LGBTQ+ and Christianity

A very distinguished professor at the "Harvard of Seminary Colleges" stated it simply: "As a Christian, if you don't see homosexuality as a sin then there is no h0pe for you..."
Really? Is it that simple? Is that what the Bible says?
The word homosexual may be in today's versions of the Bible but it wasn't in the original Koine Greek - they didn't have the word in their vocabulary.
So what gives? Questions abound.
And people - good people - are leaving the church, even rejecting the Gospel over LGBTQ+ issues. Should we care? Or just say good riddance.
Here is a hint. Jesus cared.

Introduction:

LGBTQ+ Part of the Litmus Test of Christianity? A Christian must be Anti-LGBTQ+ ? They are all "groomers?" They will corrupt our children? They will destroy humanity? It's Biblical.

-OR -

“For Christians, the problem is not how to reconcile homosexuality with scriptural passages that condemn it, but how to reconcile the rejection and punishment of homosexuals with the love of Christ.”
-- William Sloane Coffin

For thoughts on the LGBTQ+ issue here are a collection of articles discussing homosexuality in an historical, a Biblical, and a current societal context.

What does the Bible Say About Homosexuality? 1

Did Christian homophobia come from a mistranslation of the Bible? 2

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT ANCIENT GREECE 6

Homosexuality in Ancient Greece 12

Homosexuality in the Roman Empire 13

The (Possibly) Gay, Elite Apostle Who Believed in Radical Equality for All 15

A thousand years ago, the Catholic Church paid little attention to homosexuality 20

How Anita Bryant Changed America 25

Does Abusing Children Have Consequences for Sexuality? 31

The UN calls conversion therapy 'torture.' Could the Supreme Court greenlight it anyway? 34

NYC church redefines acceptance for LGBTQ+ community 36

Most cardinals at the Vatican are gay, says Catholic academic 42

Hate pastor threatens to kill gay pastors after same-sex couple delivers sermon 44

Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker says Pride Month is example of 'deadly sin' during commencement speech 45

Chiefs Kicker Spreads Antisemitic Lies In Benedictine College Graduation Speech 46

Report: Harrison Butker's PAC Coffers Are As Empty As His Head 48

GOP candidate said it's "totally just" to stone gay people to death 50

The American family moving to Russia to flee ‘moral decline’ of US 52

Rep. Ted Lieu recites ‘what Jesus Christ said about homosexuality’: Remains silent 54

What Does The Bible Say About Homosexuality?

By the HRC

So Then What Are Those Passages Talking About?

While the six passages that address same-sex eroticism in the ancient world are negative about the practices they mention, there is no evidence that these in any way speak to same-sex relationships of love and mutuality. To the contrary, the amount of cultural, historical and linguistic data surrounding how sexuality in the cultures of the biblical authors operated demonstrates that what was being condemned in the Bible is very different than the committed same-sex partnerships we know and see today. The stories of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19) and the Levite’s concubine (Judges 19) are about sexual violence and the Ancient Near East’s stigma toward violating male honor. The injunction that “man must not lie with man” (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13) coheres with the context of a society anxious about their health, continuing family lineages, and retaining the distinctiveness of Israel as a nation. Each time the New Testament addresses the topic in a list of vices (1 Corinthians 6:9, 1 Timothy 1:10), the argument being made is more than likely about the sexual exploitation of young men by older men, a practice called pederasty, and what we read in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans is a part of a broader indictment against idolatry and excessive, self-centered lust that is driven by desire to “consume” rather than to love and to serve as outlined for Christian partnership elsewhere in the Bible. While it is likely that Jews and Christians in the 1st century had little to no awareness of a category like sexual orientation, this doesn’t mean that the biblical authors were wrong. What it does mean, at a minimum, is that continued opposition toward same-sex relationships and LGBTQ+ identities must be based on something other than these biblical texts, which brings us back to a theology of Christian marriage or partnership.

Did Christian homophobia come from a mistranslation of the Bible?

A new documentary challenges an alleged 1946 mistranslation that helped lead to a justification for Christian anti-gayness

04:04 EST Friday, 01 December 2023

What if all the anti-gay, homophobic rhetoric that has come from the Christian right over these past few decades was rooted in a mistranslation of the Bible?

In the documentary, 1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted Culture, researchers and scholars delve into the 1946 mistranslation of 1 Corinthians 6:9 and explore how it fuelled the Christian anti-gay movement that still thrives today.

The film hinges its premise on the fact that the word “homosexual” appeared for the first time in the Bible in 1946, in an apparent mistranslation of the ancient Greek words malakoi – defined as someone effeminate who gives themselves up to a soft, decadent, lazy and indolent way of living – and arsenokoitai – a compound word that roughly translates to “male bed”. While people could take it to mean man bedding man, within the context of the time, scholars believed that arsenokoitai alluded more to abusive, predatory behavior and pederasty than it does homosexuality.

The director and producer Sharon “Rocky” Roggio documents the journey of the Christian author Kathy Baldock and Ed Oxford, an advocate and gay man who grew up Southern Baptist, as they dug through archives at the Yale Sterling Memorial Library. There, they discovered correspondence between the head of the translation committee and a gay seminary student in which the committee head conceded with the student’s point about the mistranslation. In the next translation in 1971, the committee changed the translation from homosexual to “sexual perverts” – but by then the damage was

done. Hundreds of millions of Bibles with the wrong translation had been published, and conservative religion and conservative politics soon banded together to push an anti-gay agenda.

Roggio melded this research with her own personal story. When she was a teenager, her pastor father discovered that she was a lesbian and responded with a letter full of Bible verses imploring her to repent and forsake her identity. With the documentary, she filmed her father attending talks by Baldock and overall standing by his belief that the Bible condemns homosexuality as a sin. “I can’t compromise conviction,” he says in the film.

“Prior to even knowing about the 1946 mistranslation, I was led to it because I knew I needed to use scripture to be able to have a conversation with my parents to affirm my reality and my identity,” Roggio said.

That didn’t make it easy. “I knew what my dad was going to give us,” Roggio said. “I have been around for a while and I’ve been dealing with this for a while and I’ve put up enough armour to be able to go back and have those conversations. And it was extremely painful, just as I’m sure it was painful for my dad.”

The documentary goes beyond this very personal throughline by focusing on academia and research, featuring interviews with language experts and biblical scholars to provide context not just for the mistranslated verse, but the other “clobber” verses that have been cited by the Christian right as a condemnation of homosexuality. They explore Sodom and Gomorrah, and the historical context behind the Leviticus verse denouncing when “a man lies with a male as with a woman”; scholars believe the verse is not alluding to homosexuality, but to ritual pagan prostitution.

“What we need to do is see that this is a text that is time-bound, that is determined by the culture in which it was written, and that our sense of God, our sense of the Holy Spirit, isn’t time-bound,” the Rev Dr Cheryl Anderson says in the documentary. “We have to ask ourselves 4

again: what’s the word of God for this time and this place? We’re not used to doing that, but that’s the task because that is what the Bible does. It’s reinterpreting itself.”

