How You Too Can Stop Worrying About What Gay People Do In Their Bedrooms

If the fundamentalists are right, then gay sex must be the greatest thing on earth. Worth dying for. Because right now in places like Iraq and Syria, there are gay men literally being tortured and murdered, and they just flat-out refuse to stop choosing to be gay… But the point of this story is not to argue the case that homosexuality is not a choice. If you think that then either you don’t know any LGBT people or you’re a moron.

About ten years ago I was a leader of a Bible study group for young adults from our church. One evening a member of our group shared some ideas on homosexuality from a theologian called Walter Wink — that the Old Testament prohibitions were irrelevant, homosexuality was natural, and that New Testament warnings were referring to prostitution. I was livid. The next day I contacted some of the elders in our church to express my concern about this member and began tearing through my Greek lexicon to demonstrate that the New Testament was not ok with homosexuality.

Simplicity is comforting. At that point in my life I’d very much bought into the simplistic worldview, standard amongst evangelicals, that puts everyone into neat boxes — men are like this — women are like this — families look like this — people who don’t look like that are doing it wrong, and we must pray that Jesus brings them “freedom” to be more like us. If you’ve never been religious then you may struggle to see the appeal of this worldview, and I would struggle to explain it.

I wasn’t a homophobe in the sense that I had any fear or hatred of homosexual persons — but I was a homophobe in the sense that I feared what society’s increasing acceptance of homosexuality meant for my fragile worldview. I was also afraid of what it meant for my faith if the Bible’s authority could be conceded on even a single issue. If one verse could be dismissed what about any other verse? Could we be certain of any of the Bible’s grand promises?

However it’s hard to maintain that view for long. Assuming you’re not a complete ass, life brings people of different orientations into your world. I found myself meeting more and more people who didn’t fit into any of my boxes. I heard their stories and realised they weren’t deviants but people who want the same things that I did. Some of the saddest stories I heard were from LGBT people in the church — those who had tried and inevitably failed to find “freedom” and those who had been told that intimacy was off limits for them.

My neat boxes began to crack. It became harder and harder for me to reconcile common sense with Biblical teachings on sexuality, and attitudes to homosexuality became one of the many reasons that I said goodbye to evangelicalism. In a way it had always felt like a burden to believe I had some God-appointed obligation to police who and how the rest of the world decided to love. It was a relief to finally realise that it was none of my business.

Which brings me to now — when the two places my wife and I call home (Indiana and Northern Ireland) are making headlines for legislation to make religious discrimination against sexual minorities a legal right. I’m not going to try to convince anyone that the Bible says homosexuality is ok because it clearly doesn’t. This should not surprise us at all considering that the Old Testament was written by priests who thought selling a rape victim to her rapist was ok, and the New Testament’s warnings against homosexuality were written by someone who thought it was disgraceful for a woman to be in church without a hijab.

All I’m going to suggest is a little common sense so that 10 years from now you won’t have to write a blog post like this about what an idiot you were now. More importantly, 50 years from now you won’t look like the people in the photo below. By all means keep your beliefs but keep them to yourself. This is a win-win for you because if you’re wrong then you can deny that you were ever a bigot, and if you’re right… well the world will have been destroyed by God’s wrath and you’ll be in Heaven. Please think about it.

But it’s not normal!

Neither is left-handedness — only 1 in 10 people are left-handed.

But it’s not natural!

Actually homosexual behaviour has been documented in about 500 different species.

But there is no gay gene!

Maybe they’ll find one and maybe they won’t. Neither have they found a left-handed gene but this is irrelevant — even if pigs could fly and homosexuality was a choice, it would still be none of our business to tell consenting adults who and how to love.

But it’s yuck!

Frankly I think kissing guys is pretty yuck too since we have all that facial hair. I also think mushrooms are yuck. But other people don’t find mushrooms yuck (this is a mystery to me), and it turns out some guys think kissing girls is yuck and some girls agree that kissing guys is yuck. Even if 99% of people thought mushrooms were yuck that wouldn’t make it morally wrong to eat them.