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From: gtaylor@cornell.UUCP (Greg Taylor)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Rosen,Boswell,Moslems,Jews(some investigations)
Message-ID: <631@cornell.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 27-Jun-84 10:08:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: cornell.631
Posted: Wed Jun 27 10:08:49 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 28-Jun-84 05:28:45 EDT
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept.
Lines: 82

That seemed a snappy starter, anyway. Actually, reading Rich's voluminous
posting on Ray Jender raised a few questions that we might be able to talk
about a bit here-not least because a fair amount of the recent brouhaha
following the Boswell postings on Christianity and Tolerance of Homosexuals
centers around a point that Rich mentions: the relationship between
Christians, Jews, and Hellenic culture (whatta mouthfull). THat is: What
do we keep, and what do we throw out?

I read the Boswell postings with considerable interest. Ron Rizzo did
an excellent job of summarizing a rather lengthy and complex issue. Ron
is also right in that there isn't a lot of response from the scholarly
community on the publication of the book, I tend to disagree on the reason
for the profound ignorance with which the book was met somewhat, though.
It's absolutely true that there are a fair number of Christians who have
little if any contact with the history of the early church, and even less 
inclination to do hard scholarship ( I can just hear you all saying "Yep,
*all* of them right now....). FOr those people, this sort of stuff is 
the kind of writing that is both threatening as an object, and would
lead to more suspicion of "the wisdom of the world." I don't intend to
apologize for folks in that tradition...they're free moral agents too.

What got me started on this whole thing was Boswell's reported assertion
that some while he didn't have the evidence on hand, he thought that
some similar issues with gays and tolerance existed in both the Jewish
and Islamic community. I decided to check this out, being as I have a
net address and live in a community of scholars. So I went hunting.

First, I did a posting to net.religion.jewish asking the wide variety
of folk there about the spectrum of response to gays. The results were
as a whole, quite interesting (as interesting as the newsgroup itself).
The Orthodox answer was, as you'd expect, couched in the LAW. I'll
include a few of the postings here:
Orthodox (i.e., traditional) Judaism regards homosexuality as a sin.
The biblical basis is in Genesis XXXVII, in the story of Onan. The
Talmud (and doubtless the Shulchan Aruch) provide more detail in terms
of actual halacha (religious requirement and current law), but I can't
give you a reference offhand.

Homosexuality is explicitly forbidden in the Bible itself.  In Leviticus
(I think, I can look it up), it says that a man shall not lie with another
man after the fashion of woman, i.e. male homosexuality is explicitly
forbidden.  Female homosexuality is not discussed in the Bible, but the various
codes either strongly discourage or actually forbid it.

I can only say that Orthodoxy forbids it, I don't know about the other
branches, but I would guess Conservative forbids it, and Reform may allow it.

Hope this helps, I can look it up in Leviticus if you want.

I've tried to choose the most succinct of the lot here. The Reform response
looked quite a bit like the more modern, psychologized discussions of
preference vs. orientation.

Okay, I thought: Looks like we've goat a conservative/liberal split in
Judaism that I recognize pretty readily. Hat in hand, I went to the
Islamic scholars. As you might guess, the Shi'ites are, uh, less than favour
ably disposed to homosexual behaviour. I expected that. So I checked on
the Sunni tradition. The same prohibitions are definitely there, though
again there was a little psychology thrown in.

What *did* surprise me, though, was the pattern of equating homosexual
behaviour with "outsiders." Not in the obvious manner in which the
faithful claim that THEY aren't like THAT, but in the sense that
that behaviour pattern is identified at the point in time in which the
"wisdom literature" (sorry, Rich-there didn't seem to be a better term
available) was composed with the homogenous social group in which the
faithful find themselves. Like the Levitical law, these prohibitions
serve a similar function in both the Islamic and Judaic traditions:
the LAW is a sort of embodiment of a core of difference:It is the
essence of what it is to BE a Jew or a Moslem. That process of *being*
involves a set of choices, and both traditions overwhelmingly construe
homosexual behaviour as *choices*.

The issue of Tolerance seems linked to a moral ground for acceptance.
This is, I think, a bit like Ken Arndt's more recent abrasive but
insightful postings in net.motss, in which (if I understand him-
you listening, Ken?) he talks about the ground for tolerance and
distinction in society as being based in a sort of moral substratum.

This is getting long, so I shall cut it up into pieces. More later.By the way,