, and I have no idea where or from whom I learned it. And though my attitudes changed, for a while I still carried a small, strange feeling inside of me when I saw a mixed race couple. If I let that feeling get the better (or the worse!) of me, I suppose I could have offered all kinds of “rational” explanations for my prejudice. But, if push came to shove, my underlying argument against mixed race marriage would have been simply, “Because that's not what I'm used to.” In Same Sex Marriage?, ethicist Marvin Ellison explains that, historically, I was not alone:

As early as 1705, a Massachusetts law was enacted to ban interracial coupling. By the end of the nineteenth century, at least forty states had similar laws forbidding people from marrying a spouse of the “wrong race.” The California courts were the first in the nation to declare an interracial marriage ban unconstitutional, but that ruling was handed down only in 1948. Because of the unfettered power of Jim Crow segregation at the time, the decision was widely denounced as threatening the stability of Western civilization. As one Southern judge argued, “Almighty God created the races, white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”⁴

It took nearly twenty years for the U.S. Supreme Court to catch up to California in 1967's Loving v. Virginia decision, voiding similar bans and defining marriage among our “personal vital rights.” Given the present turmoil over same-gender marriage, it's interesting how Massachusetts and California have figured into both discussions.

Over forty years later, I may still feel a twinge of reservation when I simply “see” a mixed race couple I have not come to know. Yet, interestingly, never had that feeling when my friends na and Chris lived next door to me. She is Italian-American and he is African-American. This configuration of marriage was different from “the way it should be,” according to ingrained prejudice, my gut reaction, but I never had an inkling as their neighbor that it was not “normal.” Similarly, “Fred and Bob” or “Shirley and June” as neighbors or fellow church members help us see “their kind” differently, but not as wrong.

I believe that when human beings cannot identify the source of our discomfort about homosexuality, from whom or from where we learned our homophobia or heterosexism, we come to believe our feelings are natural, inborn, God-given. Opponents would be quick to say the same of homosexual feelings: since most lesbians and gay men report discovery rather than choice of our feelings, we come to believe our feelings are natural, inborn, God-given. The difference lies not only in the research of recent decades, which reveals sexual orientation of any kind is best understood as an unfolding, an unveiling in very early childhood related to a mix of factors, both genetic and psychosocial.⁵ The difference also lies in the fact that, according to the school of thought of cultural anthropologist René Girard, we learn how to be human by imitation, by mimesis, mimicking others. The fact that homosexuals come from heterosexual parents, peers, churches, and cultures belies the notion of homosexuality as learned behavior. On the other hand, that children often hold the same prejudice as their parents, peers, church, or culture suggest we have learned such prejudice through the subtle process of imitation. As the Rodgers and Hammerstein song from South Pacific about racial prejudice suggests, we have to be carefully taught.

Just Plain Dirty

In his book, Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today, Episcopal priest and seminary professor L. William Countryman describes the sense of “dirty” applied to human behaviors in the Holiness Code of Leviticus, where two prohibitions on males acting like females in sexual intercourse occur, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. Personal integrity and social harmony are the general principles underlying both the moral laws (right and wrong) and ritual laws (pure and impure) of the Holiness Code. The laws presupposed orders of creation, categories of existence, that were not to be mixed up. A familiar example of not mixing things up are the kosher laws still practiced as a spiritual discipline by many Jews today: certain foods are not to be served nor stored with other foods. Other examples are the laws against sowing a field with two different kinds of seed, or wearing a garment made of two different materials; both are common practices today.

Countryman illustrates “dirty” with a rather tame example of a contemporary taboo: putting quarters in your mouth, a taboo most of us were taught not to do as children for fear of germs. But I want to use a more vivid example: picking your nose in public. As did many bodily functions, this taboo became the subject of a hilarious Seinfeld episode. A woman Seinfeld was interested in misinterprets him scratching his nose for picking his nose, and is so disgusted, she loses interest. Now, I hope I'm not revealing “too much information” to say that most of us have probably stuck a finger up our noses. But to be “caught with a finger up our nose” is an idiom suggesting profound embarrassment. Public nose-picking is taboo. It is not morally or legally wrong; it is just plain “dirty.” As such, it elicits a visceral response. It's not like we haven't “been there, done that.” But to witness it in public elicits feelings ranging, for most of us, from discomfort to repugnance. That is the nature of taboo. “What is consistent from one culture to another is that purity rules relate to the boundaries of the human body, especially to its orifices,” Countryman writes.⁶

Countryman goes on to explain that this is the nature of the purity laws of ancient Israel. As with any culture, certain things or behaviors were considered “dirty.” Men acting like women in the sex act was one of them. Having sex during menstruation was another. A seminal discharge yet another, and so on. As Catholic scholar Daniel Helminiak points out in What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality, echoing John Boswell and others, the word used in Leviticus to describe such acts, translated as “abomination,” is toevah, which could be accurately translated as “uncleanness,” “impurity,” “dirtiness,” or “taboo”—in other words, what is forbidden culturally and ritually. Helminiak points out that another Hebrew word, zimah, could have been used to mean “what is wrong in itself. It means an injustice, a sin.”⁷ To underscore this careful delineation between what is understood as a sin versus a ritual violation, Helminiak adds that the Greek translation of Jewish scriptures, the Septuagint, translated the Hebrew toevah with the Greek bdelygma, which means ritual impurity, though other Greek words, such as anomia, which meant a violation of law or sin, could have been used.

