Final Thoughts

As my 3 devoted readers have probably determined by now, I think I've decided to give up the blogging game (as if that weren't readily apparent from the 3 month gap in posts). Right now, I feel like I can do absolutely no good, so I've decided to take care of myself for a while. Perhaps I shall return at some future date in a blaze of blogging glory. A couple of final thoughts, though (I, like Jerry Springer, feel the need to wrap things up).

I am convinced that our churches are wrong to treat gay men and lesbians they way they do. Period. We deserve love, full inclusion and affirmation, not pity, dismissal, and revulsion. This is not just another 'issue' the church must deal with. The Church of Christ destroys lives and families when it throws stones. Our church must grow up, move past the pettiness of absurd doctrinal disputes, and move on to the real work of Christ.

Further, while most elders, preachers, and Christian college presidents and professors insist that their opinions are based on the Bible, I am convinced that their condemnation stems more from pure disgust. The refusal of so many to reconsider their doctrine (or to even give a modicum of respect to those whose opinions differ from their own) speaks volumes. Disgust, misogyny, and homophobia, however unconscious, drive the (male) decisionmakers at our universities and in our churches:

Consider, finally, the central locus of disgust in today's United States: male loathing of the male homosexual. Female homosexuals may be objects of fear, or moral indignation, or generalized, anxiety, but they are less often objects of disgust. Similarly, heterosexual females may feel negative emotions toward the male homosexual -- fear, moral indignation, anxiety -- but again, they rarely feel emotions of disgust. What inspires disgust is typically the male thought of the male homosexual, imagined as anally penetrable. The idea of semen and feces mixing together inside the body of a male is one of the most disgusting ideas imaginable to males, for whom the idea of nonpenetrability is a sacred boundary against stickiness, ooze, and death. The presence of a homosexual male in the neighborhood inspires the thought that one might oneself lose one's clean safeness, become the receptacle for those animal products. Thus disgust is ultimately disgust at one's own imagined penetrability and ooziness, and this is why the male homosexual is both regarded with disgust and viewed with fear as predator who might make everyone else disgusting. (Martha C. Nussbaum, Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law, p. 113)

The male decisionmakers in our churches are afraid of penetration, of vulnerability, of the so-called "female" traits they, in their (perhaps innocent) ignorance, believe to characterize the homosexual. We must convince our elders, our leaders, to let go of notions of masculinity and femininity, of what makes one a Man, so we can convince them to reconsider their readings of the Biblical texts.

Disgust, that most unchristian of virtues, controls the discussion now. Love must overcome it.