In 1958 when I was a fourth grader our family moved to Quonset Point, Rhode Island where my dad was soon promoted to lead HS-11, one of the Navy jet-helicopter squadrons defending the east coast from attack by Russian submarines.
We moved to Quonset Point with some trepidation because Hoskins Park — the housing project for military families in those days (now sold, redeveloped, and renamed Wickford Point) — had a long waiting list; we didn’t know where we would live or if we could afford off-base housing.
As it turned out, we got a lucky break. A Navy Lieutenant — who was a Negro — moved his family into Hoskins Park. Some white officers found out and decided their families weren’t going to live in non-segregated housing. As a result, vacancies popped-up, and we got in; we moved-in next door to the Negro officer and his family.
In 1958, my family moved to Quonset Point, Rhode Island. Inexpensive on-base housing was overcrowded. We didn’t know where we would live, or if we could afford to live anywhere.
Lieutenant Brown, his wife and two daughters, lived in the two-story, condo-style apartment on the other side of a thin concrete wall from us.
Despite the custom that white and black families didn’t fraternize in those days, eventually I had encounters, conversations, and interactions with all the members of the Brown family.
Over time, I came to understand how traumatized they were, each in their own way, living in a country that, basically, isolated and mistreated them.
My parents accepted an invitation to the Brown’s for dinner — an event that had all the drama of the movie, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, released nine years later, in 1967.
One encounter involved my parents. The Browns invited them for dinner to get acquainted, and after agonizing about it, Mom and Dad accepted. I think Dad wanted to check them out; to make sure his kids would be “safe” living next door.
After the meal, Dad reported that the Lieutenant’s wife, Jean (Alston), was a good cook, but he couldn’t shake a queasy feeling in his stomach, which spoiled his appetite. He had never interacted with negroes, except servants(everyone called black people negroes in the 1950s); he certainly had not eaten food at the same table. And, unlike my dad, Mr. Brown was a graduate of the Naval Academy.
In that sense, the lieutenant kind of outranked him. According to dad, Academy graduates favored one another and worked hard to help each other achieve promotions. They put non-Academy graduates (like dad) to great disadvantage in the competition for rank, which was fierce inside the Navy.
A black Academy graduate presented a dilemma. Brown was a graduate of the elite Naval Academy with all its privileges and protections; at the same time, he belonged to a race that was, to put it politely, undervalued both by the Navy and the country at large. It was unfamiliar terrain for dad and made him uncomfortable. I remember my parents writing a thank-you note to the Brown’s for their hospitality but as far as I know, they didn’t return an invitation.
Another incident occurred a few weeks later that changed the way I thought about people and what they sometimes go through. It happened on a day when my fourth-grade teacher decided to punish me for violation of good-citizenship. I sassed her, she claimed, because I insisted — in a loud voice before classmates — she couldn’t tell me what to do!She wasn’t my parent!
In my mind, it made sense. To show how wrong I was, she kept me after school to clean the blackboard. She forced me to practice my reading. I left school an hour late.
When I arrived home, I saw Billie — Lieutenant Brown’s sixth-grade daughter — standing on her porch a few feet from ours, crying, and shifting back and forth on her feet in a puddle of — I took a second look to be sure — her own pee. I couldn’t believe it; I didn’t know what to say or do. I ran inside our condo to tell mom.
I wish I could say that Mom brought Billie into our place, helped her clean-up, and gave her a secure place to wait until her mom got home with a key. But mother did nothing like that. Instead, she became animated and began to marvel about how such an embarrassing calamity could befall a sweet girl like Billie. I became annoyed. Why didn’t she ask us? I interrupted. We would have let her use our bathroom!
Maybe she was afraid to ask, mom said. Maybe she was afraid we would say, no.
So afraid she let her stomach burst? I yelled.
1957. Daisy Bates tries to enter Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to rescue her and eight other students from angry whites. It was the following year that our family moved to Quonset Point, Rhode Island.
Some weeks after, I stood alone in the playground behind our building when Billie walked up. We didn’t speak but sat down together on the ground to draw pictures in the gray clay beneath us — clay the housing complex we shared was built on.
It didn’t seem right to sit with someone and not talk but I couldn’t think of anything to say. Billie was a couple of years older. We had little in common, it seemed. We concentrated for a while, in silence, on our art.
Then, she looked up. She fixed her eyes on mine. I didn’t look away. I tried to hold her gaze. Finally, she whispered. She said simply, I hate being colored.
I felt the blood drain from my face. Hate was a bad word. We didn’t use the word hate in our family.
To hear Billie whisper, hate, about herself — hate about something she had no control over or responsibility for, which she couldn’t change, wish away, or escape — upended my internal world. In that moment, the ground shifted beneath my feet.
Somehow, hearing her speak those words — and the mental image I had created in my memory of the day she danced in a pool of her own urine — conflated in my mind. As Billie waded ankle-deep in her own bodily fluids, I heard her screaming. I hate being colored!!! I hate it!! I hate it!I hate it.