Between the research, however, Roggio wove in the emotional repercussions for all members of the LGBTQ+ community – showing what it meant to feel as if they had been declared an abomination by sacred text and to grow up hearing that even God doesn’t love you. Oxford has a poignant moment in the film where he admits that even as outspoken as he has been on the topic of religion and sexuality, he has not been able to allow himself to experience intimacy with anyone.

“I don’t get depressed about damaging theology any more,” he says. “I have been damaged and I get depressed over how that affects me today, the here and the now.”

The documentary, which opens this week, first premiered in 2022 and has already won 23 festival awards. But Roggio admitted that the film was struggling to get wider distribution. Even before its premiere, the documentary received a lot of backlash in the form of conservative articles, radio shows, videos and sermons all attempting to debunk the research – despite some never having watched the documentary, Roggio said.

But Roggio and the film has also received an outpouring of support from viewers in general. The film has received more than 1,700 donations, totalling more than $150,000, on GoFundMe, to help spread its findings. Roggio is hoping for more – she’s looking to screen the film at churches and community centers. They have put together a workbook to help with the study of this material after viewing the film. Just as Mark 15:16 called for Christians to “go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation”, Roggio is trying to spread the film’s message as far and wide as possible. “We want millions of people to be able to access this information,” she said.

Because for gay Christians like Roggio, this mistranslation means everything. It means that 5

“No one can dictate your relationship with God,” she said. “We’ve been told how we have to live as Christians, by putting away our identity, a part of ourselves. But you can totally be gay and Christian.” But the film’s findings also hold significance beyond Christianity. “Whether you’re Christian or not, or whether you’re religious or not, the Bible impacts you,” said Roggio. “It’s the most published book in the world, translated into multiple languages for millennia.”

In one of the conversations Roggio has with her father in the film, he expresses sadness and disappointment in what he saw for his child’s future before learning she was gay. He tells her that he recognizes how alike they both were, and at one point, he saw her following in his footsteps and becoming a minister.

“Maybe this is my ministry,” Roggio responds.

BBC History Magazine ANCIENT GREECE

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT ANCIENT GREECE

Was homosexuality made taboo by the Christians or by the Romans?

Professor Paul Cartledge answers key questions about one of the world’s greatest civilisations

Q: What time period do we define as ancient Greece, and which events bookend that period?

A: There’s really no such thing as ‘ancient Greece’, in the sense there’s a ‘modern Greece’. Ancient Hellas is what the Greeks would have called it, and it was really wherever Greeks (Hellenes) lived permanently – where they made homes, spoke Greek, worshipped gods in the Greek way, and so on.

The Greek language is attested as early as c1400 BC in a script we know as Linear B – this was a syllabic script, with every sign standing for a syllable rather than a letter. Linear B was devised for a very different Greek civilisation than the one we’re exploring in this essential guide. So, you could say that ancient Greece goes back as far as 1400 BC, but I would date it from around 1000 BC until the end of the Hellenistic period and the death of Cleopatra – who was an Egyptian Greek – in 30 BC. After that, the Roman period of Greek history takes over.

Q: How many ‘periods’ of ancient Greece were there?

A:Within ancient Greece (c1000– 30 BC) there were three broad periods: Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic. The beginning of the Archaic period used to be dated to 776 BC, which is the traditional year for the founding of the Olympic Games. This period goes on for about three centuries, so I would say from about 800–c480 BC. There was a turning point in the final two decades of the Archaic period when a tiny handful of Greek cities saw off a great Persian

invasion (at the battles of Salamis and Plataea) and retained their independence. That’s traditionally when the Classical period is seen to have started, and that middle period lasted until the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 BC. And then there was the Hellenistic period, which, as I’ve mentioned, lasted until 30 BC. In this final period, we see a new Greek-dominated Middle East – as far east as modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan – that is dominantly Greek, but that incorporated a certain amount of oriental elements as well.

Q: How did Athenian democracy differ from democracy as we know it today?

A: Typically, those of us who live in a democratic country have a form of democracy known generically as ‘representative’. In other words, you and I, on a daily basis, do not rule: we choose people to represent us in parliament. Representative democracies differ from country to country, but they all are the same in that they choose people – representatives – who rule for them. The ancients didn’t have that notion. They thought if you’re going to rule; if you have power (kratos); if you choose officials; if you elect generals; if you sit on the council; or if you attend an assembly meeting and raise your right hand and vote, then that was it: they were ‘doing’ democracy. They were the ruler as well as the ruled; in other words, the Republican notion – no monarch, no single ruler and no tyrant, but everybody in turn fulfilling different roles at different times. And that included being judges. We think that the conduct of legal justice is something quite separate from legislation or holding executive office. The ancient Greeks didn’t have a notion of separation of powers. So they were a direct democracy.

Q: How has ancient Greek democracy influenced the way in which democracy has developed since?

A: Oddly enough, very little directly. The word ‘democracy’, coined by the ancient Greeks, is the universal term for whatever different countries decide their democracy should be. But

the direct line of descent stops in ancient Greece; there is no ancient Greek-style direct democracy after the second or first century BC. When, in the early modern period, the word ‘democracy’ starts creeping back – especially in 17th-century England and 18th-century France and America – then democracy acquires a salience, and people start looking back to the ancient Greeks. But there was a universal agreement in the 19th century, when democracy started expanding quite considerably, that the system – partly because of size – must be indirect. It must be representative. There was, in fact, quite a lot of discussion about the dangers posed by direct democracy in ancient times, namely the danger of it shifting over into mob rule.

Q: Was Alexander the Great really as great as he is often made out to be?

A: Alexander III actually acquired the nickname ‘the Great’ after his death, but he was certainly unparalleled as a conqueror. As the commander of forces, both in pitched battle and sieges, and in traversing vast unknown terrains, he, quite frankly, was in a league with leaders like Genghis Khan – an elite ‘super league’ of commanders, if you like. One of the extraordinary things about Alexander the Great was that, technically, he was never defeated in any battle that made a difference. There were skirmishes when leaders under him were defeated, for example, but he personally never suffered a single failure as a general. And that’s really quite an extraordinary feat.

Alexander came to the throne at the age of just 20, after the assassination of his father, Philip II. But he had been commanding armies since the age of 16, and by the time he was 18, he was his father’s right-hand man in battle. By 330 BC, Alexander had effectively defeated the Persian empire, but it wasn’t enough for him: he then made the decision to push on to what he thought were the outer limits of the entire inhabited world.

Q: How did Alexander die?

A: Well, the evidence for such a climactic event is very confused so we’re not sure how, or from what,

he actually died in 323 BC. He may have been killed by one of his warlords – some of them would fight for the next 50 or so years over the land Alexander had conquered, and would eventually carve it up into three major kingdoms. Or his death could have been from natural causes. We just don’t know for certain.

