What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality

Father Dr Daniel Helminiak’s What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality is a short, much reprinted, book setting out for a lay audience current biblical scholarship about the passages in the Bible which are taken to condemn homosexuality.

Biblical interpretation is something of a nightmare of translation and context: particularly so for sexual terms, which tend to be highly colloquial and context-laden.

Some things are fairly clear. The sin of Sodom (Genesis 19:1-11) was rape, abuse, inhospitality and hard-heartedness, something that Jesus makes quite clear (Matthew 10:5-15), as do other passages ( Ezekiel 16:48-49, Wisdom 19:14, Isaiah 1:10-17 & 3:9, Jeremiah 23:14, Zephaniah 2:8-11). To use ‘sodomite’ to refer to male homosexuals, or to those who engage in anal intercourse, is based on a systematic misreading of the original story (it being better, given that rape was happening either way, that the men of Sodom rape Lot’s daughters than Lot allow an avoidable betrayal of the law of hospitality against the servants of God). Apart from the would-be rape of the angelic visitors, and the actual attempted rape of Lot’s daughters, in the Genesis passage, the only sexual sin mentioned in any of the above passages is adultery. There is also a reference to (promiscuity and) lusting after the flesh of angels (Jude 7).
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The abomination of Leviticus 18:22 & 20:13 is male-male penetrative sex. It was a ritual violation of the Jewish Law’s notion of the distinction between male and female. Moreover, it is specifically about male-male anal intercourse and no more than that. But lots of things are abominations in Leviticus for reasons of ritual uncleanliness: it is rather a case of take one, take all, or pass on. Passing on being what Jesus said to do ( Matthew 15:10, 18-20). A sentiment echoed by the Apostle Peter ( Acts 10:11-15, 28, 34) and by St Paul (; 1 Corinthians 7:19, Galatians 5:6, Romans 2:29 & 14:14).

The point where things get very tricky is over Romans 1:18-32, which contains what appears to be a clear condemnation of homogenital acts. What Helminiak argues is that Paul is attempting to bring together Jewish and Gentile Christians over the Jewish purity laws, so he says idolatry (the abandonment of God) leads to shameful and impure acts but it is their continuing abandonment of God which leads to genuine evils (what Christians should really be worried about). That is, he argues that Paul distinguishes shameful and unclean acts from genuinely evil acts. Their engagement in same-sex acts is unclean and shameful—an embarrassment and punishment in itself—but not a serious moral matter.

The interpretation is rather complex. The main thing it has going for it is that Paul’s list of things that should not be done doesn’t list any homogenital acts and the interpretation sits well with the aforementioned abandonment of the Jewish purity laws. But I doubt it would be persuasive to anyone who doesn’t want to be persuaded. It is certainly not the traditional interpretation.

Father Helminiak is on much stronger grounds with 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and 1Timothy 1:9-10 where the key words are obviously highly unclear in their meaning, as can be seen in their very varied translations.

The terms are malakoi and the even more obscure arsenokoitai. Malakoi has been translated as: catamites, the effeminate, boy prostitutes, sissies, masturbators, the self-indulgent. Take your pick (current scholarship favours the self-indulgent). Either way, it clearly is not a blanket condemnation of homogenital activity.

Arsenokoitai has been translated as: homosexuals, sodomites, child molesters, perverts, homosexual perverts, sexual perverts, people of infamous habits, practising homosexuals. Again, take your pick (current scholarship is still deeply divided—the term literally means man-penetrator but that does not help much: as Father Helminiak points out, ladykiller means neither a lady nor a murderer). Either way, the passages seem to be about exploitative relationships.

Arsenokoitai strikes me as evidence that St Paul was relying on the thinking of Philo of Alexandria in his use of the very un-Judaic concept of para physin, against nature. Arsenokoitai seems to have been a reference to language used in Leviticus in the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures (arsenos koitén, “man who lies with”). St Paul’s phrasing in Romans 1:27:

Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion

is similar to Philo’s rhetoric that the same-sex active “waste away as to both their souls and bodies”, that such a person “adulterates the precious coinage of his nature”. While St Paul’s affirmation that long hair is the glory of a woman but an unnatural shame in a man (1 Corinthians 11:13-15) echoes Philo’s horror of men acting like women.

Either way, in the face of such uncertainty in meaning, Father Helminiak is clearly on strong grounds to argue these passages are simply not a reliable enough grounds to condemn folk—particularly not those in stable, loving relationships or who aspire to the same.

One of the strongest arguments is what is not in the Bible. Nowhere does Jesus condemn homogenital activity, or even mention it. It is clearly not a concern for Him. Indeed, in the only case that is arguably of a same-sex couple, Jesus is notably solicitous—when the centurion asks Him to heal his servant ( Matthew 8:5-13, Luke 7:1-10).

There are also apparent same-sex relationships in the Bible that clearly do not get condemned. David and Jonathon ( 1 Samuel 20:41-42, 2 Samuel 1:26), Naomi and Ruth ( Ruth 1:16-17), Daniel and the Palace Master ( Daniel 1:9).

Father Helminiak dismisses other apparent references to homogenital acts as mistranslations wrongly using the words sodomite or unnatural. In particular, translations of the story of Sodom which use unnatural when the reference is to lusting after angels and translations of the Hebrew qadheshim or 'devoted ones' where the reference is to sacred prostitution.

I did have one very clear quibble with Father Helminiak’s text. To claim that Edward II was assassinated for his gay relationship with Hugh le Despenser (p.23) is to do some violence to the historical record: Edward was killed because deposed kings were a threat (James II, who fled, was the first deposed English king not to be killed). Edward was deposed, not because he had male favourites, but because he sacrificed his kingship to his gonads. All kings had favourites of one sort or another: folk only seriously complained about them if they were incompetent, rapacious or narrowly monopolised all office and preferment. His Queen was mightily annoyed at his humiliation and neglect of her, but if he had been a competent king that would have meant little.

Father Helminiak notes that it was the Stoics who developed the idea that the only proper purpose of sex was procreation—the when-God-made-sex-fun-even-when-the-woman-is-not-fertile-he-didn’t-really-mean-it argument, an argument philosophically pioneered in Plato’s The Laws (through the voice of “the Athenian”). It was reading into the Bible (and translating with those presumptions) a restrictive theory of sex and a narrow version of ‘natural’—one that is clearly simply not based on how either other species or humans actually are but how they are allegedly supposed to be—that generated the blanket condemnation of homogenital activity.

Though, given that all the monotheist traditions condemn same-sex activities (something polytheist and animist traditions are much less inclined to do), I suspect the sexual logic of monotheism encourages such readings. Since monotheism is the worship of the One God, sexuality is not part of the divine (unlike in polytheism or animism). So sex becomes what differentiates, and thus separates, us from God, from the divine. The only way sex connects us to the divine, to God-the-Creator, is via procreation, so only procreative sex (or, at least, sex between procreators) is acceptable.

Even so, homosexuality is simply not a major Biblical concern. Jesus, the Apostles and the Prophets are much more concerned with other issues, which makes the saliency of homosexuality for contemporary political Christianity even sadder. Particularly as the condemnation and persecution of homosexuality—with its hangings, burnings, burials alive, gaolings, floggings, humiliations, poisoning of lives, dividing of families, wasting of talent—has caused far more evil than homosexuality itself (precisely how many same-sex orgasms "equals" one person dying in pyrotechnic agony?)

What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality is a short, highly readable and informative book.

The Truth about Muhammad

Robert Spencer produces the blog jihad watch. His The Truth About Muhammad: the Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion is a polemic, but an intelligent and informed polemic, written in an accessible and populist style. One of the strengths of the book is that Spencer builds his case from entirely Muslim sources about the life of Muhammad.

The book is a biography of the Prophet, one written with a cold eye to the legacy of his life and work. In his first chapter, Spencer explains that he wrote this book to counter what he sees as ill-informed tendencies to have far too glowing a view of Muhammad, whose biography matters because the Prophet’s words and actions have such an authoritative status within Islam. To whitewash the Prophet is both to whitewash Islam and to create a barrier to understanding Islam. One of the themes in the book is Spencer citing and critiquing particular Western scholars for whitewashing, obfusticating or simply misrepresenting the evidence in order to project a positive view of the Prophet. (It is clear that one of the problems is that the default vision in Western heads of a founder of a major religion is Christ or Buddha, and Muhammad is very different from either: as are his teachings.)