In my imagination, I took my place beside her. I raged against God and all the earth for making her colored; for allowing white people to be so insensitive, so mean, so un-caring, so ill-tempered, so prejudiced.
—————
Billie’s father supervised a motor-pool near, but outside, the Quonset Point military base. According to friends of my mom, he was some kind of gas-station attendant. One warm day, he saw me playing outside and asked if I wanted to take a ride with him in his new convertible. I said sure.
He said he wanted to show me something. He was in charge of something and wanted to show me what it was. He wanted to show me what he did.At his work.
I thought, this is a crazy request. After all, I didn’t know what my own dad did. He’d never taken me to work or showed me anything having to do with what he was about when he wasn’t home.
So, I climbed into Mr. Brown’s convertible, top down, and off we went. It turned out that he was good at small talk. I listened happily to his resonant voice and enjoyed the sun and warm breezes as we rambled along. We passed through some old guard shacks, a few barbed-wire-topped chain-link fences, and entered an area so remote and wild, it was hard to believe we were still in Rhode Island.
We drove through a dense grove of trees and up onto a hill. Mr. Brown slowed the car and stopped. The sun blazed into the open convertible. Look, he said. He frowned, then nudged my shoulder and pointed. Look down there.
There were more military vehicles under Navy Lieutenant Brown’s command than I imagined there were cars in the entire world. This photo of a military motor-pool in a western state reminds me of what I saw in Rhode Island.
Below us for as far as my eyes could see, in a valley that stretched to the very edge of Earth, sat thousands of green and gray trucks and jeeps; armored personnel carriers and tanks; military vehicles of every stripe and size, all neatly parked in long straight lines. As a naive fourth grader, I found the view hard to take in. There lay spread below us more vehicles than I imagined existed in the entire world.
It was the second time a member of the Brown family stunned me. I was speechless. Then I said, you’re in charge of all of those trucks? Navy Lieutenant Brown smiled, sadly, I thought, then looked at me like Billie had.
I am, he said.
Billy Lee
Editor’s Postscript: This story is grounded in the memories of a fourth grader of events that occurred almost sixty years ago. The make of Mr. Brown’s car and the nature of the installation visited may or may not be accurate.
After writing this article, Billy Lee learned that Mr. Brown, sadly, passed away on May 22, 2012, at age 85 from cancer. After reading old press releases, he discovered that historian Robert J. Schneller had published a book in 2005 about Mr. Brown’s experiences at the Naval Academy called Breaking the Color Barrier. In 1949, it turns out, Midshipman Brown became the school’s first black graduate.
Unknown to Billy Lee, Wesley Brown had become an historical figure. Billy Lee has asked the Editors to add biographical notes to his post.
In 1958, neither Billy Lee nor Mr. Brown’s neighbors knew that the young Naval officer owned the distinction of being the first black midshipman to graduate from the Naval Academy. In the racial climate of the 1950’s, an achievement like Mr. Brown’s would have been seen as the exception that proved the rule: Negroes were inferior. It would have been bad taste in polite society to call attention to Lieutenant Brown’s achievement.
None of Wesley’s neighbors, Billy Lee recalls, had any idea of the hell he went through to become a Naval officer. In any event, white people in 1958 were so blinded by racism that they would have thought, had they known: Wesley’s accomplishment was of no consequence; it was not worth mentioning or even thinking about.
It’s hard to believe now, but white Americans in 1958 didn’t know their country had a race problem.
Wesley Brown was the first black graduate of the Naval Academy. Because no white midshipmen would share a room with him, he lived alone during the four years it took to earn his engineering degree. When classmates blocked his admission to the academy choir, Wesley joined the cross-country track team where future President and upperclassman, Jimmy Carter, befriended him.
Wesley Brown became the first black American to survive the racial hazing at the Naval Academy and graduate. I knew him to be a happy person with a charitable attitude toward all people. He was a kind and gentle neighbor who, during the year of 1958, made me feel good each time I saw or spent time with him.
His wife, Jean (Alston), led our church choir and taught me to sing. We did a television show under her direction. His daughter, Willetta (Billie), transformed my view of the world with a single sentence. I read somewhere that Carol, the youngest daughter, did well in life.
After our families parted ways, Wesley’s family grew to include sons. Eventually, Wesley Brown and Jean divorced; Wesley married Crystal Malone in 1963. He rose to the rank of Lieutenant Commander before retiring in 1969 to pursue other interests.
As my story tells, it was racism in the Navy that made it possible for me to know the Browns. Midshipman Wesley Brown changed America for the better. He suffered to accomplish it, but he kept his pain to himself and his closest friends.
I am proud to say that once, I knew Wesley Brown and he knew me.