The main problem was that Alexander died without a living male heir. He had three wives, one of whom, Roxana – from Sogdiana or Bactria, in modern-day Afghanistan – was pregnant at the time of his death and later gave birth to a son (Alexander IV). But both Roxana and her son were murdered by one of the many rivals for Alexander’s kingdom, which just shows you how murderous, how vicious the struggle for power was after his death.

Q: Where is Alexander buried?

A: His tomb has never been found but there is really, in terms of our evidence, only one site in which he conceivably was buried, and as far as we know, his remains have never since been moved from there. And that’s Alexandria in Egypt. Alexander died in Babylon and his corpse was mummified so that it could be transported to the capital of Macedonia, a place called Pella in what is now northern Greece. But as it was passing through Damascus in Syria, the funeral procession was interrupted by Ptolemy I – Alexander’s former general who, after his death, became ruler of Egypt. Ptolemy effectively hijacked the corpse and took it to what was then his capital, Memphis in Egypt. Alexander had designated Alexandria to be the new capital of Greek Egypt, so his corpse was eventually transferred from Memphis to Alexandria and given a fantastic burial with great ceremony, and placed in a tomb with glass over the top so that his mummified corpse could be viewed. And that’s the last we know for sure of where his remains were.

There’s a famous story that claims Augustus, the first Roman emperor of Egypt after the death of Cleopatra, made a pilgrimage to the tomb to see

the corpse of Alexander. He is said to have been so keen to look at the corpse that he knocked its nose off! At any rate, I have no doubt that Alexander is buried somewhere in Alexandria.

Q: Why were homosexuality and bisexuality accepted in ancient Greece but not in Rome?

A: It’s very, very hard to say. I think one possible explanation is that if you conquer a people and you think yourself, therefore, superior to them, you look for the things that differentiate your civilisation from theirs. And the Romans singled out their abhorrence, their rejection, of this ‘deviant custom’ of homosexuality among the Greeks, which they thought was effeminate. So I think that’s the answer: the Romans conquered the Greeks; Greeks were therefore seen as feeble; and one manifestation of their feebleness was seen to be their acceptance of homosexuality.

Q: Where was religion practised in ancient Greece?

A: There were specific sites of worship. The ancient Greeks actually had a word that meant a ‘cut out space’, where a sanctuary, which might or might not include a temple, was sited. So there were shrines and distinct religious spaces.

But religion was really practised everywhere. If you went to battle, you would slaughter an animal before that battle to get the will of the gods. The liver and entrails of the sacrificed animal would be removed and ‘read’ by manteis (seers); if the readings were favourable, you would go into battle. If they weren’t, you didn’t.

At home, you would have a statue of Hermes just outside your back door. You would pour a libation – wine, olive oil or some other liquid – and that would be your way of making your peace with the gods. There was a notion of there being a type of contract between mortals and the gods – if you, the human, did the gods favours, looked after them and gave them their due, then the gods were bound by contract to do you a favour in return. It was a give and take relationship.

Religion was everywhere, in principle, and just about any phenomenon could have a religious interpretation. A rainbow, for example, was a goddess called Iris; the Sun was the god Helios. So the ancient Greeks were incredibly religious, and that’s why it’s a bit of a paradox that some Greeks were able to draw a distinction and actually even question whether the gods – Zeus, Hermes and so on – were real, or whether they were figments of human imagination. In other words, we see the beginnings of atheism through humanism, as well as most Greeks being what we would call very religious.

Q: What role did Oracles play?

A: The Delphic Oracle – the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi – was the most significant because it was thought to be the most holy and authoritative. You could consult an oracle by various means – by listening to the cooing of doves or by getting a prophecy, a form of utterance meant to be directly inspired by, in this case, Apollo. And that would tell you an answer to a question.

There were actually two main types of oracle: one was the public, official one, which advised a city or an individual ruler. The other was the purely individual type, which a lot of Greeks at one or other point in their life – typically during life crises such as marriages, births and deaths – would consult.

PROFESSOR PAUL CARTLEDGE is AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow and Emeritus AG Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. His books include Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece (Picador, 2021) for a full Greek citizen.

Homosexuality in Ancient Greece

In cities such as Sparta and Thebes, there appeared to be a particularly strong emphasis on relationships between men and youths, and it was considered an important part of their education. On the night of their wedding, Spartan wives were expected to lie in a dark room and dress as a man - presumably to help their husbands make the transition from homosexual to heterosexual love. While in Thebes, the general Epaminondas commanded a regiment composed of 150 pairs of lovers. This 'Band of Lovers' became a formidable fighting force, with lover defending lover until death.

Homosexuality in the Roman Empire

Wikipedia

Homosexuality in ancient Rome often differs markedly from the contemporary West. Latin lacks words that would precisely translate"homosexual" and "heterosexual". The primary dichotomy of ancient Roman sexuality was active / dominant / masculine and passive / submissive / feminine. Roman society was patriarchal, and the freeborn male citizen possessed political liberty (libertas) and the right to rule both himself and his household (familia). "Virtue" (virtus) was seen as an active quality through which a man (vir) defined himself. The conquest mentality and "cult of virility" shaped same-sex relations. Roman men were free to enjoy sex with other males without a perceived loss of masculinity or social status as long as they took the dominant or penetrative role. Acceptable male partners were slaves and former slaves, prostitutes, and entertainers, whose lifestyle placed them in the nebulous social realm of infamia, so they were excluded from the normal protections accorded to a citizen even if they were technically free. Freeborn male minors were off limits at certain periods in Rome.

Same-sex relations among women are far less documented and, if Roman writers are to be trusted, female homoeroticism may have been very rare, to the point that Ovid, in the Augustine era describes it as "unheard-of". However, there is scattered evidence—for example, a couple of spells in the Greek Magical Papyri—which attests to the existence of individual women in Roman-ruled provinces in the later Imperial period who fell in love with members of the same sex.

Overview:

During the Republic, a Roman citizen's political liberty (libertas) was defined in part by the right to preserve his body from physical compulsion, including both corporal punishment and sexual abuse. Roman society was patriarchal (see paterfamilias), and masculinity was premised on a capacity for governing oneself and others of lower

status.[6]Virtus, "valor" as that which made a man most fully a man, was among the active virtues. Sexual conquest was a common metaphor for imperialism in Roman discourse, and the "conquest mentality" was part of a "cult of virility" that particularly shaped Roman homosexual practices. Roman ideals of masculinity were thus premised on taking an active role that was also, as Craig A. Williams has noted, "the prime directive of masculine

sexual behavior for Romans". In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, scholars have tended to view expressions of Roman male sexuality in terms of a "penetrator-penetrated" binary model; that is, the proper way for a Roman male to seek sexual gratification was to insert his penis into his partner.Allowing himself to be penetrated threatened his liberty as a free citizen as well as his sexual integrity.

Then again… Apollo, the god of sun and music, is considered the patron of same sex love, as he had many male lovers and was often invoked to bless homosexual unions.