Spencer then looks at the problem of historical sources, why the Qur’an—due to its often very elliptical nature—has to be interpreted in light of the hadith, the difficulties of the evidence and how it is the traditional beliefs about Muhammad which matter, since these are what inspire Muslims.
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Seven chapters on the life and career of Muhammad follow: the book concludes with a final chapter on Muhammad’s legacy. The notion that religion is corrupted by marriage with secular power is an old one: hence claims that Constantine corrupted Christianity, Ashoka Buddhism and so on. In the case of Islam, such corruption occurs right at the beginning under the Prophet himself, since the (later, after he has achieved secular power) Medinan verses are much more intolerant, violent and persecutory than the earlier Meccan verses (when he was just a preacher). And, according to standard Qur’anic exegesis, later verses supersede earlier ones.

It also means that, if one wants to present a nice, “fluffy” view of Muhammad and Islam, you quote the Meccan verses, quietly ignoring the superseding authority of any contradicting Medinan ones. Or the inconvenient bits in his life. For waging aggressive war for Islam, engaging in deceit, defining as good anything which advances Islam (and as bad anything that harms it), taking slaves and booty, sexual exploiting one’s captives, ordering the assassination of writers, beheading captives, selling women and children into slavery, waging war in ways which put non-combatants at risk, taking child brides, killing apostates, insisting on special privileges for believers, insisting men have more rights than women: all these things have impeccable Islamic credentials in the life and actions of the Prophet.

Reading The Truth About Muhammad, one is struck by what an enormous burden the legacy of Muhammad is, particularly on Muslims but not only on Muslims.

Not only the lack of consistency in moral principles due to its overarching moral instrumentalism, but also encouraging a profoundly fatalistic conception of causality, a requirement to believe as God’s Revealed Truth things that are demonstrably untrue (e.g. that the men of Sodom invented homosexuality), that the unpassable benchmark of human political development was achieved in C7th Arabia: the latter in particular being something even someone as intellectually sophisticated as Tariq Ramadan is committed to.

While Christians believe Christianity to be the fulfilment of Jewish history, they accept the Old Testament as is. Islam sees itself as the fulfilment of the Jewish and Christian prophetic tradition, but the Qu’ran, as the direct Word of God, is uncreated and eternal: so any contradiction with Jewish or Christian Scriptures is due to Jews and Christians perverting the word of Allah.

The burdens in dealing with non-Muslims go beyond this profound de-legitimising of Judaism and Christianity. There are the attacks on befriending Jews or Christians; that laws that treat believers and non-believers equally, or men and women equally, are an offense against Islam; the permission for being deceitful in dealing with non-Muslims, part of the narrowing of the moral compass so that what is good or not for Islam is the highest ethical consideration.

One can see why some Sufis developed the notion that religions were just “masks” for expressing more fundamental spiritual realities. The “mask” of Islam is a very problematic one.

Muhammad established a divinely sanctioned conquest autocracy: a form of rule that, in various forms, has been the standard form of rule in the Middle East for essentially its entire history since rulership began. So the Prophet’s religion fitted both the standard form of rulership and attempted to incorporate (and, to be fair, transcend) tribal politics: a winning combination. (Even if its marriage of the sacred with rulership has left an enduring problem of succession to the Prophet.) It was an imperial religion of conquest in a region whose history has been dominated by waves of conquest: a matching of enduring patterns with belief, a triumph of selection processes.

Muhammad really is a very different figure than, say, Jesus or Buddha, and he established a very different religion. Spencer’s The Truth About Muhammad is a useful corrective to wishful writing about the Prophet and his legacy.

The Homosexual Matrix

The late C. A. Tripp’s The Homosexual Matrix was one of the first publications to treat homosexuality in a matter-of-fact way.

Tripp showed an impressive grasp of sources and information. The calm sanity of tone, the enormous breadth of information, the continual insistence on the variety of the human is very impressive.

He attempted to tackle the question of what causes heterosexuality and homosexuality—surely the right approach. Alas, there was simply not sufficient scientific information for him to use. And, alas, he accepts John Money’s claims about the pliability of gender assignment that have since been comprehensively discredited.

The coverage of historical and anthropological data is very impressive—I was amused by the passages detailing how standard translations of Plato take the homosexual references out. Tripp very much brings home, in his discussion of the rich variety of human social forms, what an outrageous lie the claims that repression of homosexuals and homosexuality is needed to “protect” the family and procreation are. (There is even evidence that positively correlates fertility rates with homosexual activity.)

Tripp is very critical of much psychiatry and therapy, regarding it as either poorly supported by scientific evidence or flatly contradictory to it. His background in sex research makes him particularly scathing about the lack of evidentiary basis. Often, he suggests, it is not much more than the rationalisation and enforcement of conventional mores. He is particularly scathing on the matter of “cures” for homosexuality (which remain as mythical now as then, despite earnest attempts to believe in them).

Tripp discusses inversion (not a concept much used nowadays) and effeminacy, but mainly to distinguish them from homosexuality. He contains quite discussion of various forms of psychological resistance, both with reference to sexual performance as well as evidence and information. His discussion of the reactions to Kinsey’s research is quite enlightening.

While some of the book is outdated, there is still much useful information. The general tone of sanity and simple humanity is not the least of The Homosexual Matrix virtues.

Pirenne thesis

I have done a moderate amount of reading on or related to the Pirenne thesis. Including Henri Pirenne's posthumous work Mohammed and Charlemagne and Hodges and Whitehouse's examination of the thesis in the light of the archaeological evidence Mohammed, Charlemagne & the Origins of Europe.

Found both books highly readable. Pirenne relied on written texts – what was mentioned: products, trade, types of persons, taxes, etc – to build up a picture of the transition from the (Western) Roman Empire to the period of Carolingian rule. His contention was that the Germanic invasions were predominantly political changes at the top of society. That the Mediterannean-based Roman economy continued, that the successor states continued Roman administrative practices with educated secular officials and dominant royal authority based on tax-funded financial power, were culturally integrated into "Romania" and it was only with the Arab-Islamic invasions and conquest of the C7th that the whole Mediterranean world is split into two, trade collapses and Latin Christendom acquires a much more Germanic and Northern nature. With the collapse of trade and a mercantile, monetised economy, the Carolingians were forced into a land-for-service local-self-sufficiency economy which is the basis for the rise of medieval society.
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Pirenne's thesis has always been highly contentious. Reading Pirenne while being aware that archaeological evidence in particular finds a quite different economic pattern – that trade and population began to collapse when the Roman Empire was still very much intact, that the decline continued until at least the middle of the C8th after which a definite expansion occurred – raises both fascinating questions about the problem of evidence (it is very noticeable how questioning McCormick and Collins are about the written texts of the period) and makes one question Pirenne's sequencing and causal explanations. For example, it is much more plausible that the decline of Merovingian rule was precisely because they relied on a collapsing Roman model, than Pirenne’s rather dated notions of family decadence and self-indulgence (though internal regime decay, if somewhat differently cast, is not to be dismissed), and that the Carolingians rose to power precisely because they developed forms of rulership much better suited to the circumstances of the time. Similarly, the clear disappearance of the formal tax-paid-long-service-regulars Roman Army prior to the evaporation of Imperial rule in the West would surely raise doubts about the fundamental health of the Roman economic and political model. Moreover, complaints about the level of piracy are evidence for significant maritime trade, not against. One does not infer from large numbers of lions that there is a lack of antelopes: the existence of large numbers of predators suggests an even larger number of prey.

Hodges and Whitehouse provide an excellent presentation of the archaeological evidence up to 1982. The shrinking of cities in the Roman world in a long cascading decay that is very clear by the late C5th and moves across the Roman world to hit even the economic mainstays of the Eastern Roman Empire by the early C7th (before the Arab invasions). In the north, elite-dominated exchange networks grew up with significant coastal emporiums in operation by the C8th. The "Carolingian Renaissance" was a shallow phenomenon financed by Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious. Once the Carolingian empire became divided by civil war, the cultural revival and trade declined. Hodges and Whitehouse see the Viking outbreak as a response to both decline in trade and divided authority, though the beginning of raids in the 790s does not entirely fit that suggestion. (I suspect technological improvements in longship construction, particularly sails, may have been the crucial factor.)