With all the studies of lesbians and gay men these days, plus our own self-reporting about our experience, I have wondered why more people are not convinced that homosexuality is a natural variation of human sexuality. But I can better understand by looking carefully at one of my own taboos that comes from my childrearing: a toilet is “dirty,” no matter how clean it looks or even is. By contrast, I view a kitchen counter as “clean,” no matter what foodstuffs have been prepared on it, and even when it is slightly messy. Despite the fact that studies have revealed that the cleanest surface in a house is usually the toilet, I hold onto my notion that it is “dirty.” In parallel fashion, we may view homosexuality as “dirty” no matter how loving, and heterosexuality as “clean” even when it is not as loving or as just in its expressions as we would expect. The vital difference in the analogous experiences of taboo, of course, is that mine doesn't interfere with how I view or relate to human beings.

Taboo and Shame

Contemporary writers in psychology and ethics make a distinction between guilt and shame. Guilt helps us take responsibility for our actions. Shame, in contrast, humiliates us to the point of believing ourselves incapable of taking responsibility for our actions, incapable of either confessing or correcting our sins. Whereas guilt suggests we are people who have done something bad, shame makes us feel like bad people. Though one might be ashamed of one's sin, taboos are all about shaming. A gay church member told me that the worst thing that a member of his conservative college campus group could say to another member was, “I will pray for you!” It meant something was seriously awry with the prayer victim's belief or behavior, and the words had the chilling effect of shaming the person for being different, an attempt to shame him or her into conformity. This shaming takes the form of formal and informal shunning in some expressions of Christianity, as in the apostle Paul's admonition to have nothing to do with such persons. When I began a gay Christian group on the Yale Divinity School campus in 1974, a Lutheran professor asked me, “What right do we have to tell these people they shouldn't be ashamed?” My response was, “Why do we feel we have the right to tell 'these people' they should be ashamed?—and we've been doing that for years!”

Shaming is what the men of Sodom were about in Genesis 19. The humiliation of rape was a common way to inflict shame on a defeated people in ancient times—raping not just the women, but the men as well. The intended gang rape of the angels by “all of the men” of the city of Sodom sealed its fate, to be destroyed by God for general wickedness. It is no more homosexual in orientation than similar rape in prisons. To treat a man as a woman in ancient times, or for a man to behave like a woman, was either to remove or relinquish superior male status. Apart from spilling seed outside a womb, another possible reason, this may be a basis for the Levitical taboo of (only) male homosexuality. Not long ago, this form of shaming was used by a few New York policemen accused of sodomizing a suspect with a broom handle, and by a few American soldiers in Iraq accused of sodomizing male captors with implements and photographing them naked in simulated homosexual group acts.

If one believes all the men of Sodom were homosexual, then logic would dictate the men in the above described incidents were also, a conclusion those men would undoubtedly protest. (I can't help but think that open gays in the military might help sensitize the armed services and make this type of behavior less likely. I also want to be clear that New York policemen and the American military as a whole should not be tarred with the same brush as the few perpetrators of these crimes, just as the few pedophile priests and ministers that have come to light should not prejudice us toward priests and ministers as a whole.)

An example of the importance of maintaining one's male status occurs when Jonathan chose, out of love for David, not to fight him and, instead, support him for his father's throne. King Saul viewed it as his son's degradation: “You have chosen the son of Jesse [David] to your own shame, and to the shame of your mother's nakedness” (1 Samuel 20:30). In other words, Jonathan has not behaved like a man, having surrendered his own power to another man. (This story will be discussed in more detail in Chapter Six.) Breaking out of gender conformity is another deeply held taboo, thus the sometimes viscerally negative response today exhibited toward transgender people, “effeminate” men, and “masculine” women.

Shame on Rome!

Toward the end of the first chapter of his letter to the church at Rome, the apostle Paul seems to be utilizing a rhetorical form of humiliation on Gentiles and their idolatry, in which he shames them by declaring they have debased themselves by controverting their “natural” gender and sexual roles:

For what can be known about God is plain … but they became futile in their thinking… . Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or four footed animals or reptiles. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. They were filled with every kind of wickedness …” (Romans 1:19a; 21c, 22–29a)

Then Paul finishes up by listing every kind of wickedness he can think of, though not a list unique to Paul and similar to the moralizers of his time who would say “that's not the way it should be.” It is also similar to the standard laundry list of sins in 1 Corinthians 6:9–11, which includes a couple of words whose meaning has been debated over the centuries, and will be discussed in the next chapter.