BBC History Magazine

The (Possibly) Gay, Elite Apostle Who Believed in Radical Equality for All

by Jay Parini

During the past decade, if not before, I’ve been wrestling with an angel: Paul the Apostle. I’ve been reading the letters of Paul intensely from the time I was a young man, drawn by his wild and visionary sense of reality, his “invention” of Christianity, his example as a man who moved through the wide cosmopolitan world of the first century without the slightest fear of consequences. (In this, he’s very different from me and, I suspect, most of us!) As Easter approaches, I begin to think about what Paul said when he urged us to “take on the mind of Christ” [Philippians 2.5], which in his theology means entering completely into this cosmic spirit so that the spirit itself becomes part of us.

My own spiritual journey has been a textual one in part, living in the gospels and letters of Paul as a reader, digging into the Greek words themselves to unearth their full meaning. This work, most recently, has led to a series of 21 lectures that I recorded some months ago about Jesus, Paul, and the early Christians. And I have just published The Damascus Road: A Novel of Saint Paul.

In this novel, I write as Paul in the first person, countering or “correcting” his narrative with that of his traveling companion, Luke, who wrote the Gospel of Luke and, of course, the Acts of the Apostles, the latter being an account of their missionary journeys through the Roman world—a journey that ended with the martyrdom of Paul in Rome around the time of the great fire of 64 A.C.E. Luke’s cool-headed view of what was happening stands (at least in my novel) in contrast to Paul’s mad visionary rhetoric, as embodied in his letters.

To write this, I had to sink into the physical as well as mental geography of these men, traveling to the Holy Lands (what I call Palestine in the novel, as all of this region was called in Roman times), to the Jordanian desert, to Asia Minor or what is now

Turkey, to Greece and Italy. I followed as best I could in the footsteps of Paul, hoping to summon that world in images, trying at all times to remind myself how these places would have played on the five senses, with its tingling atmosphere of herbs and spices, wild flowers, shit in the streets, decaying bodies, brilliant sunshine on the sea, and evergreen forests as deep as one can imagine.

This was an intellectual journey as well as a physical one. Like Plato, Paul was a founding thinker in the West. In fact, I began to write this novel after reading again through the Dialogues of Plato—always a text I return to for inspiration and bracing mental exercise. I realized how many of Plato’s ideas, even phrases, had sunk into Paul’s unconscious. He casually quotes from the great philosopher throughout his letters. The very idea of the eternal soul was, of course, illumined by Plato, and Paul ran with this, creating a Platonic theology.

It’s important to recall that Paul was a Greek-speaking Jew, born in Tarsus (now in Turkey), privately educated there by Greek-influenced tutors—the latter is an assumption, but one that seems to make sense, given his erudition, his command of Greek prose, his range of allusion. His status as one of the elite is evident in the fact that he “transferred” to the academy run by Gamaliel in Jerusalem as a young man. Only the child of a wealthy family would have been shipped to a far-off country to study under a major scholar like Gamaliel, the grandson of Hillel—the famous Jewish sage.

But what mostly drew me to Paul was his vision of equality—not what one usually thinks about when one thinks of Paul. Indeed, many friends who heard I was writing about Paul raised an eyebrow or two, saying: Wasn’t he a patriarchal misogynist who hated all gays?

My answer, invariably, was No! No! No!

Paul’s chief idea was this, as found in Galatians 3:28: “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free man, neither male nor female. In Christ, all of these are one.” For me, this is the key verse in the entire New Testament.

Boldly, Paul erased the most crucial barriers of his day. Himself a Jew, a member of the tribe of Benjamin, a Pharisee by affiliation, he took the Good

News (as he called it) to the West, understanding that if the Way of Jesus were to prosper, it would have to go beyond this powerful boundary. In this, he fought against the church in Jerusalem, led by James, the brother of Jesus, who wished only for the Way to remain a kind of hyper-Jewish sect devoted to the strict adherence to the Law of Moses. Had James won out over Paul, Christianity would soon have dwindled to a tiny group in the Holy Land, one that would soon be overridden, obliterated by time and circumstances.

Needless to say, Paul challenged class divisions when he erased the boundaries between slave and free man. Remember that half of the people one met in the ancient world were slaves. Paul would have grown up with a house full of slaves who fetched water, bought food in the market, cooked and cleaned, raised the children, and so forth. Most of the people working for Paul’s father in his tent-making business in Tarsus would have been slaves. And slaves were invisible, not really people, hardly creatures in possession of a “soul” or—in Greek—psyche. Paul didn’t want to see divisions among the classes, believing that enlightenment (a word I prefer over the less interesting and misleading term “salvation”) would come to everyone in the end, slaves as well as free men and women.

Which brings us, crucially, to men and women. Paul had no doubt that women were equal to men in the sight of God, in the mind of Christ. The world of early Christianity was largely financed and led by women, including the powerful Phoebe, Lydia, and Priscilla. Phoebe is described as a presiding officer in the early movement, a deacon, a dominant figure. She could easily be seen as the first Pope, although there were no such offices as the church was not an official body but a loose aggregation of gatherings with no hard rules or clear theology. Indeed, Paul sent his most important piece of writing, an epistle to the Roman gathering, in the possession of Phoebe, this spirited woman of the world who traveled widely and knew every leader in the early Christian movement.

But what about the patriarchal Paul who said women shouldn’t speak in church? There are two mentions of this, one in the 14th chapter of 1 Corinthians, one

in 1 Timothy. The former is widely considered a later addition, an “interpolation” by editors. In this case, the assertion that women should be silent wildly interrupts the flow of the passage, which is whole without it. And the infamous remark is not present in several early manuscripts of this letter. Furthermore, the injunction contradicts the main thrust of the epistle, where (in 1 Corinthians 11:5) Paul says that women should “prophesy and pray” in church. It just makes no logical sense for Paul to follow with a command for them to remain silent: This was an

editorial hand at work, much later. And the matter of 1 Timothy is easily discarded as not something written by Paul himself.

Paul only wrote seven letters that survive: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, 1 Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon. The remaining six letters are “school of Paul,” written much later. To anyone who reads Greek, the difference in prose style is obvious—Garry Wills burrows into this with common sense in What Paul Meant (2006). The differences between the two clumps of letters is profound: They come from wildly different worlds, with different underlying assumptions. A frantic effort was underway on the part of some within the evolving movement to keep the patriarchal practices of Judaism and the Roman world in place. Hence the “pastoral epistles,” 1 and 2 Timothy, which are very late indeed as additions to the New Testament canon.

“Paul sent his most important piece of writing in the possession of Phoebe, this spirited woman of the world who traveled widely and knew every leader in the early Christian movement.”