I found Hodges and Whitehouse's following of the archaelogical evidence concerning trade to Abbasid rule in Iraq particularly engaging. There is strong evidence of the Norse being conduits of trade via the Russian rivers from the Caliphate to the Carolingian realm. The establishment of Abbasid rule seems to have acted as a stimulus to trade, its later decline a suppressor of it. Hodges and Whitehouse suggest that part of Louis the Pious's problems from the 830s onwards may have come from the commercial consequences of Abbasid financial exhaustion.

It is certainly clear that the collapse in trade was never absolute. But it is also clear that there was a long decline from c300 to c750 such that, by 750, the Church is the only significant repository of literate folk in Latin Christendom: a fundamental factor in the squabbling alliance of Church and Warlord which is the overarching institutional basis of the medieval world. What seems to be going on, amongst the competition for power and wealth, is a slow searching for institutional arrangements that will work in the changed circumstances. However brilliant a medievalist Henri Pirenne was, his basic thesis does not really hold up.

In Sheep’s Clothing

George Simon’s In Sheep's Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People is a clearly written analysis of covert-aggressive people and how to deal with them.

Like Albert Bernstein, author of Emotional Vampires: Dealing With People Who Drain You Dry, Simon is a therapist and uses cases as illustrative examples, setting them up in the first part of the book and then using them to illustrate various points later in the book. Simon adds a useful extra dimension to what Bernstein has to say, not least because he shows the same unsentimental practicality, he carefully discusses the role of covert-aggression with other personality disorders (such as passive-aggressive, obsessive-compulsive, narcissist, anti-social [pp 30ff]) and he agrees with Bernstein that mild personality disorders have become more common, noting that therapists are increasingly using cognitive-behavioural therapies to diagnose and treat such (p.xii).

More specifically, Simon argues that neurotic disorders aren’t anywhere near as common as they used to be. Now, aggression is much more of a problem. Which can be a major problem if outmoded or misplaced assumptions lead to misdiagnoses (pp 12-13).

Simon makes a fairly standard distinction (p.6) between assertion (standing up for yourself) and aggression (fighting unnecessarily or with little concern with how others are affected). But it is not aggression per se which is his concern. Open aggression is pretty obvious. It is covert-aggression, people who obscure their aggression: an inherently manipulative thing to do.

Simon distinguishes between covert-aggression – which is active – from passive-aggression (p.7). Key features of manipulation (what he calls the process of victimisation) are (1) the manipulator’s aggression is not obvious, (2) the manipulators frequently use tactics which are powerful deception techniques hard to recognise as clever ploys, (3) all of us have weaknesses and insecurities that can be exploited, (4) we rationalise away what our intuition tells us about the person (pp 8-10).

Simon distinguishes between neurotic individuals (those too bothered by their own thoughts and actions) and character-disturbed personalities (those not bothered enough about their own actions). The latter are a bigger problem because they make other folk unhappy and are much more socially disruptive (pp 18-19).
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Simon summarises the problems in the thinking of character-disordered people (like Bernstein, he regards as fundamental that character-disordered people do not think as most folk do) as such being

self-focused, possessive, extreme (all or nothing), egomaniacal, shameless, quick and easy, guiltless (pp 22-23).

Simon lists the main types of aggressive personalities as unbridled, channelled, sadistic, predatory (pp 25-26). He argues that covert-aggressives are a distinct sub-type of aggressive personalities. Their major attributes are that:

they always want to “win”; seek power and dominance; can be deceptively civil, charming and seductive; can also be unscrupulous, underhanded and vindictive fighters; have uniquely impaired consciences; are abusive and exploitative in their interpersonal relations (pp 28-29).

They may have various symptoms of other character disturbances but the core feature is being covert-aggressive (p.32).

Simon also identifies various learning failures by covert-aggressives:

they never learned when fighting is necessary and just; they never allowed themselves to learn that “winning” in the long-run is often characterised by a willingness to give ground, concede or submit in the short-run; they never learned how to fight constructively or fairly; because they detest submission, they never allowed themselves to learn the potentially constructive benefits of admitting defeat; they never learned to get beyond their childish selfishness and self-centredness; they never learned genuine respect or empathy for the vulnerabilities of others (pp 34-35).

Having set up the descriptive and analytical framework in Chapter 1, Simon then goes through various characteristics of covert-aggressive people, using case studies. These cover The Determination to Win (Chapter 2), The Unbridled Quest for Power (Chapter 3), The Penchant for Deception and Seduction (Chapter 4), Fighting Dirty (Chapter 5), The Impaired Conscience (Chapter 6), Abusive, Manipulative Relationships (Chapter 7), The Manipulative Child (Chapter 8).

Simon argues that it is important not to diagnose, for example, predatory aggression as being driven by fear but to see it clearly as being driven by desire (p.62). Similarly, with manipulative children, once you start looking for “underlying causes” (such as fear) you are diverted from considering the way that it is not the frustrations of life that are the problem, it is the personality and the patterns of behaviour which has become the problem (p.83).

Which leads Simon to distinguish between self-esteem (of which it is easy to have too much as well as too little [p.84]), which derives from what we know we have and self-respect which derives from what we’ve done with what we’ve been given (p.85).

Part II is entitled Dealing Effectively With Manipulative People. Starting with how to recognise the tactics of manipulation and control. Simon distinguishes between the psychological defence mechanism of being in denial in order to avoid unbearable emotional pain and acts which people do because they lack the guilt or shame to consider anything but their own wishes (pp 92-94).

Simon lists some of the more common forms of manipulative behaviour as:

minimization, lying, denial, selective inattention (or selective attention), rationalizaton, diversion, evasion, covert intimidation, guilt-tripping, shaming, playing the victim role, vilifying the victim, playing the servant role, seduction, projecting the blame (blaming others), feigning innocence, feigning confusion, brandishing anger (pp 96ff)

using the case studies he had already set out in Part I to provide illustrative examples. He makes the key point that repeated use of such techniques indicate that the person will continue to engage in the problematic behaviours (p.113).

The last Chapter (Redefining the Terms of Engagement) sets out various principles to follow:

letting go of harmful misconceptions, becoming a better judge of character, knowing yourself better, knowing what to expect and what to do, avoiding fighting losing battles, put your energy where the power is (pp 116ff).

Under knowing yourself better, Simon lists the main dangers as:

naivete, over-conscientiousness, low self-confidence, over-intellectualization, emotional dependency (pp 117-119)

Simon also sets out various tools of personal empowerment (p.122):

accept no excuses; judge actions not intentions; set personal limits; make direct requests; accept only direct responses; stay focused and in the here and now; when confronting aggressive behaviour, keep the weight of responsibility on the aggressor; when you confront, avoid sarcasm, hostility and put-downs; avoid making threats; take action quickly; speak for yourself; make reasonable agreements; be prepared for consequences; be honest with yourself (pp 122ff).

The point is not to have a life without fights – they are part of life – but to fight fairly (pp 136-137).

There is also an Epilogue: Undiscipline Aggression in a Permissive Society, where Simon argues that unprincipled aggression in an increasing social problem and that learned responsibility and improved moral character need to be adopted and instilled.

George K Simon Jr’s book is short, clear and easy to read. I found it informative and useful and much in it that resonated with my own experiences.

Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas

Elaine Pagels’ book Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas is far more about the development of the notion of Christian orthodoxy than specifically about the most famous of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic Gospels (about which Pagels has written a very enlightening book).

The Gospel of Thomas is included as an appendix to the Beyond Belief. But Pagels writes far more about the Gospel of John rather than the Gospel of Thomas. Pagels argues that the Gospel of John is written as a response to the Gospel of Thomas (which commits her to an early dating of the Gospel of Thomas). What she brings out is the sheer activity of the early Christians, in writing and arguing about who Jesus was and what he meant, arguments that can be traced in the canonical Gospels themselves (particularly the differences between the Gospel of John and the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke).

This sheer variety seemed threatening to some within the Christian movement, particularly in the light of its very real persecution. Particularly to Irenaeus who sought to establish a set of Canonical books and a set of basic Christian beliefs: to seek strength through unity. A process that was itself greatly strengthened when Emperor Constantine started supporting the Christian Church – so it became legally important who had authority and who didn’t, who was a proper Christian and who wasn’t. Hence the Nicene Creed.

What interests Pagels in Beyond Beliefis not only how certain propositions and certain specific writings became regarded as fundamental to Christianity but also how the idea that propositional beliefs were defining in the first place developed. (Hence the title.)

