I signed up for the House of Bishops\/House of Delegates listserv that served the two before and during General Convention last August. The list is still active, and a couple of fellow seminarians are members. The debate and reports covering this past convention and the Plano\/Dallas AAC conference this past week have been very active and at times degrading and rancorous.
\nThis is a post to the list by a man in L.A. I’m including a portion of his post and withholding his name because I have not asked his permission to include this, which may not be a good thing, but there you go. Anyway, here is what he posted responding to another post which is part of the thread dealing with “natural-law” and natural-theology. The previous post commented on the fact that even if something is normal or natural, that does not mean God considers it good.
\nHere is part of his response deal with many posted arguments against homosexuality appearing on the list:
\n
\nWe've seen a variety of attempted arguments on this list in the past, and it's a good moment to rehearse them and exactly what's wrong with each of them. For each of these, we have heard anti-gay people say \"yes, you're right, that's a bad argument, but what about XXX?\" It's a game of constant bait-and-switch, in which the anti-gay crowd trot out argument after argument, each of which is refuted, only to be replaced by another, which had already been refuted the month before.
\nWe have:
\n* Scriptural morality requires monogamous heterosexuality.
\n[Refutation: Scripture never requires monogamy for anyone but
\nclerics, and holds up as laudable many polygamists, and commands
\npolygamy in some cases.]
\n* Only in a relationship with someone of the opposite gender can a
\nperson be fully human.
\n[Refutation: Jesus and other celibates are fully human.]
\n* Tradition has always taught that homosexuality is wrong.
\n[Refutation: If this is your only argument, then it is no argument
\nat all, because tradition can err.]
\n* God's will for creation is that people be in heterosexual marriages.
\n[Refutation: Jesus and other celibates are not in heterosexual
\nmarriages.]
\n* Heterosexual marriage is a better symbol of such-and-such than
\nhomosexual marriage.
\n[Refutation: Acts are not to be judged moral or not because of what
\nthey might or might not symbolize; and, there are other good things
\nwhich homosexual marriage better symbolizes that heterosexual
\nmarriage.]
\n* Gay sex is inherently dangerous.
\n[Refutation: All sex is inherently dangerous; sex between men is
\nless dangerous than pregnancy; sex between women is exceedingly low
\nrisk. Moreover, nobody is criticizing straight men for impregnating
\ntheir wives and putting them at risk. And finally, this requires a
\nparticular reductionistic view of what gay sex *is*--some forms of
\nwhich are of essentially no risk whatsoever.]
\n* Gay people are more likely to be pedophiles.
\n[Refutation: there simply isn't any evidence here at all, indeed,
\nthere is the opposite--heterosexuals are more likely to be
\npedophiles.]
\n* Gay people are mentally ill.
\n[Refutation: the experts disagree, and there has been no
\npresentation of evidence to the contrary, except if one takes
\nhomosexuality *itself* as a mental illness, which begs the
\nquestion. Note as well that mental illness and sin are mutually
\nexclusive categories.]
\n* If we weaken morality here, next we'll be allowing bestiality and
\nrape.
\n[Refutation: nobody is arguing for \"weakening\" morality.]
\n* Having positive gay role models makes teenagers more likely to be
\ngay.
\n[Refutation: total lack of evidence. If role models and social
\nmessages of acceptability affected people's sexuality in this
\nmanner, there would be no gay people. Moreover, this begs the
\nquestion and assumes that being gay is bad, and thus to be avoided
\nfor teenagers.]
\nWhich leaves what I believe are the two most common reasons:
\n* Thinking about gay sex grosses me out.
\n[Which is irrelevant, of course, and offensive as well. People said
\nthe same thing about interracial marriages. If it grosses you out
\nthat much, it's your problem, not mine.]
\nAnd the most important:
\n* If I admitted that gay people were my equals, then I would have to confront that I had made a horribly serious mistake, and been engaged in ruining the lives of an awful lot of people, and blasphemously using the name of God to persecute innocent people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I signed up for the House of Bishops\/House of Delegates listserv that served the two before and during General Convention last August. The list is still active, and a couple of fellow seminarians are members. The debate and reports covering … Continue reading