There is also the complicated matter of Paul’s sexuality. I tend to agree with Bishop John Shelby Spong, a brilliant theologian and church leader, who argues that Paul was “a rigidly controlled gay male,” as he writes in Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism(1991). Be this as it may, Paul was clearly at war with his own body, tormented by the idea if not the reality of sexual desire, and eager to withdraw into the company of his male companions: Luke, Timothy, Silas, and others. His conflicted feelings about his own sexual nature may account for the “thorn in his flesh” that he wrote about in his

second letter to the church at Corinth. (2 Corinthians 12:7-9)

In my view, the authentic Paul was combative, fiercely intellectual, probably depressive, bi-sexual or gay, a radical visionary who had a fiery image in his head of a new heaven and a new earth. He had a vision of what it meant to take on the full mind of Christ, and this involved emptying himself out thoroughly, taking up the cross, which for him meant following the path of self-abandonment, uniting with

the mind of Christ, where everything—male and female, slave and free man, Jew and Gentile—finds reconciliation in unity with God in the eternal moment of Resurrection.

A thousand years ago, the Catholic Church paid little attention to homosexuality

Published: April 10, 2019 6:49am EDT

Author: Lisa McClain, Professor of History and Gender Studies, Boise State University

Disclosure statement

Lisa McClain does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Pope Francis has spoken openly about homosexuality. In a recent interview, the pope said that homosexual tendencies “are not a sin.” And a few years ago, in comments made during an in-flight interview, he said,

“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”

However, the pope has also discouraged homosexual men from entering the priesthood. He categorically stated in another interview that for one with homosexual tendencies, the “ministry or the consecrated life is not his place.”

Many gay priests, when interviewed by The New York Times, characterized themselves as being in a “cage” as a result of the church’s policies on homosexuality.

As a scholar specializing in the history of the Catholic Church and gender studies, I can attest that 1,000 years ago, gay priests were not so restricted. In earlier centuries, the Catholic Church paid little attention to homosexual activity among priests or laypeople.

How The Conversation is different: All our authors are experts.

While the church’s official stance prohibiting sexual relations between people of the same sex has remained constant, the importance the church ascribes to the “sin” has varied. Additionally, over centuries, the church only sporadically chose to investigate or enforce its prohibitions.

Prior to the 12th century, it was possible for priests – even celebrated ones like the 12th-century abbot and spiritual writer St. Aelred of Riveaulx – to write openly about same-sex desire, and ongoing emotional and physical relationships with other men.

Biblical misunderstandings

The Bible places as little emphasis on same-sex acts as the early church did, even though many Christians may have been taught that the Bible clearly prohibits homosexuality.

Judeo-Christian scriptures rarely mention same-sex sexuality. Of the 35,527 verses in the Catholic Bible, only seven – 0.02% – are sometimes interpreted as prohibiting homosexual acts.

Even within those, apparent references to same-sex relations were not originally written or understood as categorically indicting homosexual acts, as in modern times. Christians before the late 19th century had no concept of gay or straight identity.

For example, Genesis 19 records God’s destruction of two cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, by “sulphur and fire” for their wickedness. For 1,500 years after the writing of Genesis, no biblical writers equated this wickedness with same-sex acts. Only in the first century A.D. did a Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, first mistakenly equate Sodom’s sin with same-sex sexuality.

Depiction of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. John Martin

It took centuries for a Christian consensus to agree with Philo’s misinterpretation, and it eventually became the accepted understanding of this scripture, from which the derogatory term “sodomite” emerged.

Today, however, theologians generally affirm that the wickedness God punished was the inhabitants’ arrogance and lack of charity and hospitality, not any sex act.

Religious scholars have similarly researched the other six scriptures that Christians in modern times claim justify God’s categorical condemnation of all

same-sex acts. They have uncovered how similar mistranslations, miscontextualizations, and misinterpretations have altered the meanings of these ancient scriptures to legitimate modern social prejudices against homosexuality.

For example, instead of labeling all homosexual acts as sinful in the eyes of God, ancient Christians were concerned about excesses of behavior that might separate believers from God. The apostle Paul criticized same-sex acts along with a list of immoderate behaviors, such as gossip and boastfulness, that any believer could overindulge in.

He could not have been delivering a blanket condemnation of homosexuality or homosexuals because these concepts would not exist for 1,800 more years.

Gay sex, as such, usually went unpunished

Early church leaders didn’t seem overly concerned about punishing those who engaged in homosexual practice. I have found that there is a remarkable silence about homosexual acts, both in theologies and in church laws for over 1,000 years, before the late 12th century.

When early Christian commentators such as John Chrysostom, one of the most prolific biblical writers of the fourth century, criticized homosexual acts, it was typically part of an ascetic condemnation of all sexual experiences.

Moreover, it was generally not the sex act itself that was sinful but some consequence, such as how participating in an act might violate social norms like gender hierarchies. Social norms dictated that men be dominant and women passive in most circumstances.

If a man took on the passive role in a same-sex act, he took on the woman’s role. He was “unmasculine and effeminate,” a transgression of the gender hierarchy that Philo of Alexandria called the “greatest of all evils.” The concern was to police gender roles rather than sex acts, in and of themselves.

Before the mid-12th century, the church grouped sodomy among many sins involving lust, but their penalties for same sex-relations were very lenient if they existed or were enforced at all.

Church councils and penance manuals show little concern over the issue. In the early 12th century, a time of church revival, reform and expansion, prominent priests and monks could write poetry and letters glorifying love and passion – even physical passion – toward those of the same sex and not be censured.

Instead, it was civil authorities that eventually took serious interest in prosecuting the offenders.

The years of hostility

By the end of the 12th century, the earlier atmosphere of relative tolerance began to change. Governments and the Catholic Church were growing and consolidating greater authority. They increasingly sought to regulate the lives – even private lives – of their subjects.

The Third Lateran Council of 1179, a church council held at the Lateran palace in Rome, for example, outlawed sodomy. Clerics who practiced it were either to be defrocked or enter a monastery to perform penance. Laypeople were more harshly punished with excommunication.

Thomas Aquinas. Carlo Crivelli

It might be mentioned that such hostility grew, not only toward people engaging in same-sex relations but toward other minority groups as well. Jews, Muslims and lepers also faced rising levels of persecution.

While church laws and punishments against same-sex acts grew increasingly harsh, they were, at first, only sporadically enforced. Influential churchmen, such as 13th-century theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas and popular preacher Bernardino of Siena, known as the “Apostle of Italy,” disagreed about the severity of sin involved.

By the 15th century, however, the church conformed to social opinions and became more vocal in condemning and prosecuting homosexual acts, a practice that continues to today.

Priests fear retribution today

Today, the Catholic Catechism teaches that desiring others of the same sex is not sinful but acting on those desires is.

As the Catechism says, persons with such desires should remain chaste and “must be accepted with respect and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.” Indeed, Catholic ministries such as DignityUSA and New Ways Ministries seek to serve and advocate for this population.

Yet gay priests are in a different category. They live and work under mandatory celibacy, often in same-sex religious orders. Pope Francis I has encouraged them to be “perfectly responsible” to avoid scandal, while discouraging other gay men from entering the priesthood.

Many fear retribution if they cannot live up to this ideal. For the estimated 30-40% of U.S priests who are gay, the openness of same-sex desire among clerics of the past is but a memory.

Slate

How Anita Bryant Changed America

She launched the modern antigay movement. It went differently than she expected.