In Beyond Belief, Pagels is very up front about being someone whose scholarly enquiries are motivated by various personal concerns and interests. But not, and this may be crucial, convictions. Scholarship is the vehicle for her explorations, not the victim of them. A very clear and striking read.

Early Medieval Europe

Roger Collins’ Early Medieval Europe, 300-1000 is a fine narrative history of the transition from late antiquity to the medieval. I enjoyed the intelligent scepticism about the available written sources and the way Collins analysed historical actors in terms of the problems actually facing them (rather than some teleological notion of how they “should” have acted or be seen to have acted). Found the lack of consideration of the underlying structures of (changing) societies a bit frustrating, though I realise there are major evidence difficulties. Still, there seemed to be an underlying story just out of reach.

Collins sees the central drama of the period, what he calls the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, as mainly consisting in the disappearance of the first the Western Roman Army, and then the capping Imperial authority, as result of various choices made by said authority under mounting military pressure, with most of the underlying structures remaining. There is much to be said for this characterisation, though the last bit is the most dubious. Moreover, the evidence of a long-term demographic and economic decline extending from about 300AD to about 750AD suggests that these processes were themselves the results of deeper underlying causes (which they may, of course, have then aggravated). Similarly, Collins seems a little over-impressed by the survival of the Eastern Roman Empire (p.98). Yes, that state did survive for another 1000 years, but it also lost half its own territory in the period 650-710AD.

Which is not to say it is other than a useful and informative book. The political and military struggles of the period are laid out in a clear narrative, particularly the rise and decline of the Carolingian empire, and there is plenty of information to assist in building a better sense of the period.

First they came for the … : Of pink triangles and yellow stars, a reply to Shimon Cowen

In the October 2009 issue of Quadrant, Rabbi Dr Shimon Cowen, Director, Institute for Judaism and Civilization—which advocates basing civilisation on the Noahide laws—has an article entitled “Rights” as a Weapon in Culture War. The article argues for the basing of law and public morality on religious values and not a hedonistic, materialistic secularism that he sees as becoming, in effect, the “official religion” in modern democracies. Dr Cowen uses abortion, incest, bestiality and homosexuality as examples of improper use of rights language and of secularist attack on religious foundations of a moral society.

Religious exclusion
What struck me when I first read the article was that, if one added “and Jews” to his attacks on equal protection of the law for homosexuals, the article could have, with minor adjustments, been written by any Catholic conservative denouncing equal rights for Jews prior to about 1945. If one added “and Papists”, it could have been written by any Anglican or Presbyterian attacking giving equal rights to Catholics prior to Catholic emancipation. If one added “Jews and Christians”, it could have been written by a contemporary Iranian mullah or Saudi cleric.

Just as Shimon Cowen takes legal equality for homosexuals as a reductio ad absurdem of liberal modernity, so Christian conservatives (particularly Catholics) in decades past took legal equality for Jews—the “God killers”, the “Messiah deniers”—as a reductio ad absurdem of liberal modernity. Similarly, “decent Muslims” in the Ottoman Empire bitterly rejected the pressure from Western powers to have legal equality for dhimmis—the deniers of the Mission of the Prophet, in the empire of the Caliph.

The historical arguments for the persecution of the Jews have—prior to the development of racial theory in the C19th—overwhelmingly been religious ones. By denying Jews (or Catholics, or Protestants, or Christians, as the case may be) equal rights, one was showing respect to God and the religious basis of society. The argument that “God does not want X group to have equal rights” has proved to be enduring, a moveable feast and regularly aimed against Jews. In the Islamic world, it still is.

Having agreed that…
Such an argument has far more power if it has a “lift off” example. Some case that “everyone agrees” with so, having established acceptance of the idea that there is some group out there for whom it is an offence against God—against basic religious values—to give equal rights to, one can just add in extra examples as convenient. And the extra group that has most commonly been “added in” are Jews.

But they are not the “lift off” group. The “lift off” group has been “sodomites”, the same-sex oriented and active—the form of the human that the Noahide laws specifically exclude from human society. They are a group that the otherwise very divided Abrahamic religions of Jerusalem can agree to hate, for example.
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They are the “lift off” group not only in terms of moral and religious exclusion but, even more grimly, in terms of virtuous extermination. The group God not only excludes from decent society, but specifically wants exterminated. This notion, this adaptation of Genesis 19 so it became a tale of God’s Wrath as virtuous extermination of “that group over there” (a nicely differentiable group, since most people are not interested in sex with members of their own sex; as well as a nicely vulnerable group, since they grow up as isolated individuals in families and social milieus overwhelmingly dominated by the other-sex oriented) was originally developed by Philo of Alexandria but was enthusiastically taken up by the Catholic Church.

Having accepted Philo’s marriage of natural law with Scriptural Revelation, and having defined the same-sex active out of being our moral neighbours, so the fundamental tenements of Christ’s teaching:

Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

did not apply to those who committed “treason” against the purposes of the Creator, the Author of Nature, by committing acts of “unnatural sex”, this denial of being moral neighbours was immediately extended to the Jews, notably by St John Chrysostom, who both accepted Philo’s reasoning, to the extent of adapting his metaphors, and was a notorious preacher against Jews and Judaising. For had the Jews not committed “treason” against the purposes of God by killing Christ? By refusing to heed His message?

So gays and Jews have both held to be “in Rebellion against God”, which made their exclusion from moral and religious decency their fault, and their fault very grave indeed.

Indeed, it is by considering how “arguments against homosexuality” (which, given the centrality of sexual orientation to human nature, are arguments against people’s natures) are still acceptable in many quarters when “arguments against blacks”, “arguments against Jews” or “arguments against women” are not, that we can enter into the mindset of Jew-hatred in particular. The still contested case within the Western world for the exclusion of some group of humans is an excellent one to look at the dynamics, the logic, of bigotry.

Denial of ordinary humanity
Arguments against homosexuality are, of course, typically mounted against homosexual activity—Dr Cowen does this, for instance. But that is a spurious distinction. As noted, sexual orientation is sufficiently central to our nature, that it is an attack on the nature of particular individuals, on them as not being proper manifestations of the human.

In his article, Dr Cowen writes:

No one will deny that homosexual impulses are part of the polymorphous perversity of the human being, and the impulse may be physically an extremely powerful one in certain individuals. But the boundaries established by morality, the concept of Divine purpose and function established by revealed morality, require its containment and inhibition in actual practice.

In other words, same-sex orientation does not count as a legitimate manifestation of the human and so any claims the same-sex oriented may have, have to be radically discounted.

The notion of homosexuality as the “silent sin”, the crimen nefandum or peccatum mutum makes perfect sense, because allowing the same-sex active to speak grants them status as legitimate persons: for if they can speak in their own defense, it becomes effectively impossible to deny them the legitimacy of their desires. Hence the radical discounting of their claims has to become a radical discounting of them. Hence also the endless, and often bitter, fight by religious conservatives against any public space for homosexuals-as-homosexuals: the denouncing and boycotting of books, films, TV series, whatever. The entire point is to deny them the status of “just folk”, to deny them ordinary humanity.

For there has been nowhere near the same campaigning against portraying thieves and murderers as ordinary folk (as distinct from concerns over direct portrayal of violence), for no matter how ordinary they are portrayed, the reality of theft and murder remains. Portray being homosexual as ordinary and the moral case against it [and thus them] begins to collapse.

Such dismissal or denial of their ordinary humanity was exactly what was done against Jews. Dr Cowen writes of:

… for example an overtly practicing homosexual maths teacher may have to be taken by the school, even though this contradicts its ethic. The school may not model its ethic through its staffing.

Just as an anti-Semite could complain that a school might be required to take an overtly practicing Jewish maths teacher, thus denying its “Christian” or “Aryan” ethic (as the case may be).

Dr Cowen writes:

The public square belongs as much to its religious constituents as to its non-religious constituents and it has to be livable for everyone.

Except, apparently, its homosexual constituents, who are to be excluded. The inherently non-reciprocating nature of bigotry (making claims for itself and/or against others which it will not tolerate by them) is here well displayed.

[It really is about respecting, or not, the personhood of the same-sex attracted. This is what has changed in the wider society. In the words of philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah:

over the last 30 years or so, instead of thinking about the private activity of gay sex, many Americans and Europeans started thinking about the public category of gay people.

The division is between those who get that attacking same-sex activity is attacking the personhood of the same-sex attracted and those who think the activity is so wrong their personhood needs to be attacked/constrained.]

