Between all those Texans protesting the gay Jesus play and Big Poppa Ratz running the largest kiddie-sex ring ever, we’ve had Jesus on the brain recently. But we thought we’d share some good religious news for a change: every Jesus-loving person isn’t a hypocritical super-bigot! Case in point: V. Gene Robinson. The first openly gay Episcopalian bishop visited the Texas capitol last Sunday to discuss “the seven deadly” anti-LGBT Bible verses, your queer uncle Harold, and why the ancient Hebrews were so hardcore against gay love and monkey spanking. Says Robinson: “I believe the Bible to be the word of God, but not the words of God.”
The Bishop’s a charming and powerful speaker, so you’d do well to hear his entire speech in the pages that follow. But we also know you’re busy folks (and maybe not too big on church), so we’ve pulled the best quotes from his hour-long sermon and placed them in a handy video gallery for you!
G-Rob Explains Why Gay-Bashing Was En Vogue Just A few Decades Ago
“Twenty or 30 years ago most Americans would have told you they did not now anyone gay … You might have worried about weird Uncle Harold or ‘There are those two nice ladies that have always lived together. You know down at the end of the street. Those spinster ladies?’ But what they would have meant when they told you they didn’t know anyone gay was that they didn’t know anyone who was openly self-affirming and out. And now is there a family left that doesn’t know one of their own to be LGB or T. Or is there anyone left who doesn’t know a former classmate or a co-worker someone to be gay. And it has made all the difference. Harvey Milk got it right that coming out is the most political thing you can do. And the reason for that huge shift is that now when we discuss this issue one or more faces come up, and people are less and less willing to say the things they’ve always said about us because they simply know it’s not true of Sam or Sally and they’re not willing to participate in that. So it has made all the difference in the world and as I like to say ‘That toothpaste ain’t gonna go back in the tube.’ We are not going to not be out and visible anymore.”
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Why Leviticus Applies More to NAMBLA and the Catholic Church Thank to You
In reference to the Bible’s “seven deadly verses” condemning homosexuality: “We have to understand that sexual orientation is a new concept. That as a psychological construct the whole notion of sexual orientation is only about 125 years old…. Now, ancient cultures knew that there was same gender sex, but they assumed that everyone was heterosexual. And so to be acting in such a manner was contrary to their nature. So in effect, these verses and scriptures are about heterosexuals acting badly; heterosexuals acting against their nature…
“A couple of [references to homosexuality in the bible] probably refer to the practice known in Greek and Roman culture where an older man would take an adolescent boy under his wing and use him sexually and teach him the ways of the world… You and I would call that sexual abuse, that’s child abuse—nobody is arguing for that. But you see the harm that is caused when you translate those two words as ‘homosexual’? So you pick up your scripture, you open up the bible, and it says that ‘homosexuals are condemned,’ when that whole notion of homosexual is a whole new thinking completely unknown to Paul who wrote those words.
“You can’t take a modern modern concept and plug it back into an ancient text without doing violence to the text. So we constantly need to be saying do these verses actually mean what we’ve always been told. And I would argue, no not necessarily.”
God Kills a Kitten Every Time You Masturbate
“Let’s understand the biology that was present during that time. A man’s seed, a man’s sperm was thought to contain everything necessary for life. The only thing contributed by a woman was a place for that fully complete seed… to incubate. There was no concept of an egg and a sperm joining together… so you get all that stuff in Leviticus about masturbation and any kind of quote-unquote spilling your seed on the ground. So we forget that masturbation is condemned along with a man lying with as man as lying with a woman, and AND heterosexual intercourse where the man withdraws from the woman before orgasm because he spills his seed on the ground.
“Well, you’re living in a culture in the ancient Hebrew world where you’ve arrived from Egypt, you’re surrounded by hostile cultures and you’ve got to grow the population. So not using your seed to produce children was a crime against the nation as well as a crime against God. Yet somehow we’ve discarded the opprobrium for masturbation—although we won’t talk about the Texas school system and all that—and birth control for instance. But we’re holding on to this ‘man shall not lie with a man as with a woman’ as if it was written once and for all time without taking into consideration the context in which is was written.
“… There’s a lot of things the bible just simply doesn’t address: it doesn’t address atomic war, it doesn’t talk about flush toilets, and I would say that it doesn’t talk about faithful monogamous lifelong-intentioned relationships between two people of the same gender. It’s just silent on that because it was unknown to that culture.”
Why the Episcopalian Church Risked Its Life to Support You Queers
“Let me just say one thing that I’m really most proud of: the Episcopal church has put itself out there on this issue [by electing openly-gay bishops] and as messy and as ugly as it sometimes has been, it has been out there for the world to see.
