Trolling So-Called Leaders
Remember “the good ole days” when some “trolling-the-gullible” politicians and “religious leaders” preyed (definitely not “prayed”) on their victims’ fears with the catchy accusation “They want to bring Sharia law to America”?
But America has already been there. We’ve had our period of Sharia-like – not “Sharia-lite” – laws. And, when it comes to the area of human sexuality and sexual behavior, they don’t work.
The Nazi’s had their “homocaust” of persecution, sending an estimated 5,000 to 60,000 to concentration camps for homosexuality. In 2019, after using torture to extract “confessions,” American “ally” Saudi Arabia beheaded five men because they were gay – a violation of Sharia law.
In 2008, a British WikiLeaks dispatch reported that Iran’s mullah-regime had executed “between 4,000 and 6,000 gays and lesbians” since the 1976 Islamic Revolution. In June 2019, when a reporter from the German tabloid Bild asked the Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif about the execution of LGB people, he defended his country’s draconian policy: “Our society has moral principles. We live according to these principles. These are moral principles concerning the behavior of people in general. And that means that the law is respected and the law is obeyed.”
A few years earlier, the world learned that in the Russian region of Chechnya hundreds of gay men were being abducted, tortured and even killed in an anti-LGBT purge. In 2017, one of the then few (now there are fewer) Russian newspapers, Novaya Gazeta, reported that hundreds of gay men had been detained in concentration camps – the first to be established specifically for LGBT people since the Second World War. The press secretary for Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Chechen Republic, called the accusations “lies,” adding, “If there were such people in Chechnya, law-enforcement agencies wouldn’t need to have anything to do with them because their relatives would send them somewhere from which there is no returning.”
In response to the reporting, religious leaders called for retribution against the newspaper and “promise[d] that retribution will overcome the instigators [of the report], wherever and whoever they may be, without a statute of limitations.” In Chechnya being homosexual is considered such a huge shame that the only way a family – and extended family – can wash away this blot is to kill the gay person. As a result, authorities frequently arrest, torture and then release gay men and women, knowing full well that their families will kill them in order to restore the family’s honor.
But the persecution of homosexuality has never been simply a Nazi or Islamic world phenomenon. In 1513, the Spanish explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa found homosexual activity among the Indigenous chiefs in Panama and ordered forty of them thrown to his war dogs to be torn apart and eaten alive to stop the “stinking abomination.” And the Mexican Inquisition, a New World extension of the Spanish Inquisition, infamously executed fourteen men by burning in November 1658 in Mexico City.
The French Capuchin friar Yves D’Evreux reported in his travel diary that in 1614 French missioners in Brazil executed Tibiro do Maranhao for sodomy by strapping him in front of a cannon and blowing him to pieces in an effort to “extinguish evil” and terrorize the native population into a “Christian” lifestyle that shunned same-sex attraction.
With the exception of the Quakers of Pennsylvania, who deplored all nonmarital sexuality including homosexual acts as culpable “licentiousness” to be penalized by six months in prison, the founding charters and earliest legislation of every North American colony prescribed death penalties for homosexuality. With the overthrow of the British and the abandonment of English penal codes and Puritan harshness, the new states abolished the death penalty for homosexuality and developed more humane penal codes. The state constitution adopted by Pennsylvania in 1776 had specifically mandated "that the penal laws as heretofore used should be reformed by the legislature of this state as soon as may be and punishments made in some cases less sanguinary and in general more proportionate to the crimes." All the other new states followed suite.
One would think that, given this history of torture, “honor killings” and genocide, homosexuality and lesbianism, bisexuality and transsexuality would have ceased to exist eons ago.
Think again.
In February 2021, Gallup reported that 5.6% of U.S. adults identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT), up from 4.5% in the 2017 Gallup survey. In the same Gallup survey, 86.7% of Americans self-described as heterosexual or straight and 7.6% did not answer the question about their sexual orientation – compared to 5% “no opinion” responses in Gallup’s 2012-2017 data.
The 2021 report was based on more than 15,000 interviews conducted throughout 2020 with Americans 18-years-old and older. This was the first Gallup survey in which respondents could specifically identify as transgender. The Gallup report found “More than half of LGBT adults (54.6%) identify as bisexual. About a quarter (24.5%) say they are gay, with 11.7% identifying as lesbian and 11.3% as transgender. An additional 3.3% volunteer another non-heterosexual preference or term to describe their sexual orientation, such as queer or same-gender-loving.” Respondents were able to give multiple responses when describing their sexual identification - accounting for totals that exceeded 100%.