In an effort to bring common sense to government, citizens of the United States voted yesterday to restore control of the Senate and House of Representatives to the Republican Party. Barack Hussein Obama, the Kenyan usurper — the first modern president to misplace his birth certificate — called the vote, idiotic.
Kenyan Usurper Barack Obama (KUBO)
Republicans have vowed to quickly demonstrate their ability to lead by promising to impeach both President Obama and VP Joe Biden so that sobbing John Boehner — the House Majority Leader (and next in line) — can ascend to the Oval Office.
Boehner, for his part, pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act and return health-care in America to what it has always been — unaffordable.
Sobbing John Boehner
The Grand Old Party promised to eliminate taxes on anyone earning over one-million dollars per year to “free up the economy” and bring prosperity to America — like was done in 2008, at the end of the Bush administration.
The GOP pledged to improve racial segregation by offering low cost loans to gated communities, exclusive golf resorts, and home-schoolers.
Triumphant GOP honchos guaranteed they will annihilate ISIS, totally eradicate diseases like Ebola and the dreaded GAY, and make Ted Cruz a household name. They pledged to intensify the national campaign to improve racial segregation by offering low-interest loans to gated-communities, private golf-resorts and home-schools.
And — in a bold election year tip-of-the-hat to Alaska, Wisconsin and Michigan — they swore to raise the temperature of planet Earth to a more comfortable setting by ignoring silly scientists who are always belly-aching about global warming.
GOP leaders agreed to work with Democrats to fund firearms training for preschoolers.
GOP paladins vowed to construct a half-mile wide oil-filled ignite-able moat (you know, the kind they dig around castles) to stop the huddledMexican masses yearning to breathe free from ever crossing the border into the United States again.
Last (but not least) they agreed to work with Democrats to fund firearms training for preschoolers.
Not Jesus.
Christian leaders praised today’s election results: it pleased Jesus, it really did, to learn that responsible, rich people with good values were finally going to fix things in America.
No more Muslim presidents, GOP preachers asserted confidently. Nor brown-skinned, another giggled.
Blaise Pascal was a man who suffered terribly his entire life until he died at age 39 from a metastasized stomach cancer. His mother died when he was 3 years old; his father when he was 28.
For those who aren’t familiar with his life, let me point out that he was French, raised by his sisters, educated by his father, and very involved in the religious controversies of his time (1623-1662). He was an inventor and mathematician of the highest order. His sufferings — his physical ailments and psychological agonies — are legendary.
I won’t burden people with the details of his life — historians and biographers have written many books to help folks understand this tragic man, if anyone is interested. What I want to do is share, in English, some of the clever things he wrote during his short life and provide a link to his books, if anyone is interested in reading further.
Most of the quotations in this essay were first published some years after his death, gleaned from scraps of paper found among his personal belongings. Had they been published during his lifetime, he might have become even more controversial than he actually was. The added stress of additional criticism from contemporaries might have shortened his life even more.
Blaise Pascal had what modern people would call a negative attitude toward groups like the Jesuits and possibly the Catholic Church, which declared five tenets of his Calvinist-style religious order, the Jansenists, heresy when he was 30 years old and still grieving for his lost father. But mostly, he had a negative attitude toward other people and himself, all of whom he considered to be hopelessly wicked.
Sensitive individuals who suffer like Pascal did, it seems to me, find it more natural than others who live easier lives to think that the world is a hostile place populated by selfish and uncaring people in need of a savior.
Pascal is reported to have said, Sickness is the natural state of Christians. He spoke his dying words in a moment of sublime clarity amid a chaos of physical suffering. He whispered helplessly, May God never abandon me.
Pascal solved several previously intractable problems associated with cycloids.
Below are some samples of Pascal’s thoughts, which I found interesting and a little sad when first I read them many years ago. His ”pensees” seem to be his way of making sense of a world that held no comfortable place for him to lay his head; a world devoid of a mother’s touch to reassure him; a world lacking the medicines and psychological insights he needed to find the peace, freedom from pain, and the joy for living so many of us in the modern world freely pursue.
Blaise Pascal was oppressed by the heightened discernment of a brilliant mind smothered by relentless suffering. His intelligence (contemporaries called him a prodigy) enabled this sensitive man to articulate his suffering through the lens of Christian philosophy, which he adopted as his own.
Here are some of his thoughts:
Myself at twenty is no longer me.
Christian piety destroys the self. Human civility conceals and suppresses it.
It is a bad sign when someone is seen producing outward results as soon as he is converted.
Sleep, you say, is the image of death; for my part I say that it is rather the image of life.
We are standing on sand; the earth will be dissolved, and we will fall as we look up at the heavens.
Life is nothing but a perpetual illusion; there is nothing but mutual deception and flattery. No one talks about us in our presence as he would in our absence.
Man is nothing but disguise, falsehood and hypocrisy…. He does not want to be told the truth.
