Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: lcrew@andromeda.rutgers.edu (Louie Crew) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: When SYSOPs Thunder Message-ID: Date: 3 Jun 91 05:55:49 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 132 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu SYSOP Chuck Hedrick writes: [My comments were not intended to suggest that the great number of >people against you means you are wrong. Just that I would expect >people to write with some understanding of the view of their >audience. Jennifer Irani said >> On campus, we have sought to love those who are not always >>accepted--and that includes homosexuals. However, I do not have to >>accept the sin to love the person. >You claimed not to have any idea what sin she was talking about. Of course I knew which stone Jenifer had picked up to aim at me, but rather than finish the job for her, I ducked, and called attention to the other issues that should certainly be considered about sexual sin, hetero or lesgay, before soc.religion.christian continues with this regular ritual of singling out gay people as a class for public abuse. No one knows what Jesus wrote on this when he moved his stick through the sand on a similar occasion, but what he said to the crowd was hardly "Hit em a lick, hit em a lick, harder, harder!" -- as you cheer Jennifer on to do. >This is simply silly, Cf. "Jesus! Don't be silly! This woman has committed grave offenses against Moses' Law handed down by Yaweh, and The Bible tells us to stone her. How dare you to re-write that Law by doodling in the sand and asking us instead to look at our own lives! We are not on trial here! She is! Go to it, boys. Here's a nice boulder that even I can handle! " >This is simply silly as is your misunderstanding of my term "homosexual >activity" to include all activities of homosexuals. This group has >enough problems of understanding without this kind of thing. Your lose me. While I cannot sort out your point, I can state mine: I hold sexual orientation to be integral to personhood, not incidental. Most of the psychological literature now concurs, as has the official listing of disorders in the manuals of APA since 1974. I was on the Board of the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force at that time, and know how hard it was for professional psychologists to stop making money out of what many now consider malpractice, namely the claim to make heterosexuals out of lesbian and gay people. Biblical writers wrote long before we even had such categories. Most do not hesitate to disagree with cosmology of Biblical writers, who believed the world to be flat and at the center of the universe. Nor are we bound to ground our psychological vocabulary into what we can read back into the six or seven specific biblical references to same-sex couplings. To the limited extent that heterosexuals think about it, many seem to view all people as if they are given at the outset only heterosexual proclivities. According to this view, a person becomes something other than heterosexual only when she or he makes an incorrect choice. For many heterosexuals, lesgay persons do not fundamentally exist: instead, we are simply heterosexuals gone bad; and they think we "go bad" only when we connect genitally. That's what you seem to be saying, though I admit I am lost in your vocabulary. It's predictable that at first we seem to see the world in our own image, but this theory simply does not account for the dynamics of pyschosexuality as most lesgays experience it and as most professional psychologists analyze it. Professionals constantly argue whether sexual orientation is inherited or learned, but few professionals argue about how entrenched it is: most note that sexual orientation is set very early and remains largely unchangeable, especially in its involuntary arousal patterns. Most religions hold people accountable for choices, not for what they receive. Current psychosexual understandings show that lesgay persons have far fewer choices than most knew when they shaped current notions of right and wrong sexual behavior. Most lesgay people simply do not have a choice of being heterosexual. They can run some grave risks for themselves and for their friends if they try to monkey around with the psychosexual plumbing, especially in its involuntary manifestations. For example, males do not choose to have a wet dream or an erection: most heterosexuals experience these only or predominately from heterosexual stimuli: most gays, from gay stimuli. Psychological games of behavior modification in these involuntary areas have now been renounced by the professionals who first introduced them, as quackery. Obviously no one can or should act on all stimuli. Most communities prefer to establish relationships in which sexual congress builds responsible community. That's why Saint Paul recommended marriage, as better than "to burn" with sexual desire. The few religions that have venerated celibacy (for example, Roman Catholicism) have never talked about it as a punishment, but as a spiritual gift, one given to only a very few people. No easy answers for moral decisions flow from my comments, but it hardly helps for you to ridicule my efforts to place lesgay sexuality into the more complex registers in which we experience it, rather than to serve your glib reduction of it to basic genital manifestations. This issue will surface this summer when the Episcopal Church debates sexuality. One bishop has put forward the resolution that we state again that all sexuality is limited to marriage. While that is a convenient and probably popular notion, it hardly addresses the complexity it purposes to resolve. What is "sexuality," for example? Will lesbian priests be encouraged to live with their female companions in the rectory so long as they forego genital contact? Will they be allowed to kiss, hold hands as a stated couple.......? At what moment in the complex interplay of persons does "sexuality" occur? At the moment of desire? At the moment one calls for a date? At the moment one "drinks with ones eyes"? At the moment one holds hand? At the moment of erection or lubrication? At the moment of petting? At the moment of penetration? At the moment of ejaculation? At the moment..... My own position does not force me to commit to "a moment" but to a dynamic, one in which the persons involved are responsible to work at every stage towards the full respect of God and of God's image in the partner, integrating sexuality with all other aspects of their relationship. That's not easy, certainly not as easy as having a magic moment towards which one may tease and then stop just in the nick of time for a god who stands with a stop watch or holds a tape at a finish line. I suspect the real intent of the Bishop's resolution is: "Shut up. Go back to the less complicated way it was when we thought we knew all the answers and when we put you to death if we found out who you are. At least have the decency to find a nice member of the opposite sex, and experiment on him/her. Like Lot, of old, I freely offer for you my own child!" Louie Crew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . lcrew@andromeda.rutgers.edu [Before responding to this, note that I regard this line of discussion as having ended. I'm accepting no postings beyond those in today's group. --clh]