My good friend Poffo wrote this and I just have to share it because I think it’s spot on.
** Why Homosexuality is REALLY Considered Wrong by the Religious **
The only reason and i stress, the ONLY reason(s), homosexuality was ever considered a “sin” during the Bronze and Iron Age (when the bible was written) comes down to 4 things, and they are:
#1.) It was a patriarchal, male-dominated society, geared toward creating large families and continuing the bloodline and family name. Children were your legacy, your way of ensuring your own survival, etc. Especially with struggling races like the Jews, who were constantly being oppressed and attacked and enslaved by other, more dominant, warring cultures. Now, if you’re a gay (male or female), you’re NOT reproducing. No procreation means no children, and this made absolutely no sense to the people of old and it made being gay a complete oxymoron in terms of your survival rate, bringing honor to your family, etc.
#2.) When the armies of warring tribes would conquer an opposing army, many times they would sodomize the other defeated soldiers, often raping them in a “homosexual” way in front of the surviving men, in order to crush their spirits and break their resolve. This was considered abhorrent for obvious reasons and when the Jews and those descended from them saw the behavior of gays, they immediately thought of this war tactic and instinctively looked down upon it. For the worst possible thing that could happen to you in this male-dominated society was to be treated like a woman. Which leads me to the 3rd reason…
#3.) Women were horribly oppressed, abused, mistreated and generally looked down upon. Their standing as citizens only slightly elevated from that of livestock and animals. You can see this in many of the Levitical laws of the Old Testament and in the horrendous treatment of women in modern day Muslim cultures of today- which, as appalling as it is to us, is not really that far from what the Old Testament teaches (a book, i might add, that Fundamentalists are using as the basis for morality and their objection to homosexuality). Women had little to no rights or freedom and to these people, for a man to “lay with another man as one does with a woman” was an absolute disgrace and an insult to their identity as men. Do you see where I’m going with this?
And finally,
#4) During biblical times and onward, prostitution was always rampant and as you can imagine, there were many men who took to this profession to make money and sustain themselves. Whatever your views on this, I’m sure most will agree, it’s a very dishonoring act- to sell your body for someone else’s demands just to earn money and to perform sexual favors for someone that you have no emotional attachments to, makes the act cheap and meaningless.
Well, this is how the ancient Jews felt as well, and another reason why they saw homosexual acts as defiling, unclean and distasteful. Adding to this, the great range of indecent acts committed by even more primitive cultures (orgies for the dead, bestiality, temple prostitution, etc.), and when the Jews saw these things, they just lumped homosexuality together in with them, so it naturally came to be severely despised.
Now, with all of this being said, can anyone out there give me a real, MORAL reason why homosexuality is wrong today? If it’s consensual and doesn’t involve money, if it’s between two adults and if you can get over the fact that a man is acting somewhat like a woman (this is NOT a moral crime, but more a matter of aesthetics), and if you can get over the fact that gay couples can’t reproduce naturally, the question must then be asked with our modern sensibilities: why is it wrong?
If all you have to say is because, “God said so” then you’ve not realized the obvious truth- that those same, desert-dwelling, uneducated, superstitious, bigoted and misogynist men from the Bronze Age are the ones who wrote the bible!
MEN wrote the bible. Men who looked down on homosexuality because of all the aforementioned reasons. If we were following the tenants of some other culture, such as Greece for example, there would be absolutely nothing wrong with it in anyone’s eyes.
So you see, bigotry and intolerance is just a consequence of the type of society with live in now; the residual, after-effects of the Judeo-Christian influence upon the world and the Church’s hideous legacy of oppression and hatred toward gays which stems from understandable but anachronistic reasons that DO NOT APPLY to modern gay relationships.