Each rung of fortune’s ladder which brings us up in the world takes us further from the truth, because people are more wary of offending those whose friendship is most useful and enmity most dangerous. A prince can be the laughing-stock of Europe and the only one to know nothing about it.
Is it not true that we hate the truth and those who tell it to us, and we want them to be deceived to our advantage, and want to be esteemed by them as other than we actually are?
It is no doubt an evil to be full of faults, but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and unwilling to recognize them, since this entails the further evil of deliberate self-delusion.
The most unreasonable things in the world become the most reasonable because men are so unbalanced. What could be less reasonable than to choose a ruler of a state the eldest son of a queen?
When we have heard only one side, we are always biased in its favor.
To the church: There is no need to be a theologian to see that their only heresy lies in the fact that they oppose you.
It is false zeal to preserve truth at the expense of charity.
Humiliations dispose us to be humble.
It is better not to fast and feel humiliated by it than to fast and be self-satisfied.
God can bring good out of evil, but without God we bring evil out of good.
God will create an inwardly pure Church, to confound…the inward impiety of the proud Pharisees. …. For, although they are not accepted by God, whom they cannot deceive, they are accepted by men, whom they do deceive.
We all act like God in passing judgments.
Do small things as if they were great, because of the majesty of Christ, who does them in us and lives our life; and great things as if they were small and easy, because of his almighty power.
They do both good works and bad to please the world and show that they are not wholly Christ’s, for they are ashamed to be.
Jesus was abandoned to face the wrath of God alone. Jesus is alone on earth, not merely with no one to feel and share his agony, but with no one even to know of it.
Silence is the worst form of persecution.
No one is allowed to write well anymore.
You brand my slightest deceptions as atrocious, while excusing them in yourselves as the [(way of your church)].
Would God have created the world in order to damn it? Would he ask so much of such feeble people?
Persecution is the clearest sign of piety.
Which is harder, to be born or to rise again? That what has never been should be, or that what has been should be once more?
All faith rests on miracles.
How happy I should be if…someone took pity on my foolishness, and was kind enough to save me from it in spite of myself.
We must make no mistake about ourselves: we are as much automaton as mind.
You would soon have faith if you gave up a life of pleasure.
We never do evil so fully and cheerfully as when we do it out of conscience.
The proper function of power is to protect.
If everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.
Fear not, provided you are afraid, but if you are not afraid, be fearful.
God hides himself. He has left men to their blindness, from which they can escape only through Jesus Christ.
I marvel at the boldness with which these people presume to speak of God.
It is an appalling thing to feel all one possesses drain away.
Who has more cause to fear hell, someone who does not know whether there is a hell, but is certain to be damned if there is, or someone who is completely convinced that there is a hell, and hopes to be saved if there is?
Truth is so obscure nowadays and untruth so well established that unless we love the truth we shall never recognize it.
“Yet I have left me seven thousand.” I love these worshippers who are unknown to the world, and even to the prophets.
We never love anyone, only their qualities.
Must one kill to destroy evildoers? That is making two evildoers in place of one. Overcome evil with good.
We are nothing but lies, duplicity, contradiction, and we hide and disguise ourselves from ourselves.
As I write down my thought it sometimes escapes me, but that reminds me of my weakness, which I am always forgetting….
Man’s sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things are marks of a strange disorder.
It is a fearful blindness to lead an evil life while believing in God.
Pascal’s death mask.
That’s enough for now.
Blaise, I pray you have found the happiness in Heaven that eluded you on Earth.
UPDATE, JUNE 15, 2020: Today, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that discrimination against gay and transgender workers is unconstitutional. Gays and transgender people are now protected by federal law, which forbids discrimination.
UPDATE, JUNE 26, 2015:Today, the Supreme Court of the United States approved the right of any two unrelated adults to marry. This article, written one year ago for both gay and straight Christians, remains relevant because it addresses issues of Christian marriage.
I’ve noticed (how could anyone not notice?) that some folks use the Bible to browbeat people who are gay. Every once in a while, not often, people are surprised to learn that persons leading the charge against gays are gay themselves. And people — sometimes — know. Somehow, folks who have the courage to self-disclose become the target of people who are working through their self-loathing by bullying. It can become a heart-wrenching spectacle.
I’m old enough to remember years ago when Anita Bryant, the former Florida orange juice spokesperson, led a national crusade against gays. Her followers’ approach to the issue of homosexuality was to show up to Gay Pride events with signs reading, you are all going to hell.
In the midst of one of her anti-gay campaigns her marriage fell apart. The media reported, apparently in error, that her husband was gay. One reporter, who knew better, reported her husband was a homo-sapien.
Some folks who have found themselves on the receiving end of hostile condemnation have complained that Christians are rude and insensitive. I remember one kid complaining on TV about the awful treatment his gay parents received from Christians during a parade they attended. It hurt, he said.
Anyway, the Bible is clear, isn’t it?