And in 2003 after I was elected in New Hampshire and came to the General Convention for the necerssary consets by the rest of the church, there was this great debate. And the bishop of Wyoming, sort of this Marlboro man looking cowboy bishop y’know, gets up in the house of bishops and says, ‘Not since the civil rights movement of the 60’s have I seen this church risk its life for something and that’s what I think we’re contemplating doing.’ And that’s what you’ve seen in this last seven years.
“You’ve heard about the schism although it’s really small. To read the newspapers you’d think it was a 50-50 split. It’s a small number of people who find it impossible to stay in a church that says it’s going to love its gay and lesbian, bisexual, and transgender as children of God. It’s a small group and I’m really sorry about that. But I am really proud of a church that has risked its institutional life on loving all of God’s children.”
The Good Bishop Gets Semi-Political and Encourages You to Contact Lawmakers About Uganda’s Gays
“Just as I think it’s easy for someone living in Chelsea in New York or West Hollywood in LA to forget about Iowa and Texas and North Dakota, it’s also easy for American LGBT people to forget about LGBT people living in horrific circumstances overseas… We have to take responsibility for our brothers and sisters who cannot speak for themselves yet without enormous risk… It means that we need to be pressuring our own congressional delegation both in terms of having an effect on our foreign policy, but also on our immigration policy and our asylum policy.”
Hyhybt
Thank you, Queerty… and thank you, Bishop Robinson, though you’ll probably never see this.
“But we thought we’d share some good religious news for a change: every Jesus-loving person isn’t a hypocritical super-bigot!”
How sad that this can be considered news, even half tongue-in-cheek.
overit
The mere fact that the bile-bull distorts sexuality is enough to render it void. Case closed.
overit
On Jesus : If he did live it was two thousand years ago. Loving an ancient person is insanity.
terrwill
Thank you Bishop Robinson for far too long the rightwing lunatics have been cherry picking obscure verses in the Bible to spew their poo at the Gays. They demand everyone live the life described in the “good book” they neglect to mention all the little chestnuts Leviticus (the original control freak)
demand they adhere to:
Don’t let cattle graze with other kinds of Cattle (Leviticus 19:19)
Don’t have a variety of crops on the same field. (Leviticus 19:19)
Don’t wear clothes made of more than one fabric (Leviticus 19:19)
Don’t cut your hair nor shave. (Leviticus 19:27)
Any person who curseth his mother or father, must be killed. (Leviticus 20:9) Have you ever done that?
If a man cheats on his wife, or vise versa, both the man and the woman must die. (Leviticus 20:10). Be a whole lotta “For Rent” signs in DC
If a man sleeps with his wife and her mother they are all to be burnt to death. (Leviticus 20:19) half the deep South would be wiped out
If a man has sex with a woman on her period, they are both to be “cut off from their people” (Leviticus 20:18)
Psychics, wizards, and so on are to be stoned to death. (Leviticus 20:27)
If a priest’s daughter is a whore, she is to be burnt at the stake. (Leviticus 21:9)
People who have flat noses, or is blind or lame, cannot go to an altar of God (Leviticus 21:17-18)
Anyone who curses or blasphemes God, should be stoned to death by the community. (Leviticus 24:14-16)
Don’t let cattle graze with other kinds of Cattle (Leviticus 19:19)
For bringing attention to the absolute hyprocicy of the right wing lunatic nutbags, I say Thank God for Bishop Robinson!
(that outta rub some sand in their vaginas……… : p)
mattresssaleanysizeonelowprice
@terrwill
i’ve often seen you comment and I have to say you’re one of a (good) kind !
B
No. 4 · terrwill wrote, “They demand everyone live the life described in the “good book” they neglect to mention all the little chestnuts Leviticus (the original control freak)
demand they adhere to.”
“Control freak” should be “control freaks” (plural) as Levicitus was not written by a single person. The “little chestnut” they
always neglect to mention is the last sentence in Leviticus, which says that the rules in it were for the “Israelites”, not anyone else. The history explains why.
The best guess is that Leviticus was written after the Babylonian exile. Cyrus, the emperor of Persia, had kicked the Babylonians’ collectives asses, and let exiled Jews return home and rebuild their temple (he did the same thing with a variety of other ethnic groups as well). He typically wanted a report telling him how they intended to set up shop. Cyrus would not be pleased if they said they were going to cause trouble with their neighbors, so of course their rules were to apply to them and them alone.
When the exiled Jews returned home, they found that those who had not been exiled were assimilating and taking up the religious customs of their neighbors. So, they acted like the Taliban and put in a series of arbitrary rules whose main function was to help undo the assimilation, with harsh penalties for anyone who did not get with the program (to use a current idiom). Their “pagan” neighbors performed fertility rites where male and female temple prostitutes would accept “offerings” on behalf of a fertility god, officially to ensure a good harvest but more likely because the pagan priests were all hot bottoms. Naturally, that sort of fun had to be banned because from a marketing perspective, competing against it was not easy.
