Dear Editor,
Someone at ETSU is finally ready to approach the topic of homosexuality on campus.
I was promised a clearly thought-out, well-researched inquiry into homosexual marriage. Instead, I browse the editorial to see that suddenly Catholicism is a separate entity from Christianity.
Unfortunately, it is this sort of sloppy rhetoric that takes up most of Marianne Steffey’s editorial space.
The least she could have done was outline it as Protestantism and Catholicism (which is at least a useful distinction); more to the point, Steffey could have thought about what she was really trying to say and described the major religious voices of Christianity as Roman Catholicism and Conservative Evangelical Protestantism.
Steffey’s sloppy work continues when she doesn’t even use a recognized spelling of Gomorrah.
She states that no one knows exactly why God destroyed the cities of the valley, but it is clear in the Genesis account and in Ezekiel 16:49-50, 2 Peter 2:6-10 and Jude 7 that the actions of the city’s inhabitants toward the angels in Lot’s home was the nadir of Sodomite depravity. So much so that throughout the Bible, Sodom and Gomorrah are used as the epitome of wicked sinfulness.
The Sodom story is abundantly clear that the men were determined to rape the visitors, their homosexuality being exposed by their refusal of Lot’s daughters when he offered them instead.
Now, I don’t believe that we can make blanket statements about homosexuals based on the Genesis 19 account. It is, after all, a narrative text meant for illustration.
But, there are too many places in the Bible that demonstrate the incompatibility of homosexuality (not just rape) with God’s community (Lev. 18:22; Romans 1:26-27; 1 Cor. 6:9-11; 1 Tim. 1:10).
Simply because we don’t have a clear Gospel account of Jesus dealing with homosexuality doesn’t mean that we can infer some discontinuity between his understanding of it and the accepted standards of the time (reflected in writings that both precede and postdate his earthly life).
Jesus’ explicit endorsement of male-female complementarity (Mark 10:1-2) and his interaction with others who were considered sexually immoral (where he uniformly exhorts them to a life of righteousness; e.g. Luke 7:36-50, John 7:53-8:11, and John 4) make it clear that Jesus was very concerned with right sexual relationships.
With his letters being written closer to the time of the Christ than even the earliest Gospel (at least by modern scholar’s reckoning), we can assume that Paul’s understanding of the moral stipulations of the Jesus tradition would be very close indeed to those of its founder.
If anything, Paul was more liberal than the mother church in Jerusalem (cf. Acts 15).
Moreover, Paul would have been forced to deal with homosexuality by its abundant presence among the non-Jews, whereas Jesus is extremely unlikely to have encountered an openly homosexual person in Palestine.
It is not an untrue statement that “God is love” (1 John 4:8b), but it is far from a complete picture of the Bible, or even of the first letter of John; the same epistle says that “God is light” (1:5b) and that “this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments.” (5:3a)
Let me remind the reader that Amor vincit omnia (“love conquers all”) is a quotation from Virgil, not the Bible.
As for the much-bemoaned lack of legal rights, it is a straw man.
The privileges of marriage function, at the state level, to solidify inheritance claims and to provide for the upbringing of children, neither of which is a concern for the majority of homosexuals.
One may argue for the exceptions of childless heterosexual married couples and GLBT couples who have children through whatever means, yet they are clearly the exceptions and not the rule (therefore, not normative).
According to the 1990 census, gay-male couples have a household income of $56,863 which is approximately $10,000 more than the average married couple. Lesbian couples reported combined income of $44,793 which is $7,000 more than unmarried heterosexual couples.
Educationally, 60 percent of the homosexual population have college degrees which is more than three times the national average. Careerwise, 49 percent of gay and lesbians have professional managerial positions, compared to the rest of America at 15.9 percent.
With the burden of childrearing largely removed from the homosexual community, there is no governmental or social incentive to bestow economic protections above and beyond those given to every non-married individual. All figures are taken from Margaret Udansky’s April 12, 1993, USA Today article “Gay Couples May Earn Most” and “Overview of the Simmons Gay Media Survey” (Plainfield, NJ: Rivendell Marketing Company, 1996).
According to the publishers of Out and The Advocate, the average reader of those gay publications is a white-collar professional with a household income of $95,000.
The economic impact of extending these benefits to “domestic partnerships” has already been felt in municipalities where it has been done.
Expanding benefits to homosexuals would result in massive insurance payouts.
An article available at the Family Research Council (http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=IS01B1) lists evidence from well-respected medical journals of the health threats of both gay and lesbian sexual activities as distinguished from the general population. Non-HIV infected gay men are likely to die before they reach 50, causing premature life-insurance claims. The cost of extending insurance benefits in Massachusetts alone is estimated to be approximately $15 million dollars, and that does not cover the administrative costs of administering such a program.
It is clear that there is more at stake in governments granting marriage benefits to homosexual partnerships than words on paper or legitimizing someone’s feelings.
Unfortunately, Steffey is either unable or unwilling to present even a modicum of information that would be truly helpful in opening up meaningful dialogue on the issue.
Chris Larimer

Author