BY JOSH LEVIN JANUARY 11 2025 3:00 PM

The way Anita Bryant told it, she didn’t have a choice but to build a nationwide antigay movement. Her 1977 book The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality begins: “Because of my love for Almighty God, because of my love for His Word, because of my love for my country, because of my love for my children, I took a stand—one that was not popular.”

When Bryant took that stand, and became the public face of the activist group Save Our Children, she created a template that the American right wing is still following today. She also became the enemy that gay rights leaders needed to build a nationwide movement of their own.

Bryant, who died of cancer last month at the age of 84, first became known as a beauty queen—Miss Oklahoma, and then the second runner-up for Miss America 1959—and a pop singer, crooning the Top 10 hits “Paper Roses” and “In My Little Corner of the World.” But it was her TV ads for orange juice—featuring her own children, a cartoon bird, and a lilting jingle about the “Florida sunshine tree”—that made her the nation’s leading avatar for white-bread American wholesomeness.

Bryant didn’t see herself as a political figure, but she did publicly support the Vietnam War, calling it a battle “between atheism and God.” And in 1969, as

the U.S. was roiled by youth activism, she lent her voice to a teenage “Rally for Decency” in Miami.

It was eight years later that, as Bryant put it, “God put a flame in my heart.” Her Baptist pastor had told her about a proposed bill in Dade County, Florida, to ban discrimination against gay people in the workplace, housing, and public accommodations. That amendment wouldn’t ensure anything close to full equality—“homosexual acts” would still be illegal in Dade County. But Bryant was still outraged. She wrote in The Anita Bryant Story, “The thought of known homosexuals teaching my children … kept coming to my mind.”

When I reported on Bryant’s antigay crusade for an episode of Slate’s One Year: 1977 podcast, her son Robert Green Jr. told me that his mother took action close to home. When she suspected that Robert’s favorite English teacher was gay, she pulled her son and his siblings from their school. That teacher, who Robert said had helped him “through a rocky time,” disappeared from his life forever.

Bryant also chose to go public with her beliefs, speaking up for what she called the “normal majority.” As the Dade County Commission got set to vote on its antidiscrimination ordinance in January 1977, she stood up and declared: “Homosexuals will recruit our children. They will use money, drugs, alcohol, any means to get what they want.”

As historian Lillian Faderman writes in her book The Gay Revolution, Bryant’s eyes were “shiny with tears.” She saw this nondiscrimination ordinance as discrimination against her, saying, “I can and do say no to a very serious moral issue that would violate my rights and the rights of all the decent and morally upstanding citizens, regardless of their race or religion.”

In January 1977, the Dade County Commission said no to Anita Bryant, voting to pass the ordinance. But Bryant vowed to fight on. Save Our Children would spread the lie that gay people were predisposed to pedophilia and were systematically grooming America’s kids. “The recruitment of our children is absolutely necessary for the survival and growth of homosexuality,” she said. “Since homosexuals

cannot reproduce, they must recruit and freshen their ranks.”

Thanks to Bryant, that slander caught on across America. In 1977 and 1978, she led a successful drive to get equal rights ordinances repealed in Dade County and elsewhere, stoking an antigay backlash that left LGBTQ+ Americans fearing for their lives. All the while, Bryant claimed she was motivated by Christian compassion, saying, “I love homosexuals, if you can believe that. I love them enough to tell them the truth, because I know that … if they’re willing to turn from sin … that they can be ex-homosexuals, the same as there can be an ex-murderer, an ex-thief, or ex-anybody.”

Throughout the late ’70s, Bryant was cheered by crowds of fellow Christians who saw her as a brave truth teller. She also became a national villain, named in a survey of American high schoolers as the female celebrity who’d “done the most damage to the world.” The man who’d done the most damage according to that survey? Adolf Hitler.

As my Slate colleague Christina Cauterucci laid out in her podcast series Slow Burn: Gays Against Briggs, the antigay wave that Bryant instigated in Florida would come to a halt in California. It was there in 1978 that activists—many of whom had been inspired to come out to counter Bryant’s hateful rhetoric—banded together to defeat a proposed statewide ban on gay teachers.

Bryant herself would lose her job shilling for Florida orange juice. And when she got pied in the face at a press conference in Iowa—her instant response: “At least it’s a fruit pie”—a whole bunch of Americans reveled in her comeuppance.

The New York Times stood up for Bryant in 1977, saying that her loss of work was reminiscent of the Communist blacklist. Bryant, too, saw herself as a victim of what we now call cancel culture. “We’re being threatened and there’s all kinds of harassment,” she said. “But I still know that God’s going to take care of us.”

A couple of years later, it seemed that Bryant was inching toward disavowing her role as America’s leading antigay voice. After a 1980 divorce that saw her get slammed as immoral by her former allies on

the religious right, she told a reporter, “The answers don’t seem quite so simple now. I guess I can better understand the gays’ and the feminists’ anger and frustration.” She was also prone to self-pity, calling herself “a sacrificial lamb.”

But Bryant ultimately made it clear that she had no regrets. In a 1992 interview promoting her latest book, A New Day: A Triumphant Story of Forgiveness, Healing, and Recovery, she said, “People hated me because I spoke the truth.”

The coalitions that formed in opposition to Bryant back in the 1970s would prove essential in the gay rights battles to come, from the AIDS crisis to the fight for gay marriage. Even so, the language that Bryant made mainstream back in the 1970s can be heard just as loudly today. Accusations of pedophilia and grooming have fueled a new anti-LGBTQ movement, this one focused on denying civil rights to trans people. And in 2025, that wave shows no signs of subsiding.

I reached out to Bryant back in 2021, hoping to speak with her for the One Year podcast, but she declined our interview request. Her son Robert and her granddaughter Sarah Green did speak with me, though, about what she’d meant to them, and about the effects of her intolerance.

Sarah said that her parents had always told her that Bryant didn’t personally hate gay people—an explanation that Sarah accepted until she realized that she was gay. When she came out to her grandmother on her 21st birthday, Bryant told Sarah that homosexuality was a delusion invented by the devil. Robert Green told me, “My mom has chosen to pray that Sarah will eventually conform to my mom’s idea of what God wants Sarah to be.” And Sarah herself said in 2021 that she was weighing whether to invite Bryant to her wedding, because “I’m not going to have a relationship with somebody who can only have one on their terms.”

When our episode got released, the news of Sarah’s engagement to a woman got aggregated gleefully online. The Advocate’s headline: “Another Pie in the Face for Anita Bryant: Her Granddaughter Is Gay.” But Sarah’s sexual orientation isn’t some kind of karmic gotcha. It’s a fact of life that Bryant’s bigotry didn’t allow her to accept.

“I’ll just say that I don’t hate my grandma,” Sarah Green said in 2021, three years before Anita Bryant’s death. “I just kind of feel bad for her. And I think as much as she hopes that I will figure things out and come back to God, I kind of hope that she’ll figure things out.”

Is it true that 33% of child abuse cases are commited by homosexuals who only represent 2% of the population? If that's the case, what's the best solution to solve this issue instead of discriminating against them?

