During this holiday season—a time, ideally, of peace, empathy, kindness and transcendence—gays and lesbians have reason to feel themselves under siege by ostensible men of God. First there was the Rick Warren affair, with its concomitant message that, unlike racism or anti-Semitism, gay and lesbian equality is something decent people can disagree on. Then, just days later, in his Christmas greeting to the Roman Curia, the Pope saw fit to compare homosexuality—and, indeed, any deviation from binary gender roles—to the destruction of the rainforests.
The official English translation of the Pope’s remarks hasn’t yet been published, but an unofficial version disseminated online by English bishop Michael Campbell shows that Pope Benedict did not, on this occasion, draw analogies between the despoiling of nature and torture or war. Gender-bending alone is singled out as a force rending the harmony of God’s creation.
“What is necessary is a kind of ecology of man, understood in the correct sense,” said the Pope. “When the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman and asks that this order of creation be respected, it is not the result of an outdated metaphysic. It is a question here of faith in the Creator and of listening to the language of creation, the devaluation of which leads to the self-destruction of man and therefore to the destruction of the same work of God. That which is often expressed and understood by the term ‘gender,’ results finally in the self-emancipation of man from creation and from the Creator.” Such self-emancipation leads inevitably to a kind of destruction as dangerous as any threat to the natural environment. “The tropical forests are deserving, yes, of our protection, but man merits no less than the creature, in which there is written a message which does not mean a contradiction of our liberty, but its condition,” said the Pope.
Expressions of homophobia issuing from the Vatican are anything but novel. Nevertheless, it is fascinating that at a time of terrifying and multiplying planetary catastrophes, so many prominent religious men across the globe have decided that homosexuality presents such an urgent and singular threat. In the United States, the Episcopal Church is tearing itself apart over gay ordination; in Africa, prominent religious leaders agitate against homosexuals in paranoid language that bespeaks a supernatural threat. As Bruce Wilson recently reminded us, Peter Akinola, archbishop of Nigeria, supported legislation that would have made it a crime, punishable by years in jail, for anyone to organize on behalf of gay rights, attend a gay marriage, or disseminate pro-gay media. According to the New York Times, the legislation “could be construed to cover having dinner with someone of the same sex.” (None of this stopped Rick Warren from comparing Akinola to Nelson Mandela.)
In Uganda, another Warren ally, the influential Pentecostal pastor Martin Ssempa, conflates homosexuality and lesbianism with witchcraft. As Helen Epstein wrote in her superb 2007 book The Invisible Cure: Africa, The West, And The Fight Against AIDS, Ssempa’s sermons condemn:
[H]omosexuality, pornography, condoms, certain kinds of rock music, and women’s rights activists, who, he said, promoted lesbianism, abortion, and the worship of female goddesses. He told me that Satan worshippers held meetings under Lake Victoria, where they were promised riches in exchange for human blood, which they collected by staging car accidents and kidnappings.
Similar demonization is running amok on other continents. The Southern Poverty Law Center has reported on a ferocious and violent anti-gay movement among Christian fundamentalists in Latvia who also happen to be influential with some Russian-speaking evangelicals in the United States. One of its leaders is Pastor Alexey (or Alexei) Ledyaev, whose Riga-based New Generation Church has more than 200 satellite churches spread throughout Eastern Europe, Argentina, Israel, and the United States. As the SPLC’s Casey Sanchez reported, the pastor “promote[s] his vision of global theocracy through elaborate, large-scale Christian rock operas that Ledyaev writes, directs, and stars in, and which are replete with lasers, smoke machines, and spandex-clad actors in ghoulish makeup. One of the rock operas, which young Russian-speaking, anti-gay activists promote on video-sharing Web sites, features a hero character wearing a tuxedo battling men in black tights armed with tiki torches. Over heavy-metal guitar riffs, a military-like chorus sings of ‘victory over the gays.’”
At first glance, perhaps none of this seems particularly extraordinary. After all, the affair between fundamentalism and homophobia has been a long and faithful one. What’s new and chilling, however, is the single-minded ideological obsession of it. This is not something one sees in every theocratic state. Iran, for example, is brutally oppressive towards gay people, whom it regularly executes (although, interestingly enough, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa allowing for sex-change operations, which are paid for by the government). But the rhetoric of Iran’s fundamentalist clerics doesn’t treat homosexuality as a cosmically subversive threat; instead, Jews and Zionism play that role (as they so often did in Europe before the Holocaust), a dynamic that may prove useful in deciphering the ubiquity and vehemence of anti-gay rhetoric among conservative Christians the world over.
Tags: alexey ledyaev, anti-semitism, ayatollah ruhollah khomeini, evangelicals, homophobia, iran, lgbt, martin ssempa, michelle goldberg, nelson mandela, peter akinola, rick warren
Isn’t there part of the analysis that must deal with women having sex with women, men having sex with men? In the end, an analysis of sexual oppression that doesn’t deal with sex cannot be sufficient. That was the basic argument of the edited volume Sexual Inequalities and Social Justice.
What is it about gay sex, that is so powerful that it unites the world’s fundamentalists?
For one thing, it must be the success of the gay movement. How old is this movement after all. Let’s just say, for simplicity sake that Stonewall started it all (but only parochial American historians really believe that), then the movement is about 40 years old. That doesn’t quite match up the 5769 years of Jewish History, of which about 1970 years have been shared with Christians.
When Bill Clinton was accused to have had an affair with an intern, he said he did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinski. Research later showed that the majority of college age kids at that time agreed that oral sex was not real sex. In other words, the meaning of “real” sex is fluid and malleable. The LGBT movement changed the meaning of what happened between men in the missions, seminaries, Qu’ran schools and other places where men only meet. It had become real sex. That must have been a profound shock indeed.
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Niels's blog.
Was there ever any comeback over Hutcherson's posing as US "Special Envoy for Adoptions, Family Values, Religious Freedom, and Medical Relief" during his trip to Latvia?
Rainforests, really? His Holiness must be reading too much evolutionary psychology.
By the way, the Catholic church is not "fundamentalist." When is the last time you saw His Holiness quoting biblical text to support some point?
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