Matt on social conservatives and homosexuality

Link here

I think this explains a lot about the appeal of anti-gay crusades to social conservative leaders. Most of what “traditional values” asks of people is pretty hard. All the infidelity and divorce and premarital sex and bad parenting and whatnot take place because people actually want to do the things traditional values is telling them not to do. And the same goes for most of the rest of the Christian recipe. Acting in a charitable and forgiving manner all the time is hard. Loving your enemies is hard. Turning the other cheek is hard. Homosexuality is totally different. For a small minority of the population, of course, the injunction “don’t have sex with other men!” (or, as the case may be, other women) is painfully difficult to live up to. But for the vast majority of people this is really, really easy to do. Campaigns against gay rights, gay people, and gay sex thus have a lot of the structural elements of other forms of crusading against sexual excess or immorality, but they’re not really asking most people to do anything other than become self-righteous about their pre-existing preferences.


Francois' response: that's an amazing observation and why I love Matt's blog so much. I'd never thought of it that way but it makes a heck of a lot of sense. I respect Christianity a great deal. But I never understood the fixation on homosexuality. Yes, it is a sin, but is it a greater sin than stealing, adultery, eating pork, violating the Sabbath, or grabbing a man by the balls if you're a woman?

But Matt makes it clear. Avoiding those personal failings are hard. Avoiding having sex with the same sex if you're heterosexual is ridiculously easy. So you can be self-righteous at no cost to yourself.

One thing I will add on homosexuality though. I'm an atheist. I don't consider homosexuality to be morally wrong. But I think that when Christians try to say that homosexuality is not a sin, they are directly contradicting the Bible. They are making up their own religion. IMO, religion is only valuable to the extent that a person really believes that the moral code didn't emanate from themselves, but from a higher power. Once people start picking and choosing from the Bible, it's no stretch to start believing that stealing is okay, adultery is okay, bearing false witness is okay. It's the flip side to the fact that homosexuality isn't a greater sin than any other sin. It also means it's not a lesser sin either. So once you're okay with homosexuality, from a Christian perspective, what's stopping you from being okay with adultery? Might as well join me and become an atheist then, because you're just making stuff up.