Dr Cowen treats homosexuality as being of the same category as incest, abortion and bestiality. But that is precisely what it is not. Incest is wrong because it breaches necessary boundaries in family life, opposition to abortion is all about defending the vulnerable (hence turns on the moral status of the foetus) while bestiality breaches species boundaries: all three issues are about vulnerability and radical imbalance in ability to give consent. Same-sex attraction is about adults building lives together. Hence the need to deny them any right to speak in their own defence, because there is no vulnerable party, except in cases which equally apply to other-sex attraction. [On the contrary, anathematising same-sex attraction and activity greatly expands vulnerability.]

To give the same-sex active their humanity is to give the game away. Just as to give Jews their humanity was to give the Jew-hating game away. What, was, after all the power of the case of Ann Frank but that her story, her words, her tragedy shrieked the ordinary humanity of Jews.

The constant battle of religious conservatives to deny the same-sex active their ordinary humanity is, indeed, their necessary battleground. But that tells you all you really need to know about what they are advocating. Any commitment to one’s faith that is based on making other people miserable, in a blatant denial of moral reciprocation, is not worth a scintilla of respect.

The secular peace
When Dr Cowen writes of:

the concept of Divine purpose and function established by revealed morality

that could equally be taken—and has—to operate against Jews who fail to accept Christ as the Son of God and Jews and Christians for failing to accept Muhammad as the Seal of the Prophets. Or one flavour of Christians against another.

Despite what Dr Cowen implies, secularism did not develop as some conspiracy against God or religious belief. It developed as a way of dealing with radical differences in what revealed morality meant. Now that significant proportions of society do not accept any revealed morality, it is even more necessary. Dr Cowen notes that:

… personal religious identification is acknowledged by 70 per cent of the Australian and more of the American public—that is, that religious identification is the salient fact of the “public” …

But that means 30 per cent do not so identify, and they are citizens too. Moreover, religious identification does not mean accepting any particular characterisation of revealed morality. Only 35% of Australians, in a recent poll, agreed that homosexuality is immoral. Among Christian denominations, the proportion so agreeing ranged from 34% of Catholics to 68% of Baptists. Basing public policy on the notion that homosexuality is immoral—particularly that they be denied any right to be sexually active according to their natures—in fact goes against majority views.

This is the problem of authority from which secular states grew. God’s authority is not contestable, it is not examinable, it is not able to be definitively established. Faced with its absoluteness and indeterminacy, using God’s authority as the basis of public policy always ends up in an exercise of exclusion, coercion and violence. As we can see in our time in Wahbabist Saudi Arabi, in the Islamic Republics of Iran and Sudan and in the past of Western civilisation.

Dr Cowen attacks the Enlightenment heritage as inadequate, writing:

The very term “rights”, with its Enlightenment lineage, has to do with a concept of the autonomy and the sovereignty of the human being. Religion, whilst acknowledging human free will, looks at the Sovereignty of God and the role of human agency in the fulfilment of Divine purpose.

Such as Islam’s claim that we should submit to the Sovereignty of Allah and the purpose of universal submission to His Sovereignty, perhaps?

Or perhaps not. (That is, after all, the basis of the Islamist assault on Israel.) The notion of rights in Western civilisation is rather older than the Enlightenment, as we can see from the 1537 Papal Encyclical Sublimus Dei and its statement that:

that the Indians are truly men and that … the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.

If Sublimus Dei shows what being within the protection of moral universalism means, the Golden Legend's presentation of the Nativity shows the extreme of being outside it.

Also outside the protections of moral universalism were Jews herded into ghettos and subject to various legal exclusions (not to mention periodic pogroms and expulsions). It was not the strength of religious belief that saw the emancipation of the Jews in Western societies, but the Enlightenment’s attack on priestly authority and religious exclusion, its pursuit of a basis for social order not subject to the violence, exclusion and strife of religion. For a genuinely human and humane moral universalism. What Dr Cowen refers to as:

… anchored in the common tradition of the world religions, which holds to objective, universal and enduring values

availed Jews little in deeply religious pre-Enlightenment Europe. Indeed, typically the more deeply religion was tied into the policy of the state, the worse the situation for Jews. With the most religious state of all (the Vatican) being much the worst offender.

There are countries where concern for what God wants pervade public policy: but Iran and Saudi Arabia are places far worse than any Western secular society. Not least for their rampant misogyny: a common feature of monotheism-based public policy, with its masculine religious authority both human (no female rabbis, clerics or priests, until very recently) and divine (God-the-Father, the ultimate authority, being conceived in highly masculinized form).

Dr Cowen wants to rehabilitate claims based on tradition. But exclusion of Jews from public life was highly traditional. It was only the overturning of long-established tradition that gave Jews legal equality. Dr Cowen wants to base public morality on values, but the exclusion of Jews was most emphatically based on values: deeply religious values. We may well say that any commitment to one’s faith that is based on making other people miserable is not worth a scintilla of respect, but that hardly stops with treating Jews decently.

Dr Cowen argues against hate speech laws making “homophobia” a crime. Hate speech laws are noxious, but if he is committed to the Noahide laws, he would appear to be therefore committed to laws against blasphemy. Any position of “my laws against hate speech are good, but yours are bad” is just another case of the lack of any genuine reciprocating universalism in many religious claims. God is so useful for bigotry, since His trumping authority means embarrassing lacks of reciprocation can be defended as fulfilling the Highest Purpose of all.

Secular ascents
Dr Cowen claims that “Hedonistic Materialism”—what he calls Hedonomat—encourages greed and theft. Yet the reality is that life and property are much safer in modern Western secular societies than they were in medieval religion-based polities, for example. The claim of religious conservatives that we are in an age of moral decline hardly fits the long-term drop in violence and cruelty. But his claim is much larger than that:

Hedonomat … can also promote a culture of greed and theft, not only on the count of its materialistic culture, but also for the simple reason that the child or adult can ride a train without paying because “no one” (not the conductor and not God) is watching.

The implication that there was no morality before monotheism, or without monotheism, is just nonsense. That Aristotle, Buddha, Confucius were not moral or did not live in societies where morality was alive and vital.

Moral universalism is prone to two pathologies. One is using the rhetoric of abomination, and the language of moral degradation and exclusion, to tell a moral story against some group so as to exclude them from the protections of moral universalism. That was notoriously done against the Jews, just as Rabbi Cowen wants to do so as to exclude homosexuals.

The second pathology is universalising the parochial: taking something specific to particular cultures, times, social milieus and claiming that it is some moral universal. Across the breadth of human cultures, homosexuality is not remotely a universal sin or crime. Human cultures have varied in their attitudes from homicidal anathematisation to making it compulsory or near compulsory (typically, as processes of passage to adulthood).

That monotheisms have been so virulent in their anathematisation is just a manifestation of the sexual obsessions monotheism is so prone too. As is monotheism’s typical fearfulness about female sexuality. It is standard justification of such obsessiveness with sex-roles and sex-forms to claim that it reflects the natural world and is necessary for proper social order. Dr Cowen runs the two claims together:

… so the liberation of the essential (the pristinely animal) human being must give expression to morphing across boundaries. Indeed the human is here accorded a freedom which the animal does not possess: whilst generally the animal does not cross boundaries, human freedom is to be expressed in the social facilities of “polymorphous perversity”, the crossing of boundaries.

Which is false both in its characterisation of nature as existing in neat sex and gender boxes and in its claim of rigidity or chaos as the only options.

Dr Cowen puts the battles as being between two alternatives:

We live in a time of powerful contrast between two philosophies: one which believes in God and in a transcendent, an objective and an enduring morality; the other which does not believe (or suppresses its belief) in God, and allows the morphing of values and moral institutions in accordance with mere desire.

Buddhists might feel to be in the excluded middle here. As might many folk. But Dr Cowen’s characterisation of some religious unity is patent nonsense.

Nor are all secularisms the same. The prevailing notions of secularism in the Anglosphere are rather different than that prevailing in France, for example. It is always useful to trot out Peter Singer, as Dr Cowen does, since he can be guaranteed to provide a wonderful reductio whipping boy. But the good philosopher’s pronouncements are widely contested and not merely by religious folk.

Indeed, many of Dr Cowen’s more cogent criticisms of Hedonomat are precisely in the areas where it is most like religion in its exclusiveness and trumping claims.