I quote so much of this first chapter of Romans because the more one reads of it, the more one may recognize that Paul's tone in this section is at odds with the point of this and others of his letters. The apostle prefaces this viciously shaming diatribe with the theme of the letter, which is salvation by grace through faith: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel,” Paul declares in Romans 1:16, and then quotes Habakkuk 2:4: “The one who is righteous will live by faith.” Apparently Paul is writing because some in the Roman church have resented the fact that others are not following Jewish law, the legalists essentially saying, “that's not the way it should be.” Notice his emphasis on impurity, the violation of ritual law.

Quite apart from what additional biblical scholarship might bring to the passage, and apart from the psychological aspect of choosing against one's own nature, whether heterosexual or homosexual—if one were to observe simply the literary form of this “over-the-top” condemnation, one could conclude that Paul was up to something quite other than what initially meets the eye or ear. The reader familiar with other Pauline writings could conclude that the evangelist who said he would become all things to all people so that they might prove receptive to the gospel is not about to alienate the Gentiles, to whom he felt especially sent. To make plain his purpose, Paul turns the tables on his legalist opponent (“that's not the way it should be”) at the beginning of chapter 2: “Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.” The effect is to shame those who oppose the new freedom in Christ.

A straight Christian ally once told me that she thought that the reason the church had not dealt fairly with lesbians and gay men was because Christians had not been adequately shamed for their mistreatment. I appreciated her sentiment, while disagreeing with her method. Shaming is a way of silencing the other, and silence, to paraphrase the adage, does not necessarily mean agreement. As a member of a minority that has been shamed and silenced too long, I don't want to employ the same weapons on those who oppose us. Audré Lorde admonished us not to dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. And the fact is, opponents voice the questions the answers to which more moderate Christians want to know but may be afraid to ask. In truth, they ask the very questions for which most lesbian and gay Christians are either actively seeking or have already sought answers. That's why gay and lesbian and bisexual and transgender Christians can be helpful in the dialogue on sexuality and gender and marriage, ranging from biblical authority and interpretation to sexual and marital ethics.

Part of the intensity of the discussion of homosexuality comes from our feelings that homosexuality is dirty and something of which we are to be ashamed, whether we are homosexual ourselves or a member of a homosexual person's biological or church family. Thus parents, siblings, and children of gay people fall under the same shadow of shame. “What did we do wrong?” parents, spouses, even children may ask. And “What will the neighbors think?” is not only a question family members might ask. “What will other denominations think?” has been a question posed by governing bodies asked to change church policies. Because neither the church nor the therapeutic profession can honestly or ethically promise change of sexual orientation, there is no “rite of reconciliation” to lift the church and culture out of this shame unless our attitudes about homosexuality themselves change—in other words, unless our customs are reformed, and this taboo alleviated by putting in place rights and protection for same gender marriages.

Unsavory Associations

Taboos reinforce one another. As a former Baptist, I relish the old joke about why Baptists object to intercourse while standing: it might lead to dancing! The discredited domino theory once applied to communism is now applied to homosexuality. “If this taboo falls, it will start a chain reaction.” During the years I served on a denominational task force on homosexuality, I heard many references to “opening Pandora's Box.” Pandora is the “Eve” of Greek mythology, in that she too was the first woman on earth, and her curiosity that opened the box released all evils on earth, much as Eve led the way (to some people's way of thinking) to the introduction of original sin. Both stories clearly come from a patriarchal point of view. Few remember that one good remained behind in Pandora's box: Hope. Similarly, the lineage of Eve would give rise to liberators and prophets, to the Redeemer and the saints—in other words, to hope.

In Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, medieval historian John Boswell documents that, though homosexuality was tolerated and even acceptable at various points of church history, when it was challenged, it was often given unsavory associations, such as bestiality and child abduction. This is done today in a “rational” attempt to explain our pre-rational taboos, our gut feelings about “the way things should be.” Taboos are strongest when linked together. So today many in the Roman Catholic hierarchy, rather than take responsibility for their own cover-ups of pedophile priests who abused either boys or girls, condemn gay priests, as if pedophilia is more common among gay people than among straight people, something studies have not borne out.

Perhaps the most all-encompassing unsavory association in what social psychologists generally consider a sex-negative culture such as ours in the United States is homosexuality's association with sexuality itself, an area with which the church and culture have difficulties. I was part of a regional church legislative body voting on a proposal to open ordination “regardless of sexual orientation.” The vote was tied, 69 to 69. The moderator of the meeting chose to cast the deciding ballot. After a show of clear embarrassment, he voted against the measure, “because,” he said, “of those three little letters at its heart: s-e-x.” He couldn't even say