Same Gender Relationships
Today, the California Supreme Court will begin hearing oral arguments in the Proposition 8 case with a decision set to come in 90 days.
Back when I was in college, a gay friend of mine was putting on an educational program called “Homosexuality and Spirituality.” This was the second time that she was putting on the program. The previous year, her program attracted massive amounts of fundamentalist Christians who were mostly acting as the Fred Phelps of the time. They seemed to have the goal of disrupting the program and calling everyone evil sinners. So when my friend decided to run the program again the following year, she called in the big guns.
I attended the program at her request for the specific purpose of distracting the entire fundamentalist Christian group from bothering the people who actually wanted to take part in the program. Basically, I was to get a small group discussion going on why they felt that homosexuality was bad. Many Christians were honest with me and pointed out that the one and only reason why they thought homosexuality was bad was because the Bible said so. While these Christians were honest with me, they were easy to argue with. The Bible of course says a lot of things that people today do not follow and of course would not follow. Slavery would be the first that would come to mind.
Some Christians would tell me that it isn’t about the Bible at all and that they would be against homosexuality simply because it is “unnatural.” How so, I would ask? Isn’t anything in the natural world, by definition, “natural?” Apparently not, since they make a distinction between God made (natural) and human made (unnatural). So of course I couldn’t resist following this line of thinking to its logical conclusion. If everything man made is unnatural and unnatural is bad, than we do a whole lot of unnatural things all the time and homosexuality would be the least of our problems.
Some Christians would be forced to say that it is all about the sex. They would tell me that the purpose of sex is to procreate and so therefore any sex, which makes procreation not possible or not the focus would be immoral and wrong. I would immediately ask this person how they feel about birth control and if they think that people who are infertile or sterile should be allowed to marry or have sex? While some Christians do have issue with birth control, they are not usually as animated on the subject as they are about homosexuality. And few if any people seem to think that heterosexual couples who can’t have children should be banned from marriage or even sexual activity. Maybe we should have a fertility test given before the State grants a couple a marriage license. And what if a couple can have children but simply choose not to have children? Is that morally wrong? Such a position is laughably ridiculous. Besides, why does sex have to have only one divine purpose? Maybe sex has different purposes for different people at different times in their lives. But all this is beside the point.
The fact is that homosexuality has very little to do with sex and more to do with attraction, love, and relationships. To claim that homosexuality is purely about sex is really inaccurate. Just as it is inaccurate to claim marriage is all about sex and not about sharing ones life with another. Sex is of course part of a relationship but anyone who marries someone purely out of sex will probably find themselves divorced very quickly. So maybe it is a Public Relations (PR) issue, which has helped the Religious Right to demonize homosexual and to get Californians to ban same sex marriage. Maybe we shouldn’t refer to homosexuals as homosexuals. Instead we should refer to gay people as being in a same gender relationship. Christians get way too hung up on sex and so maybe if we reframe the issue in the form of a loving relationship we can help to take this issue out of the Culture War and help to get our friends in the Same Gender Relationship Community some much needed equal rights to marry.
Filed under: Gay Issues, Politics, Religion, sex