Dr Cowen’s tendency to conceive matters in apocalyptic divides is also on display when he writes:

Hedonomat is the deregulation of sexual activity: including not just the normalisation (and thereby in the educational system, also the cultivation) of homosexual practice …

This notion that equality-means-hegemony is precisely the sort of claim that was made against Jews. Just as anti-gay activists nowadays talk of equal protection of the law for homosexuals meaning the “homosexualising” of society, so equal protection of the law for Jews was taken to represent the “Judaizing” of society. Treating the same-sex attracted as “just folks” is the cultivation of nothing except ordinary human decency. Just as treating Jews as “just folks” is and was also.

That same accusations, the same claims of threat and justified exclusion, are used against the same-sex attracted now has were used against Jews previously does not show that there is something wrong with Jews after all, but that what we are dealing with is the common logic of bigotry, with its purloining [of] the language of morality. For bigotry denies the objects of bigotry the reciprocal protections of morality, a denial which is itself a moral claim and so is cast in moral language. But it may purloin the language of morality, that does not remotely make it moral.

Even given the feeding on the wish of parents for grandchildren, and rulership for the breeding of workers and warriors, exacerbated by monotheism’s problems with eros, the central dynamic in the anathematisation of same-sex activity has always been priests, clerics (and, indeed, rabbis) parading their role as “gatekeepers of righteousness” by selling effortless virtue to a huge majority at the expense of a small, easily isolated, and vulnerable minority.

Rabbi Cowen might see “God-defying, decency-destroying, immoral homosexuals”, corrupting all they touch. I see generation after generation of vulnerable young men and women, growing up in utterly unnecessary emotional misery: self-fearful, self-loathing, told they are rebels against God, against the natural order, against the very moral order itself.

Wars against people as they are
Enough, already: the notion of One True Sexuality is every bit as tyrannical and oppressive as the notion of One True Race, One True Class or One True Religion. They are all wars against people-as-they-are in the name of people as-they-are-allegedly-supposed-to-be. Nor is the trumpeting of their evil any stronger than that of the Holocaust: the pink triangles of the death camps are, every bit as much as the yellow stars of those same death camps, a warning against that deadly and brutal delusion in all its forms. It a grotesque betrayal of the lessons of appalling human misery to hold that some of the suffering in those death camps is a warning and others are not. If it is monstrous, as it is, to take that warning and burden away from Jew-hatred, it is no less monstrous to take that warning and burden away from queer-hatred.

It is a tribute to the power, and appeal, of effortless virtue, and the human capacity to fail to see others except as stick figures in one’s own internal or collective enthusiasms; to not see the simple human consequences of what one preaches, to not even consider such; that even the common experience of the death camps apparently conveys no message, no warning. No shred of human empathy.

Tammy Faye Bakker is no doubt few people’s idea of a great moral paragon. But her comment on such matters:

We’re all just people made out of the same old dirt and God didn’t make any junk

denying any notion of “proper” and “improper” forms of the human, showed an elementary capacity for human empathy that apparently eludes so many of the “gatekeepers of righteousness”. If there is something more pathetic that members of a huge majority railing against a small, and inherently vulnerable, minority it is a member, a community leader, of a small minority who has suffered appalling levels of persecution, keeping alive that same dynamic.

We know that rhetoric of abomination, and the language of moral degradation and exclusion, can turn back against their source, because they have been. Just as Christians held Jews to be rebels against God’s purpose by rejecting the Messiah they brought forth, so Muslims held Christians and Jews both to be rebels against God’s purpose for rejecting His Prophet. Orthodox priests who had railed against those rebels against the purposes immanent in creation found themselves crushed as rebels against the purposes immanent in History. And the notion of God the Virtuous Exterminator also recoiled back on its source.

According to the chroniclers, the first case of members of Jewish community being massacred by a Christian mob occurred in 414 in Alexandria. The city and community of Philo, from whose pen the notion of God the Virtuous Exterminator of the different had flowed into Christian thought. The massacre was the culmination of decades of violence and horror against the Jews stirred up by the greatest names in Christendom, notably St Augustine’s mentor St Ambrose and St John Chrysostom, the “patron saint of preachers” and an avid propagator of Philo’s ideas: of God as the Virtuous Exterminator of the morally set apart.

Why did that Christian mob act with such murderousness? Because those they slaughtered were Jews and, as such, “obviously” hateful to God: “obviously” separated from decent God-fearing folk by an enormous moral divide, for had they not denied and killed His Son?

It is way past time for rejecting the deeming of categories of people, who are otherwise just folk, as hateful to God. To use God as a weapon against one’s fellow humans, to deny them the reciprocation which is at the heart of morality. It is certainly way past time to suggest that public policy should reflect or echo such views. It is way past time to put Philo’s homicidal intolerance, and its continuing echoes, finally to rest. Ideas have consequences. A leader of the Jewish community should understand that better than most.

For is it not one of the great warnings of our time: “first, they come for the Jews”? But it is not true. For first, they come for the queers.

And if your response is “but throughout the history of Western civilisation they have always been coming for the queers”, the answer is yes, precisely. Once it has been established that there is a small, vulnerable minority who God hates, who God wants dead, who are a pathological betrayal of humanity, who corrupt anything they touch, who are a profound threat to moral decency, who absolutely cannot be treated as equals, then moving on to the next group is so much easier.

After all, if you can convince yourself that moral decency requires that young, isolated, same-sex attracted teenagers represent some great moral threat; that making their lives miserable, full of deception and self-loathing, is some great moral necessity; that they are un-persons whose suffering is entirely their fault and their burden; then doing the same to the Jews (or whoever) is easy.

You can even use exactly the same accusations. Just ask the Catholic Church.

Shimon Cowen is not protecting his people, he is keeping alive the states of mind that are their greatest threat and danger. His embrace of the un-personhood of homosexuals is doing his bit to keep alive that same logic of belief on which Jews have been crucified.

That does not show moral commitment, it shows enormous moral blindness.

The pink triangles of the death camps give exactly the same warning as the yellow stars of those same death camps, exactly the same warning of the dangers of denying our common humanity and all that goes with it. No more, no less.

ADDENDA The post has been updated to fix a spelling error and to add in the words in [ ].

Homosexuals and the Holocaust

A review essay by William Percy and Warren Johannsen on Homosexuals and the Holocaust provides a lot of useful information and insight into oppression of homosexuals by the Nazi regime and subsequent responses to the same.

The inherent vulnerability of the same-sex oriented—growing up in families and milieus where the overwhelming majority are other-sex oriented—has made them historically very easy targets. That same vulnerability played out in the death camps:

Professor Rüdiger Lautmann of the Univer­sity of Bremen demonstrated that in eleven camps on German soil, homosexuals, ostracized and without support groups, died sooner and in greater proportions than did political prisoners and Jehovah's Witnesses.

Vulnerable minorities have had historically common experiences:

Homosexuals and Jews, along with such "heretical" sects as Quakers, Unitarians, and Jehovah's Witnesses, have suffered (or enjoyed toleration) at the same times and places and at the hands of the same people ever since Christian fanatics began their persecution of sodomites not long after the Emperor Constantine in 323 made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire.

The pattern of the Nazi persecutions, and the Holocaust, replicating past patterns has been noted for Jews, less so for others (and rarely at all for the same-sex active):

In his history of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg noted that "for many centuries, and in many countries, the Jews have been the victims of destructive action.... The Nazi destruction process did not come out of a void; it was the culmination of a cyclical trend."* In his opening chapter he showed that everything that the Nazis did to the Jews had been done to them earlier by Christian governments during the Middle Ages or early modern times. What was new and unexpected in Nazism, besides the aim of total destruction, was the use of the administrative machinery and the technology of the modern state to effect the goals which the Christian Church had long pursued in regard to Jews. He should have said the same about gypsies and homosexuals.

Read More... One of the reasons the 1950s saw the growth of homophile movements in the US in particular is that a period of comparative loosening in the early C20th had been followed by a period of increased repression. This pattern had occurred previously in Germany:

This extension of the law, this regression to late medieval, Reformation, and early modern intolerance, produced in response the first efforts at homosexual emancipation in the 1860s on the part of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Károly Mária Kertbeny, the latter even coining the term "homosexual" in 1869. … Germany was the first country in which such a movement became public. It flourished as never before under the Weimar Republic — and hence once the Nazi came to power, clericalism and other reactionary forces joined the Nazis in their efforts to destroy it.