For over thirty years I’ve worked with children affected by abuse and trauma. My specialty is working with child victims of sexual assault. What you wrote here is 1000% incorrect and based on a combination of fear and ignorance. I understand that some people like to believe that homosexuals pose a grave danger to children. These same people somehow find “statistics” to support their ignorance and hatred. Fortunately, (at least for the rational among us) verifiable fact supports reality.

Here are some truths. BTW: You can easily look these up using Google or visit one of the many websites established by honest and experienced organizations providing education and support to those who work with child victims. In the US try the NIH or Zero Abuse Project

82% of the suspected perpetrators of child sexual abuse were at the time of the offense or had been at some time involved in a heterosexual relationship with a close relative of the child they victimized. In their study sample, researchers found that a child’s risk of being molested by his or her relative’s heterosexual partner was over 100 times greater than their being molested by someone who identifies as being homosexual, lesbian or bisexual (0.7%)

Now, from here I can hear you screaming - NO! How can a man who molests boys be considered heterosexual? He is, by definition a homosexual -right? Ah, the common mistake those who do not understand sexual violence perpetuate. Sexual assault is NOTabout sex. Again: SEXUAL ASSAULT IT NOT ABOUT SEX. It is about power and the abuse of that power. There is no valid evidence in support of the notion that Gays are more likely to

commit acts of sexual violence than heterosexuals. In fact, there is plenty of valid evidence in support of the opposite.

How to better protect vulnerable people of all ages from sexual violence? We can start with facing reality and putting aside our fear and biased beliefs and look at verifiable facts - even when these facts make us uncomfortable. By being unwilling to accept truth, to educate ourselves and our children about gender, sex and sexual violence we put the lives of all vulnerable people, particularly children at risk. Put aside prejudice born of ignorance and fear and embrace fact and guess what? We might actually make the lives of children safer.

Psychology Today

Does Abusing Children Have Consequences for Sexuality?

Ritch C. Savin-Williams Ph.D.

Sex, Sexuality, and Romance

Are they abused because they’re gay or because of their “inappropriate” gender?

Posted December 2, 2019. Reviewed by Matt Huston

Back in the day—before ex-gay advocates began confessing their own same-sex attractions—conversion therapists argued that, among a litany of causal agents, being abused as a child causes one to become a sissy boy or a tomboy girl and through this process the deviant gender behavior becomes homosexuality. To cure or convert gays to heterosexuality one simply counters the abuse by getting rid of the unorthodox gender behavior—give the girls their Barbies and the boys their trucks. Nice, simple, and straightforward.

Although these assumptions have been challenged as overly simplistic, research has clearly established that non-straight children (especially boys) report elevated levels of emotional, physical, and sexual maltreatment (that is, abuse). Here are four recent studies that attest to these relationships:

1. From the U.S. National Epidemiologic Survey in the United States: Roberts and associates found a history of childhood sexual abuse predicts increases in the prevalence of same-sex attractions, same-sex partners, and same-sex identities—the connection is stronger for boys than girls.

2. From the U.S. Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System: Anderson and Blosnich reported that gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals have higher odds of adverse childhood experiences compared to their heterosexual peers.

3. From the U.K. Avon Longitudinal Study: Xu and associates reported boys with a history of childhood parental maltreatment are more likely to be nonheterosexual “even after controlling for important covariates.”

4. From a Canadian Community-Based Study: MacMullin and associates found gender-nonconforming children have higher levels of suicidality/self-harm compared to children who are gender-conforming; group effects are mostly due to having poor peer relations and behavioral and emotional challenges.

Questions this research raises but does not answer include: Does childhood maltreatment directly cause or shape a not-straight orientation? That is, does the parental and peer abuse cause children to be not straight? Given the well-established finding that sexual-minority youths are more gender nonconforming than straight youths, do children provoke the abuse by being gender deviant? That is, do parents abuse their gender unorthodox children in an attempt to straighten them out? Do peers abuse them because they are disgusted with masculine girls and feminine boys? Do the not-straight children elicit sexual encounters with same-sex adults because of their homosexual inclinations? Are not-straight youths biasing their retrospective recall of abuse?

These possibilities and others have been proposed. Public health researchers Roberts and colleagues warn that their “results suggest that causal relationships driving the association between sexual orientation and childhood abuse may be bidirectional, may differ by type of abuse, and may differ by sex.” For psychologists Yin Xu and colleagues, the association between maltreatment and sexual orientation is reduced to non-significance when taking into consideration the gender nonconformity of the sexual-minority youths.

This implies that not-straight children and adolescents are more likely than straight peers to be mistreated, even abused, not because of their sexuality but because they are not conforming to gender expectations. Hence, it seems that gender-nonconforming children (regardless of their sexual orientation) are at risk for mental health problems due to poor parental and peer relations and that, because of their biology, not-straight youths are more likely to be gender-nonconforming and hence maltreated. After all, the abuse begins during childhood, prior to any knowledge by the parents—and perhaps the youths—of their sexual and romantic attractions. What is visible and hence known is their gender expression. It is not that the child is not straight which provokes parents and friends to mistreat them but that they are acting too much like the opposite gender.

The larger question this research raises is whether the gender-nonconforming child is abused because of the association parents and peers are making between gender nonconformity and gayness or because they just cannot stand their child or friend expressing a nonstandard gender. Given these associations between childhood gender nonconformity and childhood trauma (often by an adult family member), sex and gender professor Henny Bos and colleagues recommended: “interventions aimed at increasing the social acceptance of gender nonconformity might also lower the levels of childhood trauma and sexual victimization, especially among gay and bisexual men.” I would add, among all of us.

The UN calls conversion therapy 'torture.' Could the Supreme Court greenlight it anyway?

Twenty-three states and Washington, D.C., have conversion therapy bans on the books. An additional four states and Puerto Rico have made efforts to limit the practice.

By Kate Sosin Published Oct 6, 2025, 5:00 AM CT

Five years ago, the United Nations concluded that conversion therapy could amount to torture and recommended it be banned. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will consider a case that could greenlight it for LGBTQ+ youth across the nation.

It is the first of three blockbuster LGBTQ+ cases on its docket this term, as the court’s October-to-October annual cycle is known. Chiles v. Salazar, brought by Christian counselor Kaley Chiles, seeks to overturn Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy, a pseudoscientific practice in which providers attempt to change a youth’s sexual orientation or gender identity, often through extremely harsh methods.

Conversion therapy is condemned by every major medical association in the country, including the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association.

It has historically involved acts of physical, psychological and sexual abuse against minors — electric shock, masturbation reconditioning, starvation, chemically induced nausea and hypnosis, among others.

Nearly 700,000 adults are survivors of conversion therapy, according to the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, which submitted an amicus brief encouraging the court to find Colorado ban on the practice constitutional.

In a statement, Ilan Meyer, distinguished senior scholar of public policy at the Williams Institute, said that research shows conversion therapy “is ineffective at changing a person’s sexual orientation and gender identity and is associated with significant

harm, which is why major professional organizations have overwhelmingly rejected the practice.”

