Your Daily Gay Devotional

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

I mentioned that I would share some of the things I have found in my research. I would like to share a couple of tidbits that make queer cool! Excerpts from The Bible and Homosexuality By Rev. Mona West, Ph.D. Only a small number of passages in the entire Bible reference same-sex sexual activity (six out of sixty-six books of the entire Bible). Obviously this topic was not of great concern to the biblical writers. Yet these verses have been used to justify hatred, condemnation and exclusion of God's lesbian and gay children. The Story of ..:NAMESPACE PREFIX = ST1 />Sodom in Genesis 19 This understanding is helpful when we read the story of the city of Sodom, Lot, and the visitors (or angels). The men of Sodom want to 'know' (yadah - a Hebrew word that can mean sexual intercourse) the foreigners who have come to Lot's house. In essence they want to rape them in order to show their social and cultural dominance over them. This story is not a condemnation of homosexuality, but is a story about rape and inhospitality. In other biblical texts (Ezekiel 16:49, Luke 17:28-29) Sodom's 'sin' is not identified as homosexuality, rather, their sins were pride, failure to help the poor, and lack of hospitality to foreigners. Leviticus "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination." (18:22) "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them." (20:13) These verses are part of the Holiness Code in the Old Testament book of Leviticus (chapters 17-26) that attempted to spell out ways the people of Israelwould act differently than their Mediterranean neighbors. In light of the previously mentioned sexual practices of Israel's neighbors, it becomes clear that this prohibition in Leviticus was an attempt to preserve the internal harmony of Jewish male society by not allowing them to participate in anal intercourse as a form of expressing or gaining social and political dominance. These verses in no way prohibit, nor do they even speak, to loving, caring sexual relationships between people of the same gender.