Since the same-sex attracted fall outside their notion of the proper form of the human—indeed, of accepted frameworks for thinking about people, love and desire—those anathematizing them can often not “get their story straight” (so to speak):

Furthermore, the Nazi leaders — like other right-wing nationalists — were preoccupied with birth rates, in part because they foresaw extensive German coloniza­tion of Eastern European areas that they intended to annex. The most frequent theme in their official statements on homosexuality echoes one of the paradoxes of the "sodomy delusion," namely that homosexual practices are limited to a vanishing handful of degenerates, but so contagious and able to "spread like wildfire" among all strata of the population that if firm measures are not taken to halt the growing evil, the end result will be race suicide. Some of them even cherished this belief to the point of wishing to encourage homosexuality among inferior races as a way of promoting their biological death.
The pronounced homophobia of certain Nazi leaders may have stemmed from the reaction of the small-town petit bourgeois German or Austrian to the homosexual subculture of the large cities.

Philo of Alexandria expresses this urban antipathy at the time of Christ:

Moreover, another evil, much greater than that which we have already mentioned, has made its way among and been let loose upon cities, namely, the love of boys, which formerly was accounted a great infamy even to be spoken of, but which sin is a subject of boasting not only to those who practise it, but even to those who suffer it, and who, being accustomed to bearing the affliction of being treated like women, waste away as to both their souls and bodies, not bearing about them a single spark of a manly character to be kindled into a flame, but having even the hair of their heads conspicuously curled and adorned, and having their faces smeared with vermilion, and paint, and things of that kind, and having their eyes pencilled beneath, and having their skins anointed with fragrant perfumes (for in such persons as these a sweet smell is a most seductive quality), and being well appointed in everything that tends to beauty or elegance, are not ashamed to devote their constant study and endeavours to the task of changing their manly character into an effeminate one.

Returning to the review essay, the marriage of Philo’s homicidal antipathy, expressing monotheism’s typical virulent anathematization of same-sex activity, with natural law thinking, spread such attitudes far and wide:

German military courts imposed less severe sentences upon homosexual offenses during World War II than did American ones, less sophisticated and more confused as to what measures they should adopt.

The initial response to the revelations about the death camps had its own grim elements:

…[homosexuals] marginality during the early years of the Federal Republic when, with the earlier movement crushed and forgotten, they could not defend themselves against the continuing repression of the governing Christian Democratic regime in Bonn.

Similar denials occurred even for Jews. Stalin’s regime refused to acknowledge the centrality of the killing of Jews in death camps. As Francois Furet noted, The Passing of an Illusion:

… so the Jews lost everything, even their misfortune.

with the horror that had happened to them as yet lacking even a name.

It is striking how anti-gay activists and commentators never consider homosexuals as people: indeed, often actively resent being confronted with evidence of their ordinary humanity:

It is a hallmark of the homophobic mentality that homosexuals exist only as objects of hatred and aversion, with no feelings that the Church or society need respect in any way.

This is another way in which homosexuality is the crimen nefandum or peccatum mutum “silent sin”. But it is the essence of bigotry that it attacks and denies or degrades the humanity of its contempt objects.

Several of the leading figures in the early homophile movements were Jewish. But if one is subject to more than one type of bigotry, one is likely to be more sensitive and perceptive about its dynamics:

Erwin J. Haeberle's "Swastika, Pink Triangle, and Yellow Star" correctly relates the persecution of sexology and of the homosexual rights movement to the Jewish ancestry of many of the leading figures in both.

The sad irony is that Jews were on both sides: those who stressed a common humanity and those who denied it. (This is, of course, still true.)

Repressive systems are often alike:

… what was actually inflicted on them in the Soviet Union following the adoption of the law of 7 March 1934 — symbolically on the first anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power in Germany — which prescribed a maximum penalty of five years in a forced labor camp for male homosexuality but ignored lesbianism. …
Lauritsen and Thorstad describe vividly the fate of the homosexuals in the Soviet Union:

In January 1934, mass arrests of gays were carried out in Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, and Odessa. Among those arrested were a great many actors, musicians, and other artists. They were accused of engaging in "homosexual orgies," and sentenced to several years of imprisonment or exile to Siberia. The mass arrests produced a panic among Soviet gays, and were followed by numerous suicides in the Red Army itself.

The vulnerability of the same-sex oriented manifested across the vilenesses of the Nazi regime:

Incarcerated homosexuals were among the first executed by Nazi doctors practicing euthanasia, as a document supplied by Henry Friedlander proves. In camps that tried to "reform" homosexuals through work and exposure to female prostitutes, if the inmates could perform — as many bisexual hustlers did — they were then released. Many died there of abuse and others who failed to perform with women were executed.

Since the notion underlying the bigotry iis that the same-sex active were an “improper” version of the human, had “betrayed” their humanity, even nature itself, has been so entrenched for so long, this made the same-sex active isolated victims even inside the camps themselves:

Even within the extermination camps other inmates shunned and ostracized the homosexual prisoners, as Boisson poignantly relates. They had the shortest life expectancies and highest death rates, because they belonged to a "scapegoat group" and because they were unable to form a strong support network. Lautmann contrasted them with matching control groups: political prisoners and Jehovah's Witnesses, finding that the death rate for homosexual prisoners (60 percent) was half again as high as for political prisoners (41 percent) and Jehovah's Witnesses (35 percent) and that correspondingly, upon liberation the political prisoners and Jehovah's Witnesses remaining in the camps (41 percent and 57 percent respectively) showed a higher survival rate than the homosexual prisoners.

As has been analysed in the case of Jewish survival rates in Occupied Germany, the attitude of the surrounding society made a difference:

… it must be remembered that only Germany, Austria and the Netherlands had organized homosexual emancipation movements before 1933, hence there was nothing for clerical and collaborationist governments to suppress. But everywhere inside and outside of the Reich, the protection and lassitude, or zeal and prejudice of local authorities were the main determinants of the fate of homosexuals.

But, as Rictor Norton points out that is also a long-term pattern in prosecutions of the same-sex active.

The sad thing is how a great inhumanity was built on attitudes that have been reflected even in reactions to that great horror:

The real scandal is that a world which was horrified by the crimes against humanity of the Third Reich remained indifferent to its treatment of homosexuals, denied compensa­tion to such survivors, and refused to inscribe the pink triangle on monuments to the victims. This silence is often the omission of the same historians and commentators who insult and defame the German people for their unwillingness to resist Hitler's policies, even though they were living in a country where everyone was at the mercy of the Gestapo and the rest of the Nazi terror apparatus.

The whole issue really comes down to notions of “proper” and “improper” versions of the human. If one rejects the entire notion of “improper” versions of the human, that the same-sex active are just folk, then they are just folk who are entitled to the equal protection of the law. They are just folk, who just have relationships which are entitled to the equal protection of the law.

It is the notion that they are not proper versions of the human, who do not have proper relationships, which justifies them not having equal protection of the law. It is precisely that attitude which led to the death camps—with the same-sex active particularly being the focus that maintained the notion of virtuous extermination—and continues to affect reactions to the horror of the death camps. The divide is between those who can see that the pink triangles of the death camps tell exactly the same lessons as the yellow stars and those who fail to do so.

Celluloid Closet, Gay Docos & Plaster Caster

The Celluloid Closet is an excellent documentary about the history of Hollywood's portrayals of gays and lesbians. It is the sort of documentary that the people who most need to see, won’t. Even the documentary itself was restricted by refusals to cooperate.

The first sections, covering early openness to censorsed indirectness—the period when gays and lesbians were largely forced to "read in" into films, or pick up subtexts that were smuggled past the censors—are wistful and funny. The middle section gets rather more emotionally intense as increased openness largely meant more direct portrayal as weird, flawed, villainous (and usually doomed). The final section is hopeful as positive gay images became acceptable. The DVD includes parts of interviews and interviews not included in the documentary itself. (In both sections, Tom Hanks comes across as decent and self-knowing.)

The late Vito Russo’s lecture, given in 1990, which is one of the special features of the DVD, concludes with comments on the lack of black leading men or women, that the black actors who make money are comics. How quickly things change, when one considers that Samuel L Jackson, Will Smith and Morgan Freeman are among top-15 box office stars. Though Eddie Murphy is still box-office number two overall. So four of the top-15 box office stars are black (which means they are over-represented for their share of the US population: women only have two in the top 15) while only one of the black stars is a comic.

