gtaylor@cornell.UUCP (Greg Taylor) (06/27/84)
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,
barry@ames-lm.UUCP (Kenn Barry) (06/30/84)
[<+>] > 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. I find this most curious; can anyone confirm that the story of Onan is, indeed, the basis on which Orthodox Judaism condemns homosexuality? I reread the story (Genesis XXXVIII, by the way, not XXXVII), and could find no more than the most tenuous connection to the question of sexual preference. There are other passages in the Bible (e.g. Leviticus) that are much more explicit in their condemnation of homosexuality. It seems poor old Onan gets accused of everything. The common Christian definition of the "sin of Onan" is masturbation. Yet when one reads Genesis XXXVIII it seems clear that what Onan was really attempting was a form of birth control. There is no suggestion that he was gay, nor that he was jacking off for fun; rather, he seemed to be trying to avoid his duty to take his dead brother's widow for his own, something that I gather was a religious requirement for the old Hebrews. In any case, what Onan did was to "spill his seed upon the ground". While I can agree, in theory, that this can be taken as condemning anything that results in semen going where no one could get pregnant from it, this seems a very loose interpretation. > 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. Out of curiosity, I read the relevant portions of Leviticus. Mostly I was curious if there was any hint whether the use of "man" in the above quote refers to mankind, or to males alone. It appeared to be referring only to males - a couple of verses later there is a prohibition against lying with beasts, and it specifically and separately states that "man shall not lie with beasts", and "woman shall not lie with beasts". I infer that if woman is not to lie with woman, it would have been so stated. Is it possible, I wonder, that the old (male) Hebrews who wrote Leviticus had never *heard* of lesbianism? It's even harder to imagine that they didn't disapprove of it, given the extremely strict attitudes toward sex shown in Leviticus, generally. If there are any scholars of the Torah out there who are willing to satisfy my idle curiousity, I would be most grateful. Kenn Barry NASA-Ames Research Center Moffett Field, CA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Electric Avenue: {dual,hao,menlo70,hplabs}!ames-lm!barry