God judges people with the same mercy (or lack of mercy) they show others, to paraphrase Jesus. Somewhere in the Bible is the promise that when our ways please God, enemies make peace with us.
Didn’t Jesus call folks to be peacemakers and witnesses of his love for all people? It must be possible to love gay people without scaring them half to death and humiliating them.
I’ve been thinking: why not write about a few well-known passages in the Bible that seem to address the issues of gay love and share a few insights? It seems to be a subject on a lot of people’s minds these days.
Of course, I’m not a theologian. I’m a pontificator, right? These ideas are my opinions, subject to change if anyone points out their errors.
Mostly, I’m asking questions about certain Bible verses to try to help people think about ways churches can make the road to Christ an easier walk for gay folks and those who love them.
It’s a sensitive subject in some churches, my own included. I hope people don’t take my word for anything except to get their thinking started. Maybe some will talk with others they know and trust who might have a similar interest.
This article speaks to straight Christians, mostly, whose ideas about sexuality may possibly be shaped more by prejudice and ignorance than by what is written in the Bible. I hope gay Christians will join the discussion. If any are reading now, insights are important. Submit comments at the end of the article, anyone who cares.
In the USA we have the LGBTacronym. It stands for lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender. Some folks are adding “Q” for questioning; various other letters are sometimes added to include related like-minded groups.
Fair enough.
I think the LGBTQ acronym is appropriate for secular discussions of sexuality. It is a shield of unity for folks who are struggling to cope with the pain of society’s prejudice and bigotry.
But for Christians, it seems to me, gay sexuality discouraged by the Bible is more narrowly defined — transgender issues are not mentioned, for one thing.
Gay sex is described in graphic terms only in the Old Testament — a collection of books written thousands of years ago; it recalls for us that men who ”lay with men in the same way they lay with women” were put to death in Old Testament times in the same way as adulterers and those who practiced six other categories of sexual activity.
Oddly, under Old Testament law, a man who committed adultery could escape execution if his sex partner was the wife of either his uncle or brother. He suffered the curse of childlessness, instead.
Should a man sleep with a menstruating woman, both were punished by being cut-off from their people.
And for those who didn’t get the message that sexual sin was serious, the book of Deuteronomy reveals that newly-wed women discovered to be non-virgins were executed and their marriages annulled.
Punishments for sexual sins thousands of years ago during Old Testament times were severe.
The Bible contains 66 books, 31,102 verses, and over 727,000 words.
In the entire Bible (66 books, 31,102 verses, over 727,000 words) little is written on the subject of gay sex or relationships — on gay sex: a dozen or so verses in nine or so books — on gay relationships: one interesting story in the book of Samuel about the love relationship of David with King Saul’s son, Jonathan.
The Bible says their love was more deeply felt than the love between a man and a woman. In this story, at least, it seems the Bible permitted two men to love one another. But it doesn’t seem to suggest, at least to me, that the love shared by David and Jonathan had a sexual dimension.
Some Christian leaders have written that homosexual activity is among the worst sins people commit. How is it then that homosexual activity is not mentioned in the Ten Commandments, the bedrock moral teaching of the Bible? How is it that Christ himself never mentioned it?
And if all sin — any sin — separates people from God, how can any particular sin be judged worse than any other, unless folks are speaking in a secular sense? And if they speak in a secular sense, aren’t they obligated to remember that, in America at least, people have protected rights to believe or not believe pretty much anything they want when it comes to religion or any other subject?
It’s something called freedom, and it applies to both Christians and non-Christians.
Neither do I condemn you. Go now and leave this life of sin.
In this article I am writing to Christians, both gay and straight. And in this context, I have to admit that a fair reading of the Bible reveals that the handful of writers who addressed the issue said plainly that sex between men was sin. Those who submit themselves to Christ Jesus have an obligation, as everyone does, to repent and leave this life of sin, as Jesus advised the famous woman caught in the act of adultery.
The woman’s accusers planned to kill her. Jesus saved her life and set her free.
Fomenting hysteria and supporting anti-gay political movements are unseemly for Christian churches, especially in light of the small number of verses about gay-sex in the Bible.
Churches better serve God when they transform themselves into safe places for gay men and women who belong to Christ to worship and enjoy the friendships to which they are entitled as members of the Christian community.
A gay Christ-professing man or woman should never be afraid to lose friends or face church discipline for being true to themselves and others, even as their process of sanctificationis ongoing.
[Sanctification is a technical term used by theologians to refer to the process whereby the LORD, over the lifetime of a believing sinful person, transforms that person to holiness. The process is not finished until after the believer dies and Christ presents them holy and spotless before God, the Father. The Editors]
It might be helpful to consider this: in contrast to its paucity of gay-sex verses, the Bible contains hundreds of condemnations of hetero-sexual activity including, but not limited to, masturbation, fornication, adultery, rape, and prostitution. I mention these because an important theme in the Bible is that sexual ”impurity” separates people from God. Some leaders claim it impacts marriages and leads to consequences like divorce.
