It’s entirely possible that the evangelical attack on queer people and especially male homosexuals exposes their greatest weakness: the obvious irrationality of their "presentist" position that scriptures as old as 8,000 BCE can provide any sane, rational application to life as lived by modern homo sapiens. I’ve always maintained, for example, that the proscriptions against homosexuality in Genesis and Leviticus are misunderstood; that the sin of Sodom was not homosexuality but xenophobia, and that early Hebraic law was more concerned with pagan temple prostitution featuring transvestite males than with any guys who like guys or women who like women, both for the simple reason that such pursuits were non-procreative. Isn't it a wee bit possible that the tribal chiefs who “heard God” only made homosexuality an "abomination" to increase the groups' numbers? One needed increasingly large pools from which to induct spear-fodder for the next fight with the Midianites. After all, God was forever war-mongering His way through all the books of the Old Testament.
The reverse of Biblical presentism is historicity, or at least historical relevancy, including science as it bears on antiquity, whose examples would incude the certain geological datum that Sodom (and its sister City on the Plain) sat on mephitic faults and were, thus, explosions waiting to happen (waiting perhaps since the Precambrian Age to cut their farts). Given the lack of scientific knowledge available to people 8,000 or so years before the myth we call the "birth of Christ," and the inherent irrationality and fear of such ignorant peoples, it was easier to manipulate the masses, as Seneca would observe, using religion. An eclipse was not the shadow of the moon but a singular event warning of the coming of the Lord or some other post hoc event. My hunch is that the O.T. was written by men who wished to rule as well as evolving Man might. They (or those who followed in their footsteps) claimed divine authorship to bolster their power and stamp themselves (as do the Popes) as divinely chosen. The Bible was written by men about men. But back to evangelicals who hate.
A year or two ago I got into an email spat with an evangelical (actually Pentacostal) who is for me, second only to the more "charismatic" Tony Perkins, the very epitome of all that is wrong about the mindset of such people. My debate opponent was Scott Lively. This individual, an ordained cleric and a lawyer to boot, co-wrote a book whose main title suggests an expose of the notorious pogroms against "sexual deviates" in both the Nazi Party and the general population in Germany: The Pink Triangle. Sent to death camps, instead of the star of David, these men and women wore a pink triangle arm band. The myth that Lively promulgates -- that the Holocaust was invented by gay men -- is not without historicity since Hitler was a bachelor who answered questions about his romantic life responded that has married to Germany.
This hardly stopped the rumors that spread about the possibility he might not be heterosexual, rumors arising from Hitler's guilt by association, a friendship with Ernst Rohm of the S.A.; Rohm, who was vocally openly gay and proud of it. Hitler is generally blamed for killing Rohm, but historians are divided as whether it was only to consolidate the power of the S.S. or to terminate a source of gossip. Lively and his co-author fabricate fully a myth that Rohm and the Night of the Long Knives were a publicity stunt whose only victims were "the effeminate" homosexuals. The masculine gays went on to cause the gassing, shooting, burning, and poisoning of the Six Million. This is as close as someone can come to making the sort of "Blood Libel" found in such treacherous works of fiction as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, including the spurious claim Jews used baby fat from Christian children in their secret rituals.
To Scott Lively, I pointed out the patent absurdity of his position and found that it was easy to get his goat, that for a professed Christian person, he was burning a short fuse and really felt put upon when dogma was challenged with reason. I said he had cherry-picked historical biographies and speculative histories of the Nazis to conclude that the National Socialist Party was homosexual in origin; the Reich, a government populated by masculine homosexuals who murdered the "weak effeminate ones" to prevail. Lively also claims that gay men were selected because it was "well known" that gay men are "inherently savage" (as the Southern Poverty Law Center put it in an article published in their Intelligence Report (Spring, 2012).
Lively also claims that the so-called "homosexual agenda" includes establishment of a "new" Nazi regime in the U.S.A. Let's see, is there any fear card Lively hasn't played? Lively was a keynote speaker at an annual convention of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), another S.P.L.C. hate group. So it's clear he thinks queer people choose to be the way they are; after all, God wouldn't put so many on earth, would he? I got thinking about Lively's religious background. He claims, like George W. Bush, that he was saved from alcoholism by "the Lord." He had a troubled childhood. And what about the Pentacostals?
One suspects Freud would have a field day with this creepy believer sect. For one thing, they believe in speaking in tongues. They use passages in the New Testament ("the good news") to instruct them on glossolalia, which always sounded to me like a background chorus at the Grand Ol' Opry. 1 Corinthians 14 is their grimoire. They say the Lord speaks through them and that's why they say things so funny. They have their limits, however: it's said that only two or three glossolalic yodels are permitted per church service. And the tongue-wagging is not top replace the preaching of the Word of the Lord. The glossolalic utterances are said to be "prophetic," but because no one can translate the Lord's messages fall on deaf ears, and --
Wait a minute! Are you supposed to believe anything said by a person who attends such camp meetings? Hogwash and balderdash! Scott Lively is a raving madman.
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