For The Bible Tells Me So

Poor Pastor Ted Haggard. One day he is organizing an anti-gay marriage campaign, telling 30 million zombies what to think, just minding his own business, pressing his white sheet and hood and the next day he finds himself in a seedy motel room, snorting methamphetamine, and playing tonsil hockey with a muscular rent-a-boy and having fantasies about being passed around like a reefer at a party by a bunch of college boys. Rev. Ted states often that God sees everything, but even the Almighty probably pulled the shades down when Teddy got his freak on. Then came the fall and the lame denials. “I’m only steady with my wife.” “It was just a massage.” “I called him to buy some meth, but I threw it away.” Another far right, self-loathing, closeted homosexual goes down in flames, Schadenfreude all around, and that is where it would have ended, except old Ted went through the three week cure. Tim Ralph, one of the counselors, announced at the end of it, that Teddy was “completely heterosexual” and only “acting out.” Presto chango, ala - ka - zam, even Harry Potter could not buy into that kind of wizardry. My only questions are what kind of Clockwork Orange, toothpicks propping open eyelids, “therapy”, did they do to snap Teddy straight; and is there a betting line in Vegas about how quickly he relapses and is found doing the backstroke in a pool of pretty boys, because I want a part of that wagering action.

In all seriousness, what I don’t understand is why the religious right is so obsessed with homosexuality. I have never gotten a good explanation of why being gay is the “special” sky is falling sin in their book. If it is a sin, it doesn’t seem to be a very hurtful sin. Former Congressman Tom DeLay can engage in politics that enslave third world women and force them into prostitution and to getting abortions and he is a good Christian. If he thought one of his male staff members looked good in his tight jeans, well, he is going to burn in hell. Newt Gingrich might pay prostitutes with a credit card, be a dead beat dad, and cheat on his wives with aides, and he is a saint in their eyes. If that aide giving him a “Clinton” is a dude, no heaven for him. You can be responsible for the needless death of thousands of people, engage in torture, repeatedly lie, and no one questions whether you are a Christian, but be found in a hotel room pretending that you are Judy Garland live at Carnegie Hall, hurting no one, and you are the devil. Violence and taking advantage of the poor and outcasts are the things that the guy, who looks like a member of ZZ Top and hung out with 12 unemployed dudes, named Jesse or Jesus or something, seemed most concerned with. So, where is this hostility towards the homosexual community coming from? It is clearly not the Bible, which mentions homosexuality in less than one percent of one percent of all the verse there in and Jesus never mentions it at all. The same sections of the Bible that condemn homosexuality promote genocide, slavery, and the oppression of women as perfectly expectable. I don’t know many American women who would put up with their husbands declaring them property or would accept the stoning of a child because their little baby wore a shirt made with two different fibers. You cannot pick and choose what parts of the handbook you want to follow.

The documentary For The Bible Tells Me So looks at the intersection of Christianity and homosexuality through the lives of five families, some famous, others not, that cross the political spectrum. There is Dick Gephardt, former Majority and Minority Leader in the Congress, whose daughter, Chrissy, is a lesbian. In 2004, many of the Congressman’s advisors, when he was seeking the Democratic nomination for President, worried that Chrissy would be a political liability and wanted her to stay more behind the scenes like a Mary Cheney. Instead, with her father’s support, she waged a very public campaign to reach out to the Gay and Lesbian community. Also documented is the family of Jake Reitan. Focus on the Family showed their support of families by having young Jake and his parents arrested when Jake tried to read a letter he had written James Dobson in front of the mega-corporation’s headquarters. (I am still waiting a reply to a letter I wrote Dobson. In one of his books, Dobson claims that homosexuality is due to bad parenting. I just wanted to know in his opinion who was the lousy parent of Mary Cheney, our Vice-President and Batman villain, or his wife.) Jake has also been arrested in his public protests on the campuses of conservative colleges and at the military academies. The other famous face is that of Rev. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the history of the Episcopal Church. His consecration was met with protest and cries of outrage throughout America. Each of the families profiled dealt with the same stages when confronted with a gay family member. All of these families and even many of the homosexual individuals themselves believed that homosexuality was a scarlet sin. The child or parent’s confession caused chaos and led to the family having to deal with their prejudices. The ramifications often took years to play out and for most of the families it led to a strengthening of their faith.

I believe that life at times is as brutally tough as wrestling a bear while wearing honey smeared underwear and making it tougher just doesn’t seem right to me. Homosexuality is just an academic question until it is your own child and that is the problem with Focus on the Family. They focus on an ideal, not living, breathing families. It is one thing to talk about how it is a sin until it is your child who battles with feelings of self-loathing because he or she is told how their feelings are evil. It is academic until its your child in the hospital bed because they have gotten beaten up or have tried to kill themselves. If just for the sake of their heterosexual children, I think that they would stop demonizing it. I know of too many marriages where one of the partners is gay and that is a long, long, lonely marriage for the other person in the bed. The self-doubts of wondering if it was something you had done or could have done even though logically you know there isn’t. How could any parent in their bigotry want to saddle their child with that possibility? Isn’t it better to have homosexuals open and happy? The only person I feel sorry for in the whole Ted Haggard affair is Gayle Alcorn, his wife. The rest of her life, she has got to wonder if Pastor Ted finds her beautiful or is he thinking of muscular men instead when in the bedroom.

I know, I know, some of you are saying, but the Bible says so, but the Bible has been used to justify slavery, wife beating, the murder of countless Jews, and South African apartheid. I want to suggest another way of reading that Holy Book. It should be seen by Christians as a manger which contains the Christ child. You can spend hours studying the beams and how many nails have gone into each board, but you might forget that the only reason that the manger is important is that it contains the Christ child. Take your eyes off the child and everything else becomes meaningless. In other words, each and every verse in the Bible must be interpreted through the lens of the liberating presence of Jesus Christ. Just something to think about from someone watching Sunday morning coming down.

Verdict: An Interesting Documentary