Depending on the translation, the word, homosexuality, appears only once (or twice) in the Bible — in the New Testament. In one passage, the writer explains that the law of God is good when it is used properly. He says the law is made to guide breakers of the law, like those who practice homosexuality, to cite one group among eleven listed in the verse.
The Old Testament passages that warn men to avoid sex with other men are the basis of the New Testament passages just mentioned. Were it not for the sensitivity of some, these verses might go unnoticed.
The passages were written three thousand years ago — before modern medicine and antibiotics; before innovators invented condoms or even soap. If modern society lacked doctors, medicines, condoms, and soap, wouldn’t it make sense to caution men (and women) to avoid unprotected sex with multiple partners?
I don’t know of a single religion that advocates executing non-virgin women who marry, even though a verse in Deuteronomy seems to demand it. Execution has outlived itself. In the USA religious freedom means that extreme religious views have little chance to become law.
Many Christian leaders, perhaps most of them, say, no. It has nothing to do with health. The reason for prohibition is to promote sanctity of marriagebetween one man and one woman.
But the Old Testament was written when powerful men — many of them Bible heroes — took hundreds, sometimes many hundreds, of wives and concubines. Many less-powerful men in ancient societies couldn’t marry because powerful rulers reduced numbers of available women.
An argument can be made that polygamy increased temptation in ancient times for single men to couple. But there were risks. Those who practiced gay sex risked their health and lives. Effective treatment against infection was non-existent.
In the same way, powerful men who practiced polygamy were themselves at risk for sexually transmitted disease should their wives submit themselves to other men. Adultery became a capital crime punished by pulverizing offending women with rocks until they died.
The rise of HIV/AIDs in modern times is a reminder of what gay men suffered during bygone Old Testament eras. Most folks agree that sex in ancient times, despite its pleasures, always posed downside risks. Many of these risks have been mitigated in modern times.
It should be easy to understand why leaders of ancient civilizations took a keen interest in protecting vulnerable, often ignorant, people from harming themselves. These concerns sometimes migrated into their written documents, like those dozen verses found in nine books of the Bible.
The story of Sodom is used to justify suppression of gays in many parts of the world. What does the story actually say?
What about Sodom and Gomorrah? This famous story is found in the Book of Genesis, written about 3,000 years ago. It is the basic text in the Bible used to justify the suppression of gays in many parts of the world. It’s time to take a closer look.
What, exactly, happened in the ancient city of Sodom?
According to the story in the Bible, the LORD appeared to Abraham in the form of three men. They discussed the town of Sodom. Abraham, fearing for the lives of the innocent, argued that destroying the city was not just. The three men agreed. They would not destroy the city, they said, if they found as few as ten good men.
The LORD went to Sodom, this time in the form of two angels. They entered Sodom, where the men living there threatened them with rape, presumably because they were beautiful.
I don’t want to get into the complexities of Christian theology (because I’m not a theologian, and it’s a sensitive subject), but permit me to point out that some believe the three men who discussed Sodom with Abraham were the Holy Trinity; that is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the Triune God as it were, of Christian orthodoxy.
Later, according to this view, the LORD entered Sodom in the form of the two angels mentioned earlier, who personified — or perhaps were — Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit. God the Father remained, presumably, at a safe distance outside the city, because some say the nature of his Holiness would have brought instant death to any sinner who looked at Him.
All the men living in Sodom, young and old, turned out to see the angels. Their reaction was not to welcome the representatives of the living God, but to attack the house where they were staying to gain access to rape them.
If you were God, what would you do? If the angels were brothers, is there anyone who would stand by and just let things happen? Of course not. God blinded the attackers to enable the angels and their host family to escape; He ignited a volcano and buried the city of Sodom under its ashes.
My question is this: was it the homosexuality of some of the men in Sodom that upset God? Or was it the predatory sexual appetites of all the men of Sodom for two of God’s most trusted messengers?
Certainly the attack provoked God’s sense of justice, and it became personal, because the men of Sodom threatened to degrade and possibly kill the two essential envoys God would ultimately task to redeem humanity. In fact, according to the view I described earlier, the men of Sodom attacked God Himself, a stupid thing for anyone to try.
There is a lot here to think about. The men of Sodom went to war against God, and God taught them the painful lesson that he protects his own, some of whom, presumably, lived in Sodom’s vicinity and had become its victims, much as God’s envoys almost had. Can there be any doubt, after reading this story, that God will defend those who belong to him?
It might be helpful to pause for a moment to say a few words about angels. The Bible describes angels as being neither male nor female; they don’t procreate or marry. They don’t have sexual relations.
It’s not that their sexuality is ambiguous. They don’t have a sexual identity! They are not sexual beings. To paraphrase Jesus, there is no sex (marriage or giving in marriage) in heaven.
