Why me?

Why am I homosexual? I didn’t ask for this, I didn’t choose it, and I’ve even prayed to God not to be. Why, why, why? Is my sexuality proof that I am rotten to the core, as those right-wing Christians say I am?

 

We have already said that we are created "good" before God (Genesis 1:31), but that all of humanity is “fallen” (Romans 3:23).  In a vertical universe--the picture language of ancient times imagined God "up there"--with God at the top and the Devil at the bottom, it was convenient to imagine that the “Fall” of humanity put us at a great distance from God.

Is our sexuality the root cause of the Fall? Is tasting the “forbidden fruit” the cause of our “fall” from grace?

Augustine of Hippo (a.d. 354–430) thought it was. After living a lifetime of sexual promiscuity, keeping several women and fathering a son, Augustine converted to the Christian faith, founded a monastery and renounced all sexuality. He came to the conclusion that “original sin” passed through the sex act from one generation to the next, and believed that a man should only be sexually aroused by his decision to have a child, not for pleasure. He thought that having too much pleasure, even within a Christian marriage, was immoral—and that it would be better to take one’s excess passion to a prostitute rather than to “sully the marriage bed”!

 

Unfortunately, Augustine was quite successful in pushing his ideas. Although many people still honor St. Augustine as a great Christian thinker and Doctor of the (Roman Catholic) Church, not everyone is so enamored with his legacy. Church historian Paul Johnson has suggested that Augustine almost single-handedly created the “Dark Ages.”

 

Augustine’s thinking about sexuality was formed by two factors that are not universally applicable to the human race:  he formed his theories based on heterosexual male sexuality, not on human sexuality; and he based his renunciation of sexual activity on internalized shame covering his early life of guilty pleasures. 

Today virtually no Christian theologian teaches that the sex act is a dirty or immoral. It is not sexual arousal, the sex act or sexual intimacy which is sinful, but our other motivations and behaviors acted out sexually, or woven into our sex lives, which may make them “right or wrong.”

Think rape. It is not the act of coitus which is immoral, but the forced violation of a stranger which is wrong.

It is not the biological gender of the people having sexual intimacy which makes that intimacy right or wrong. It is the behavior and motivation behind it.

Is being homosexual a choice?

Most “fundagelicals” say that we must repent of our “lifestyle”, or must change our orientation through prayer and reparative therapy. They have adopted this as a near-universal demand on LGBT people. They have jammed together “choice” and “change” as if our sexuality were as simple as buying a different brand of toothpaste.

   
And they have clearly drawn their line in the sand politically. Because they insist that the “homosexual lifestyle” is freely chosen and so could be walked away from, then homosexuals do not need or deserve any “special rights.”

Wrong Choice, Right Choice and Privilege

Whether being a sexual minority is a choice is going to continue to captivate the public policy debates, the “culture wars” and the anxiety in the churches. For right-wing Christians, “choice” equates with “sin.” To be lesbian or gay or transgender is the “wrong choice.” And to be bisexual seems to prove their point (even if it is a gross misunderstanding of bisexuality).

We should remember that mainstream, conservative rejection of us is not isolated from mainstream conservative rejection of many other things in our changing society.

Fundamental to the persuasion that we have a choice (in this case, about our sexual orientation) is that the supremacist/racist/heterosexist and upwardly-achieving class is that they have made all the right choices in life, which explains and justifies their positions of privilege. It is about them and the superiority of their achievement, lifestyle, ethnic purity, education, marriage and nuclear family. It is “all about them,” and the god they have invented to bless them for making all the good choices.

Seen in that harsh light ~ yes, it is a harsh critique ~ LGBT people are only one category of human beings on which the right wing is inclined to look down. Heterosexual privilege is closely linked with economic privilege and class, with white privilege, conservative Christian privilege, and ultimately political privilege. The key thing for you and I to understand is that we should not have to defend ourselves against the view that we have made a “wrong choice” in our innate sexuality.

Quite the opposite, those who claim all manner of privilege in our society should feel the need to defend their accumulation of privilege. The Bible and the Christian Gospel make it clear that God does not identify with the privileged, but with the poor in spirit, the hungry, and the oppressed.

So says Jesus in the beatitudes which begin his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3–12):

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

"Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

"Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

"Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

And so says Mary in her poem of praise to the Almighty when she hears the announcement by the angel that she will bear a son:

. . . “My spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. . . .

"He has shown strength with his arm;

he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty."

In our reading of Scripture, we dare to claim the grace and favor of God because we read the Scripture not from the position of privilege, but from the position of oppression. We no longer imagine God to be the Ultimate Control Freak, whose strict moral law tightly controls every aspect of our lives, but the God who rights what is wrong in this world by turning it right-side up: bringing down those people who cling to and rationalize their privilege “in the thoughts of their hearts,” and lifting up those who have been reviled, persecuted and the object of all kinds of evil accusations.

In this Catechism, we will return to this discussion of “choice” at a deeper level, and study both its biblical and ethical dimensions.