The Gallup summary noted a continuing increase in the percentage of LGBT identification over the past decade. “One of the main reasons LGBT identification has been increasing over time is that younger generations are more likely to consider themselves to be something other than heterosexual. This includes about one in six adult members of Generation Z (those aged 18 to 23 in 2020). LGBT identification is lower in each older generation, including 2% or less of Americans born before 1965 (aged 56 and older in 2020).”
What?!?! The percentages are increasing!?!?
Despite thousands of years of religious condemnations and all the beheadings, burnings, honor killings and blowings-to-smithereens!
The authors of the May 2021 Academic Statement on the Ethics of Free and Faithful Same-Sex Relationships published by England’s Wijgaards Institute for Catholic Research succinctly summarize the Roman Catholic Church position by citing The Catechism of the Catholic Church and the documents Persona Humana and Homosexualitatis Problema.
The sixty-plus academicians recognize “Current papal teaching condemns same-sex orientation as ‘intrinsically disordered,’ and same sex acts as always ‘intrinsically disordered… Papal teachings provide two types of arguments [‘the biological argument’ and ‘the biblical argument’] for this teaching, both of which are unsupported by the relevant evidence.” [Because of the length and complexity of the issue, we’ll address the biblical argument in weeks to come.]
The authors challenge the traditional Church position by briefly summarizing contemporary Science:
“Sexual orientation is one’s degree of sexual attraction to persons of the opposite sex, the same sex, or both sexes. It is manifested in physiological sexual arousal patterns to male or female erotic stimuli. In turn, sexual attraction motivates sexual behaviour, and both influence sexual identity. No evidence exists to suggest that individuals can consciously alter their genital arousal patterns to change their sexual orientation or identity.
“Sexual orientation is largely determined during pregnancy, by factors which are genetic and hormonal rather than social. In a significant minority of cases, such an orientation is non-heterosexual. Like other forms of non-heterosexuality, homosexuality is a ‘natural variation within the range of human sexuality.’
“Because sexual orientation is largely determined during pregnancy through genetic and hormonal factors, it is not the result of a free choice. Non-heterosexual people are no more responsible for their sexual orientation than heterosexual people are for theirs.
The authors respond to the traditional theological arguments against same-sex acts – procreation is “an essential and indispensable finality” of every act of sexual intercourse - by noting:
“…the natural sciences show that the vast majority of acts of heterosexual intercourse do not have the biological capacity for procreation, and therefore they cannot have procreation as their proper ‘finality.’ In this, non-heterosexual ‘acts’ are not different from the vast majority of heterosexual ‘acts’: in both cases, they are biologically incapable of procreation.
“Moreover, current papal teaching regards heterosexual marital intercourse as ethically legitimate even when there is no possibility of procreation… Likewise, Catholic theology and Canon Law maintain that the capacity for biological procreation is not even necessary for sacramental marriage: ‘Sterility neither prohibits nor nullifies marriage.’
“Individual sexual acts in particular, and marriage in general, include moral ends other than procreation. Non-heterosexual acts and relationships, too, can include the same non-conceptive moral ends. It is therefore incorrect to condemn them as intrinsically evil for not being ‘ordered per se [i.e. in and of themselves] to the procreation of human life’ because biologically incapable of it.”
Many years ago, I watched with awe as a mid-30s daughter interrupted her nursing career to care for her father after his heart attack and bypass surgery. She was amazing!
The crisis call came months later. Mom and Dad had to see me “right away! It’s an emergency!”
The crisis: The same daughter who had so devotedly cared for her father, giving up her job and practically living in his hospital room for weeks, had just told them she is a lesbian. [I almost wrote “was a lesbian,” but, as the Academic Statement makes clear “Sexual orientation is largely determined during pregnancy, by factors which are genetic and hormonal rather than social.”]
I remember that the conversation went pretty much like this:
“Did you love her a year ago?”
“Yes, Father.”
“And six months ago?”
“Yes, Father.”
“And all those nights when she never left your side in the hospital so Mom could take care of the other kids?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Well, she was a lesbian all those times. The only thing that has changed is now you know.
“You loved her then. Love her now. And tomorrow. And the day after that. She’s still ‘daddy’s little girl’ and she has always been and always will be loved by God.”
Wow! It’s difficult to believe that was forty years ago! How the world has changed!
Finally, a “money quote” (one of many) from the Academic Statement:
“Same-sex sexual orientation, like heterosexual orientation, is not a ‘tendency’, the result of an individual’s choice, of some defect or unnatural factor. Rather, same-sex sexual orientation is the natural capacity for a deep emotional, affective and sexual attraction towards, and intimate and sexual relationships with, individuals of the same sex. Today there is no longer any doubt that the variety of sexual orientations is now much more than a scientific hypothesis, and as such it demands to be taken seriously by theological reflection.”