Keeping the words of Jesus in mind, it seems reasonable to believe that most will agree that subjecting an angel to a sexual assault rises to the level of a horrible crime punishable, in this case at least, by death.
All the men in Sodom, both gay and straight, participated in the crime against God’s envoys. It turned into a war the men had no chance to win.
According to the Bible account, all the men in Sodom, both young and old, participated in this outrage. It means that some of the men could not have been homosexuals. In fact, the majority were not, if anyone chooses to use their common sense to read the passage.
Can any reasonable person extrapolate that all men from then until the end of time stand condemned, because they, like the men of Sodom, want to have sex with people they’ve only just met and don’t really know?
I’m not sure. Maybe. Yet some use this story to condemn only the men who were gay, and not only that, they condemn all gay men for all time. It doesn’t seem fair.
In fact it’s not fair; it’s not even biblical. The prophet Ezekiel gives the reasons for Sodom’s destruction in chapter sixteen of his eponymous book and explains clearly that other cities were worse in God’s eyes than Sodom, including, of all cities, the City of Peace: Jerusalem. And he predicts that God will someday restore both Sodom and Jerusalem; and he explains why. Click on the link and read the chapter, anyone who doesn’t believe it.
Ok, readers. Maybe it’s time for a break. Take some deep breaths. Inhale through the nose. Exhale through the mouth. Exhale slowly. Good. Good. OK, then. Let’s move on.
May I now, please, be allowed to pose another question, this time from the New Testament? May I humbly ask if it is possible, just possible, that another Scripture passage is being misread by some possibly gay-intolerant Christians?
Many of us are familiar with the words written by Paul where he says of humanity, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones.
I’ve heard Christians say that this passage refers to lesbianism. But let’s slow down and think for a minute. Doesn’t it seem reasonable — wouldn’t the passage make better sense — if the shameful and unnatural relations Paul condemns are between the women and their husbands? Doesn’t the passage, when read properly, reflect the conservative attitude of Paul, who wrote it, and the attitudes of early Christians as recorded in other non-biblical texts?
Isn’t this view consistent with the passage Paul wrote exhorting married couples to keep their marriage beds pure and undefiled? Can there be any doubt that early Christians believed — based on their reading of passages in the Old Testament — that certain sexual acts were unclean and defiling, regardless of who performed them?
Saint Dominic’s Catholic Church, San Francisco, California
After all, the early Christian Church permitted only missionary-position style sex to heterosexual couples who the Church itself married — and then solely for the purpose of producing offspring. Sex was of course forbidden to anyone not married.
In fact, sex was forbidden even to those who were married if they served the Church in any leadership position whatsoever — this according to the 33rd Canon of the Council of Elvira in AD 306. This conservative view has been the traditional position of the Catholic Church for centuries.
By this difficult — some might say impossible — standard, many congregants of the forty-thousand Christian denominations in the world today might be standing before God guilty of sexual rebellion and in need of forgiveness.
Straight Christians, many of them it seems, are in the same sexual predicament as their gay brothers and sisters.
What are we to do? How do we avoid Hell? One thing Christians might do is try to understand this simple idea: straight people are in the same sexual sin-boat as gay people. Of course, they are. Think about it.
Straight people want biblically-forbidden sex like almost everyone else. They are tempted to act out their unbiblical sexual proclivities, many of them, within their marriages and against God’s will — if we adopt the Church’s historically orthodox and conservative position on sexuality, which admonishes Christians to keep their marriage beds pure and undefiled.
Jesus brings forgiveness and grace to Scripture and offers hope to people overwhelmed by sexual suffering who once faced execution for their sexual behavior.
But those who belong to Christ Jesus are united by him, according to Scripture, into one holy people. Yes, each of us is self-condemned by our own behavior, even by our own unbiblical sexual behavior inside our marriages, if the view of the New Testament writer and the Catholic Church is fully accepted.
When studying the Bible, people learn that everyone — all of us; gay and straight — once we submit our lives to Christ are made righteous before God by Jesus’s death in our place on the cross.
The Old Testament death sentence for sexual sins is endured by Jesus alone who reconciles each person to God. Then, over time, God’s Holy Spirit transforms all into a people worthy to spend eternity in heaven.
And this is my view. The Bible plainly says that Christ Jesus provided a way out of our dilemma. Jesus really is the way, the truth and the life, as he said. As the Wordof God, Jesus has the authority to both fulfill Scripture and to meet its demand for justice through his sacrificial death on a Roman cross.
This concept of grace is a central theme of the Bible. It is repeated twice; once in the Old Testament (Psalm 32) and once in the New Testament (Romans 4):
Blessed are those whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed are those whose sin the Lord will never count against them.
Who are the people the Bible talks about, whose sins are covered? They are me and you and everyone we know.
