As the United States continues to grapple with equality for gays in the workplace schools and in marriage we witness once more the dangers of the church preaching outdated verses and interpreting them with no less fervor than when the country struggled with rationalizing slavery and female oppression.
After the United States established the Atlantic slave trade the church justified black slavery through the episode in Genesis in which Noah condemns Ham and his descendents to servitude claiming they will be “the lowest of slaves… to his brothers” (Genesis 9:25). Today we use the story of Leviticus against gays not knowing that historically sodomy has had a variety of definitions among them referring to bestiality rape involving anal penetration and intercourse between an older man and a boy.
And while blacks were once held in bondage by Bible verses relevant to their servitude women were stamped down by verses ordering subordination to their husbands. Among those verses was Peter 3:1 which reads: “Ye wives be in subjection to your husbands and Ephesians 5:22: Wives submit to your own husbands as to the Lord.” Yet less than a century since the Women’s Rights Movement these verses are marked as outdated and we teach a different interpretation of them or ignore them altogether. We unknowingly verify again and again that danger lies not in the subjectivism of the Bible but in the hands that carry and teach it.
At some point we will have to accept that “anti-gay” verses such as those in Leviticus are as outdated as the same verses we once used to preach inequality for blacks and women; that even if the Bible intentionally preaches intolerance toward gays we cannot ignore what we know today about homosexuality— that it is not a choice; that lobotomies electroshock therapy and gay conversion camps cannot fix what was deemed until the 1970s a psychological disease of the mind. We cannot ignore the age of the Bible nor remove altogether its verses from its social context. At some point we have to challenge our traditional views of homosexuality and accept the proposition that the church has perhaps been wrong on this issue too.