Written by Ryan
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I recently saw an HBO documentary, about a woman travelling throughout the southern states, visiting southern Baptist or fundamentalist churches and speaking to various church leaders and laypeople.  They ran the gamut: she spoke in the back of a van with Jerry Falwell before a student rally at a Baptist University he helped found,  she sat and talked with a young couple who home-school their 10 children, and she talked with a very pompous Ted Haggard outside his church.  Notable missing personalities were Billy Graham and Rick Warren, whom I, coincidentally, consider to be conscientious and productive members of society at large; whereas Ted Haggard was barely tolerable BEFORE he was revealed as a hypocrite on national television, and Jerry Falwell lost a lot of steam after a full page article was run in the New York times naming him “America’s Taliban”.  While I don’t want this to devolve into some kind of name-calling diatribe against the Christian right, I couldn’t help, while watching this documentary, comparing some of the more extreme elements with the aforementioned group, specifically as it concerns sex and sexuality and the Christian right’s ongoing effort at repression.

What bothers me, my greatest complaint with the Christian right (or extra-right), is that most of their extremist activities center specifically on sex or sexuality.  Jerry Falwell called the rally to shore up support for George Bush ahead of the 2004 election; and his argument, in front of 2000 screaming students, was that they needed to use their vote to protect the sanctity of marriage, which was apparently under attack.   I won’t get into why I think it’s ridiculous to say that heterosexual marriage is under risk of disappearing because gay couples want to wed, or how stupid is the presumption that God has so little to worry about that He/She cares what we do in our bedrooms.  Ted Haggard had a very similar argument, comparing homosexuality to murder; his exact words were: “I’m not going to have a ‘Murderer’s Rights’ parade.”  However, he went one step further and voiced what I can only call a threat against the government, by effectively stating that at will, he and his followers can paralyze the phone banks of the United States Capitol, by flooding it with phone calls.  Not only does he claim to supercede the opinions of the 80 percent of us or so who don’t agree with him, but every time he throws a temper-tantrum he can shut down the government whenever it even THINKS about speaking for all Americans. 

The couple of whom I spoke earlier embodies a complaint I have with the church at large: the war against sex.  The fairer sex, that is.  They met in college: they both went to a Baptist college, where they were encouraged to date by their peers and parents.  She, in the interview, talked about her misgivings: she hadn’t wanted to marry, she’d wanted to have her own career, and she even hadn’t wanted to have so many children.  But through her parents, friends, and even University professors, she learned that these goals were inherently selfish.  She now works full-time in her house; this job includes making food for a dozen people, homeschooling her children, keeping prim and proper in a beautiful house-dress, and agreeing with every damn word that comes out of her husband’s mouth, ostensibly.  This is how the church, justified by these sanctimonious stuffed-shirts, continues a millennia old tradition of making women prisoners in their own lives in an era of human history where we have levels of unprecedented social equality.  Church elders, mostly men, open colleges and universities that don’t educate people, give these young unfortunate students no choices in regards to what kind of education they receive, enforce draconian rules in regards to personal conduct, and then on top of that act as veritable pimps to encourage young Christian ladies and young Christian men to get together with no single common interest besides their faith or the semblance thereof. 

Besides a few passages in the Old Testament, the bible has precious little to say about sexuality and sex.  It is an insult to the intelligence of the followers of mainstream Religion, by Right-wing Christian leaders, to continue to claim a biblical precedent for their bigotry against homosexuals and women; as a Pastor of mine once said: “You have no right to use the Bible to justify your prejudice.”  The bible does, in Leviticus, specifically denounce homosexual sex, as well as sex with animals and adultery; however, in Leviticus the bible also writes that you may not wear a cloth made of two different fabrics, and that I have an inalienable right to kill my neighbor if the scent of his burnt offering offends me.

The church, for all of its existence, has been trying to take away the joy of the sweetest gift that God has given to mankind, sex, and replacing it with a vague idea of the afterlife.  And for all of its existence it’s been persecuting homosexuals to one degree or another.  Now, instead of burning them at the stake, the Church has taken to denying them the right to call a spade a spade and recognize love where it exists; admittedly, it’s an improvement. But anyone who called this an improvement in the rights of homosexuals in society at large doesn’t deserve the consideration of being listened to, and he/she certainly doesn’t deserve the right to the appearance of sole arbitration over heaven, hell, and the word of God. 

Jerry Falwell accusing homosexuals and abortion doctors of calling down God’s wrath upon us in the form of 9/11, and Ted Haggard calling homosexuality murder while getting handjobs from a male prostitute both call into question not only the Christian right’s objectivity in the matter, but also their right to be leaders in the first place.  After all, wouldn’t the singular intelligence behind Humanity, the Earth, Evolution of Life, the stars and planets of every galaxy (numbering in the millions), and ultimately the fact of existence itself (the first and greatest miracle) have more important things to worrying about than where and when we decide to bury our collective bugle?

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