Jesus brings the concept of forgiveness and grace to Scripture and offers hope to the fallen; hope to those who once faced execution for their sexual behavior. And Jesus, through his Holy Spirit, gives us the ability to treat our marriage partners with the honor, dignity, and respect owed anyone who belongs to God.
The Bible says people will someday live in a time when the law of God is written on their hearts. I really believe that time is now.
The law is written on our hearts.
The law is no longer written on stone, unless it is our hearts that are stone. We know in our hearts — where the law lives — we must love more our wives and husbands, our gay sons and daughters, our gay sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, and especially our gay neighbors.
Shouldn’t we be praying for each other, that Jesus will give people the strength and grace to endure the sexual suffering they are sure to face in this life on Earth?
We know full well (because Jesus told us) that there is no sex (marriage and giving in marriage) in Heaven. This fact alone should give folks comfort, because it means no one will be taking their sexual identity with them.
All who enter Heaven will be free of sexual sin and sexual suffering. People will enter as brothers and sisters of Jesus, in complete victory over sins that once separated them on Earth. We will enter Heaven celebrating freedom. Everyone, even the most sexually-imprisoned, has this hope, in Christ Jesus.
This much folks should know. Love pleases God more than hate. They should know that tolerance and inclusion please God more than intolerance and exclusion, because the Bible says, God is love.
But those who belong to Christ Jesus know something more. If we honestly face our past and examine our hearts, we know that God loved us first, before we even knew who He really was, while we were still numbering ourselves — many of us — among the most God-hating people on Earth.
Don’t folks have a duty to love those who are like what they used to be — ignorant of who God is and ignorant, even, of who they themselves are? Of course they do. It’s difficult, because most want to forget the past and move on. No one wants to be reminded that everyone is trapped in a quicksand of sin; that absent Christ Jesus they have no hope of rescue.
Can Christians move on without first offering out-stretched hands to fallen friends? Some can be found within our churches. They are sexual sinners like us.
And just like us, they always will be.
God loved us first, before we even knew who He was.
I hope that Christians have love enough to accept their gay brothers and sisters in the name of Christ Jesus; that they have the wisdom to see that we share the same daily struggle against sin; that we have the presence of mind to beg Jesus to lift us out of the muddy waters of sin, together if necessary; to wash us clean with His blood that he shed for us in suffering.
Pray that the LORD forgives us, accepts us, and loves us unconditionally, which is nothing more than everything we’ve ever wanted.
Billy Lee
Post Script: The story behind the publication of this article is told in Writing Free. The Editorial Board
From 1950 to 1980, before the personal computer revolution and the birth of the Internet, a vigorous and pervasive paper media flourished in America. The underground press — as it was called then — included not only thousands of newspapers, but literary gazettes and alternative periodicals.
Hippie Rescues Drowning Child. Michigan legend, Denny Preston, illustrated this famous cover from the Underground Press.
Historian Ken Wachsberger is now working with libraries and publishers to find, rehabilitate, and digitize hundreds of underground publications that otherwise will be lost to history as they decay to dust in closets and basements across America.
Not on my watch, Kenny has pledged.
Historian Ken Wachsberger is the Director of the Digitizing our History Project
The task is enormous. [ click on link above to see how big ] The number of publications is in the thousands.
The underground press got its energy from millions of people who opposed war during a period when the United States raged racist wars in countries like Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Countless men and women of conscience opposed segregation in America; they dedicated big chunks of their lives to helping our country come to grips with its sordid racial past.
The underground press injected energy into a cultural revolution that brought hope to women, gays, racial minorities, the poor, the disadvantaged, and the physically and mentally challenged.
During the thirty years between 1950 and 1980 the underground press brought a fresh point of view, which changed not only America but the world. The earth became a better place to live for hundreds of millions of people who had been burdened and locked-out by discrimination and prejudice — the ravages of war and scarcity — brought by the greed and power of men, mostly, who didn’t give a care about who they hurt.
Today it seems like if it’s not on the internet, people think it never happened. If a PDF, Word file, blog, or web-site doesn’t write about it — or a YouTube video doesn’t feature it, people give up looking for records from past that exist only in the memories of folks too old to understand the internet enough to preserve their experience for the folks who will come after.
The risk to everyone — to the people who lived and suffered these changes — is that everything the smartest generation learned and accomplished will be forgotten.
Civilization will slide back into old the habits and ways that have wrecked society after society over the entire history of humankind. The politics of exclusion will push back the politics of inclusion. Peace will give way to war. Open and free-living will give way to gated communities and a fortress mentality.
The lessons learned from the struggle to save America will be lost, and our country will have to relearn them, at great loss to our national momentum toward a better life for all. Should totalitarianism take root, freedom will disappear, forever.
It’s a risk every thinking person is wise to take seriously.
The project to digitize the legendary past is big and important. I am grateful to Ken Wachsberger and his team for the effort they are making to save our history when so many seem ready to put it behind at great peril to future generations.
