Beyond the Binary

Re Peace and Compassion, September
This letter evidences a generous, tolerant spirit. However, I am still concerned about the binary thinking that informs much of the debate over sexual orientation and church issues.
It is simply incorrect to apply the term marriage to another type of relationship entirely – which could perhaps be called a physical alliance. I don't think there was homosexual marriage as such in ancient Greece, and I haven't run across the term in my admittedly limited readings of Aristotle and Plato. This is not to say that people of the same sex who are committed to each other should not have roughly comparable benefits and rights like hospital visitation, etc., as appropriate, although adoption would not make sense in the majority of cases.
The standard gay subculture as featured in the mainstream and homosexual media has been grossly irresponsible, and its sad legacy to us from the 1970s and 1980s was the expansion of a very dangerous epidemic. The mechanical approach to sex in settings like bathhouses must be condemned.
It seems, however, that the fashionable academic left-liberal reductionist-materialist hard-line evolutionist point of view and the Christian fundamentalist viewpoint occasionally have some things in common. If a sensitive boy or young man has affectionate feelings for a member of the same sex in any context whatsoever, they will each say, under rigid binary thinking, that he is condemned — by heredity, genes and brain chemistry on one side, and by original sin and predestined total depravity on the other — to go over to a completely homosexual lifestyle in an urban gay ghetto and stay there forever. This kind of thinking is analogous to the “stuck theory” condemned by Washoe Valley, Nev., philosophers in the 1970s, led by James H. Lathrop, Jr., of Presbyterian background, some of whom unfortunately are no longer with us — the theory that genes or pre-adolescent family background condemn a person to be forever whatever he is at a particular moment. Human relationships in this view are completely a function of genes and innate disposition. Consciousness, principles and shared goals are inconsequential epiphenomena. There is also no concept on either the materialist Left or the fundamentalist Right that different types of relationships serve different functions and there could be a hierarchy of relationships ranging from traditional friendship without sexual content through various levels of bonding up to traditional heterosexual marriage, and that these different kinds of relationships can have varying levels of expression at different stages of life.
The Kinsey report on human sexuality, published in 1948, has been available for 50 years. Kinsey posited the view that maybe half of the population is completely heterosexual and maybe six to 10 per cent more or less completely homosexual. However, he noted there is a gradation of people between those two poles of orientation which he described as being along a scale of 1 to 7. Those who were completely heterosexual were 1 and those completely homosexual 7. In between though were those at, say, 2 who were interested in the same sex one-sixth of the time and members of the opposite sex five-sixths of the time, and those at 6, who were interested in the same sex five-sixths of the time and members of the opposite sex one-sixth of the time. Kinsey, a dedicated scientific researcher, said it is not possible to neatly separate people into sheep and goats when it comes to sexual orientation. Yet, a half century later, this research is usually ignored, and even boys or young men who just make an occasional glance at a member of the same sex are immediately assumed to be, and condemned as (and even attacked for) being homosexual.
To be sure, some Christian non-Calvinist fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals believe that homosexuals, by surrendering their lives to Christ, can change to a traditional heterosexual lifestyle, but they still think in binary terms of 'gay' and 'straight'. In addition, these supposedly loving people tolerate, as a test of masculinity, vicious bullying of boys who happen to be interested in piano or poetry rather than team sports. The result is that many such boys are badly beaten up on the way home from school, sometimes within an inch of their lives, even when the victims have not expressed, or are completely unaware of, any homosexual tendencies. Under this type of outlook, the friendship of David and Jonathan as described in I Samuel in the Bible would, if expressed in the modern-day Mountain West, lead to them being beaten up and left for dead in a lane behind a bar in Brooks, Alta., or Shelby, Mont. (See, for example, I Samuel 20:17, “For he (Jonathan) loved him (David) as he loved his own soul.”)
A rational approach to the issue of homosexuality, or what is perceived as such in the church, will require a major revision of the binary thinking on the topic that prevails today.
Thank you.
I am Sincerely yours,