And one of the top-20 is openly gay (which is roughly proportional).

As for times changing, only three years after that lecture, Tom Hanks won an oscar for playing a gay man dying of AIDS in Philadelphia. Gay roles have since won Oscars for Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote) and Sean Penn (Milk).

A certain box office success has also proved possible: Brokeback Mountain is the third highest grossing gay/lesbian movie (based on rating Interview with the Vampire as a gay/lesbian movie), the sixth highest grossing Western and the eighth highest grossing romantic drama (results not adjusted for inflation).

Other gay docos
Beefcake is a fun and informative mixture of “talking head” personal reminiscences, redone shorts and narrative dramatisation of the era of beefcake mags focusing on the life and vision of the founder of the American Model Guild.

Gay Sex in the 70s starts off as an examination of the amazing upsurge in sexual hedonism that followed Stonewall and becomes a touching portrayal of the effect of AIDS on the American gay community.

Fabulous!: A history of queer cinema is a pleasant, particularly dyke-aware, history of queer cinema in the US, from some very tentative beginnings to its established position as a distinct cinema.

Homo Promo is a series of trailers from films in have some sort of queer sensibility many of which are so camply dated as to be quite funny.

eXposed: the making of a legend is a fun, bouncy doco shot by redoubtable, bouncy, goth lady (Mr. Pam) about the making of the multiple-award winning gay porn movie Buckleroos. This is gay porn as professional, friendly, fun and self-aware.

Pagan capture
On a slightly different, and vaguely related note, I have rarely laughed so much watching a film as when I watched Plaster Caster. The subject is inherently funny, but the participants add to the humour and charm. Particularly Cynthia Plaster Caster herself, who comes across as sweet, everyday and determined (rather than obsessed). In between explanations of how it started, how it is done, organising an exhibition in New York of “her babies”, seeing how it is done, meeting Cynthia and her friends and reminisces from various rock stars, we have unexpected moments such as Camille Paglia informing us that Cynthia’s plaster-casting activities were what made her first start to think about rock music as pagan. Lots of fun.

History of Islamic Societies (2)

(This continues my review of Ira Lapidus’s A History of Islamic Societies. The first part is in my previous post.)

Lapidus's work is so rich in detail, one can see the recurring patterns in Islam, even beyond those he explicitly considers.

Recurring patterns
As a religion, Islam is clearly more violent than Christianity, partly because it so quickly became a religion of rulership. (Which is not the same as saying that Muslims are inherently more violent than Christians: the point is about the basic precepts, not the characteristics of believers as people: the logic of belief is not necessarily the logic of believers.)

It took Christendom centuries to evolve wars for the faith. Islam began with wars for the faith. It took Christendom centuries to evolve wars of religion. It took Islam a single generation. When, after one-and-a-half millennia, wars of religion evolved within Christianity, they led, over time, to evolution of secular states. (A concept alien to Islam and very much a Western import.)

In its first thousand years, Islam aggressed against every culture it came up against and only stopped because it came up against more successful predators. Jihad—and jihad understood as including aggressive war—was quite central to Islam’s development, right from its first generation. And remained a recurring pattern in Islam, particularly where Islam confronted non-Islamic cultures. Sufi preachers in central Sudan even preached that the inner jihad (strengthening one's own submission to Allah) as being preparation for outer jihad (forcing others to submit to the rule of Allah) (p.419).

In the world of the “global village”, we all have Islam as a neighbour to some extent. The language al-Qaeda uses to fellow Muslims fits in with longstanding patterns.

Alas, a great deal of obfusticating nonsense is propounded on this point. From two sources: Muslim apologists who are aware of a religious duty for aggressive war looks bad and those whose politics requires that the West (particularly the US) always has to be to blame and so always has to be worse than its opponents.
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Lapidus points out that Islam, in many ways, replicated previous patterns. One gets a picture of North African and Middle Eastern Islam as a region where the Volkerwanderung which never ended. Ibn Khaldun’s basic model of alternating between political unity that, after a period of cultural effervesce, decays into stagnant corruption then collapses into chaotic disunity certainly seems to work.

But a conquest religion suits an area subject to regular conquest.

The lack of communal institutions meant that even where there were fairly stable states, these were institutionally attenuated by the standards of Christendom/Europe/the West. So the Ottoman regime could decay, but not evolve, since lacked mechanisms for connecting centre and society other than command, bribery and patronage. In particular, it lacked the link that Germanic warrior assemblies had provided and from which medieval assemblies (and later modern representative legislatures) evolved. Until, of course, said medieval assemblies were subverted by absolutist governments—in the case of the ancien regime in France, ultimately disastrously, since the monarchy also lacked mechanisms for connecting centre and society other than command, bribery and patronage.

The much-vaunted Islamic tolerance generally peaks when Islam is triumphant and the religion of a ruling minority. As Islam became more dominant in the society (so the refusal to convert more problematic) and/or Islamic rule became more contested, tolerance diminishes. (Norman Sicily and Reconquista Iberia showed similar patterns.) The ultimate expression of these trends in Islam being that the first megacide of the C20th was the slaughter of a dhimmi group in a Muslim empire in its last years.

The lack of stable competing jurisdictions, and the lack of representative institutions, meant that, in Islam, intellectual suppression on religious grounds was not operating against counterbalancing mechanisms. On the contrary, such suppression was often convenient for political authorities.

Islam is also clearly a more structurally misogynist religion than Christianity. There are precisely two Muslim women with any religious significance. Fatima—daughter of the Prophet and the source of all his descendants. And Aisha, youngest of his wives and a very important source of hadiths.

But no woman matters religiously outside the family of the Prophet. There is no mainstream Muslim equivalent of Hildegard of Bingen, of St Theresa of Avila, of Mother Theresa.

Modern Islam
Lapidus’ discussion of modern Islam is fascinating and provides a framework for making sense of the better contemporary commentary. Such as the way Hezbollah (and, to a lesser extent, Hamas) stand out in effectiveness precisely because they use Islam as a unifying force.

Similarly, his discussion of Turkish politics as a struggle between two identities helps see that, given if the central identity is not Turks, then Muslim, the election success of a moderately Islamist Party is good for Kurds in Turkey (along with the election of Kurdish MPs), since it can deal with them as fellow Muslim, not as “not-Turks”.

Lapidus has a particularly informative discussion (pp 529ff) of the role of the Islamic revival in Egyptian society.

In some ways, the Islamic revival even serves as a diversion from politics … In many cases, the most important tenet of Islamic revival is the restoration of symbolic and actual male supremacy over women and the curtailment of the social and educational rights that have been gained by women in the last couple of generations. … The result is … a continued division of the Egyptian population between those segments that are moved by nationalist symbols and those that are affiliated with the Islamic revival (p533).

In the 1930s and 1940s, opposition to the British meant anti-imperialist aspects of Islam were stressed; in 1950s and 1960s solidarity and justice were stressed in opposition to the corruption of the military regime; in the 1970s personal morality and family values in response to changing social order; in the 1980s and 1990s

in Egypt as in Turkey, Islam has been the main vehicle of resistance to the state and its policies (p.534).

After all,

in many Muslim societies the state was conceived as the direct expression of God’s will for the ordering of human affairs (p.816).

In postcolonial Islam we see

a threefold structure of society. This included a secularized state, correspondingly differentiated non-political Muslim religious associations, and opposition movements that favored the reconstruction of an integrated Muslim state and society (p.818).

With some profound changes:

Sufism as a system of organizing tribal peoples for political purposes virtually disappeared (p.818).

One of the themes in the last part of Lapidus's book is the consequence of a lack of a Caliph in Islam. If there is no Caliph, then either must go back to original text (reformism) or must adapt the texts to new conditions (modernism): with finding a new Caliph being an implicit program.

One can also see how confronting Western success and globalisation can be for many Muslims. Leading to a contrast various folk have remarked upon. In the West, people have much to enjoy, so want to live and are afraid to die. While contemporary Islam produces rather too Muslims who seem afraid to live, so want to die. And—this being central to the exercise—kill people on the way out.

It is obviously silly to claim that the West has had no impact on Islam: the effect has been profound. But Islam is also a civilisation 13 centuries old (and heir to even older civilisations), with its own patterns and dynamics. Lapidus’ book is quite simply the best single source to understand them and to understand Islam as it is, and has been, in the world.