Source: http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2
and http://www.sacred-texts.com/lgbt/index.htm plus some (hopefully obvious) wisecracks by me.
terrwill
@mattresssaleanysizeonelowprice: Tyvm!!
B
QUEERTY someone dropped a comment I tried to post. The “scholarly consensus” is that Levicitus had multiple authors and was written at the end of the Babylonian exile. Jews were allowed to return home and rebuild their temple, and had to provide the Persian emperor Cyrus with a report describing how they planned to exercise this restored authority. Leviticus is basically that report – the (perhaps idealized) rules for running the temple.
Leviticus applies only to Jews (Israelites, specifically) and says so in its last sentence. It reads like something the Taliban would write because the returning priests wanted to reassert their authority – the Jews who avoided being exiled were assimilating into the culture they were embedded in and the returning rulers desperately wanted to undo that.
terrwill
@B: TYVM, Now it all makes perfect sense!! The rightwing lunatics would love nothing more than to impose a taliban regime on the United States. No wonder they have adopted leviticus as their poster-hate spewer…………..
Mike L.
I guess gays-for-pay are going to hell. lol j/k.
He’s so cool.
jeffree
Here’s to you Mr. Robison………
If u put my parents in a car for a road trip u will hear James Taylor, Paul Simon, Carley Simon, & Simon and Garfunkle.
If you are raised by such parents then your first songs may include these here words, more or less:
“And Here’s to you Bishop Robinson,
Jesus loves you more than you can know,
Oh Oh, Oh……”
Oh oh oh…
Sorry: that’s all I can remember. I say that out of respect, even if I don’t believe in religions.
p.s. If you heard my parents sing, you too would try really hard 2 block those memories!!
OH: hint: do not *ever* attempt 2 crawl out of the car no matter how bad ur parents sing!
B
No. 8 · terrwill wrote, “Now it all makes perfect sense!!” It gets even better. One contributing factor for the seemingly anti-gay passages in Leviticus is that the Israelites “pagan” neighbors had rituals involving temple prostitutes, both male and female, whom males would f___ as a way of offering “seed” to the gods to ensure a good harvest and other benefits. Given the part of their anatomy that most men think with, the returning Jewish priests had some serious competition in winning back those who were starting to assimilate. So it is not surprising that the returning priests would try a death threat to get assimilating Israelis to (figuratively) zip up their pants.
Then you have to consider Cyrus’ viewpoint. Persia is roughly centered on present day Iran and Babylon on present day Iraq. After you conquered someone, the custom at the time was to turn the vanquished into slaves, so they probably had a slave glut, which they solved by letting the exiles return home. By doing that, Cyrus ensured that Babylon would be surrounded by people who were eternally grateful to Cyrus, making a Babylonian revolt appear futile. It wouldn’t do to have the exiles (it wasn’t just Jews) fighting among themselves. So restricting Leviticus to the Israelites made sense – Cyrus would have been pissed if the Israelites claimed their religious rules applied to others because that would have created an unnecessary conflict.
Carter
Excellent post, Queerty.
Nice to see some occasional serious journalism.
I like hot guys as much as the next person, but your endless parade of shaved, emaciated twinks is becoming tiresome.
ewe
That tired old book needs an updated edition.
D.R.A.
Count me in as someone who adores this man. He’s so kind and intelligent. He has my respect.
Peter
Well, does the bible say anything at all about farmers f*cking sheep??
B
No. 15 · Peter wrote, “Well, does the bible say anything at all about farmers f*cking sheep??” … actually it does: Leviticus 18:23 (found easily via a google search, and the page I found quoted some ‘related’ passages), Exodus 22:19, Leviticus 20:15, Leviticus 20:16, and Deuteronomy 27:21. The rule is a general one forbidding sex between humans and other species.
In the case you mentioned, there’s a death penalty for both the farmer (whether male or female) and the sheep. It didn’t say whether it was OK to eat the sheep after you killed it, nor whether you could get some wool off of it first.
If there’s a spontaneous emission, and some kinky guy scoops up the fluid into a turkey baster and injects it into an animal, it is not clear what happens under the rules. But then, when this stuff was written, they didn’t have turkey basters.
jeffree
@B: Too Much Information !! Lol. Thanks!
So now, where do i find more info about these “temple prostitutes” –they r not listed in the phonebook or on craigslist!
Kidding, so sorry.
MasterBater
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Jonathan Malcolm Hlutke
wayne
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Jonathan Malcolm Hlutke
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