Twenty-three states and Washington, D.C., have conversion therapy bans on the books. An additional four states and Puerto Rico have made efforts to limit the practice. The majority of those laws still allow therapists to discuss sexual orientation and gender identity with youth, but practitioners are not allowed to promise that they can help kids change their gender identity or sexual orientation — nor are they allowed to pressure them into doing so.

Tuesday’s hearing could change all of that. While the case focuses on Colorado’s ban, which was enacted in 2019, its outcome could have major implications for conversion therapy bans across the country.

Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ+ rights organization, said in a statement that while the organization urges the court to affirm the constitutionality of Colorado’s ban, the expectations are low given the court’s conservative majority.

“In recent years, we have seen decisions out of our highest court that have rolled back our rights and cleared a pathway for discriminatory legislation that targets LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized communities,” Robinson said. “From access to critical health care to inclusivity in our schools, this shift is nothing short of alarming — and now the safety of our children is once again up for debate.”

The case comes down, in part, to an argument over free speech. Chiles argues that her right to practice conversion therapy is protected under the First Amendment. The Trump administration has weighed in to support Chiles, along with 19 state attorneys general.

But opponents argue that conversion therapy should be classified as conduct,not speech. Federal appellate courts in the Ninth and Tenth Circuits ruled that Chiles’ practice amounted to conduct, while the Eleventh Circuit concluded it was protected speech. The Supreme Court will make the final call.

The Supreme Court will hear two other major LGBTQ+ cases this fall — BPJ v. West Virginia and Hecox v. Little. Both involve challenges to statewide bans, in Virginia and Idaho, respectively, on transgender participation in sports.

The court is expected to issue its opinion on the cases in the spring or summer.

ABC News

NYC church redefines acceptance for LGBTQ+ community

By Shannon Caturano. Jun 26, 2024, 2:42 PM ET

Pope Francis formally signed off on allowing Catholic priests to bless same-sex couples in December 2023.

But decades before the pope’s historic announcement, a New York City church has embraced the LGBTQ+ community and provided a safe space for worship.

The Church of St. Francis Xavier, in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, provided services for AIDS patients while others refused, including being one of the first to bury a person who died of the virus during the epidemic of the 1980s. More recently, the church became the new home for a decadeslong memorial for people who died from AIDS-related complications when the original host parish was closed as part of the Archdiocese of New York’s reorganization plans.

“We came and we never left,” Roe Sauerzopf told ABC News Live, recalling the first time she and her wife, Paula Acuti, had attended Sunday Mass at St. Francis, and how they immediately felt “safe” to be themselves.

“It’s been a struggle to be a lesbian, and to be a Catholic lesbian has been even more of a struggle,” Acuti, a New York resident, shared with a room full of women who attend a Catholic Lesbian group at the church and can relate to her experience, all nodding in agreement, while eating cheese and crackers and sipping wine on a Friday night.

“I had left the Catholic Church because of the attitude toward gay people,” Sauerzopf added.

“It was on Pride Sunday and the priest said that everybody there should pray for all the sinners who were marching in the city. And I think that's the last time that we went into a church for a long time,” Acuti told ABC News Live.

It was at least 15 years before the couple found their way back to the Catholic Church. When attending a friend’s wedding in the early 2000s, they shared with a straight couple that they had felt unaccepted to be themselves within their religion.

“We were complaining to them about how there really is no accepting Catholic churches and they were like ‘oh no, there is one,’” Acuti said.

That’s when Acuti and Sauerzopf found St. Francis Xavier.

They soon became involved in the parish’s Catholic Lesbian group, which was founded in 1995, and now has more than 300 participating members.

Pastor Kenneth Boller, who leads the LGBTQ+ friendly groups at the church, said the parish has been welcoming of all people for “many, many years.”

“It's important for everybody to find groups of people who are ‘like’ instead of ‘other.’ So you can develop friendships, you can share experiences,” Boller said. “What's important is that people find a place to pray.”

The Catholic Lesbians group meets monthly to pray together and share their own faith experiences. With a wide range of ages, the youngest member is 18 years old and the oldest members are in their 80s.

Acuti and Sauerzopf, who have been together for 45 years, got married at St. Francis Xavier in 2004, when same-sex marriage was still illegal in the United States.

Sauerzopf said the ceremony was for their 25th anniversary, and the priest at the time told them to invite their family and friends.

“He did a whole Mass, he blessed our rings, he just couldn’t sign the papers.”

It was a day the couple said they’d never forget. Wanting other same-sex couples to feel the acceptance they had received, they helped plan a surprise ceremony at a recent Catholic Lesbian retreat for a newlywed couple who joined the group during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“They’re just the most welcoming group we found,” McKenna Coyle, who is in her 20s, said, describing the group as “family.”

It was the last day of the retreat when Coyle and her wife, who were celebrating their one-year anniversary, walked into a room with music playing, a cake and photos from their wedding day displayed.

“They blessed us to celebrate our wedding since we can’t get married in the Catholic Church,” Coyle said.

“It's a blessing on persons because everyone, every person, is entitled to be blessed. It's not a blessing or endorsement of their living situation, but a realization that these are people of goodwill,” Boller said, in describing the Vatican policy change.

“The Pope says all are welcome. But then he kind of backtracks a little,” Sauerzopf said. “But this church doesn't do the backtrack. They keep it up.”

In addition to advocating for equality within the Catholic Church, Sauerzopf also said she would like to see more women in leadership roles within the church. The Church of St. Francis Xavier allows women to perform the homily during Mass, Sauerzopf said, which is rare within the Catholic religion.

“We shouldn't be the oasis. We should be what it's all like,” she said, while sitting in a church pew.

Six Biblical Passages That Discuss LGTBQ Issues

addresses the topic in a list of vices (1 Corinthians 6:9, 1 Timothy 1:10), the argument being made is more than likely about the sexual exploitation of young men by older men, a practice called pederasty, and what we read in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans is a part of a broader indictment against idolatry and excessive, self-centered lust that is driven by desire to “consume” rather than to love and to serve as outlined for Christian partnership elsewhere in the Bible. While it is likely that Jews and Christians in the 1st century had little to no awareness of a category like sexual orientation, this doesn’t mean that the biblical authors were wrong. What it does mean, at a minimum, is that continued opposition toward same-sex relationships and LGBTQ+ identities must be based on something other than these biblical texts, which brings us back to a theology of Christian marriage or partnership.

Marriage of a Couple Compared to Christ and the Church

Evangelicals have a core belief that sex differentiation is an indispensable part of Christian marriage. The latter being of tremendous importance, because according to the New Testament, marriage is a primary symbol of the love between Christ and his beloved “bride,” the church..To them, same-sex couples (and single people for that matter) are uniquely excluded from participation in this symbol on the basis of a failure to perform one or more dimensions of an often vague category referred to as ‘gender complementarity.’

And yet, those who are not married but are not LGBTQ+, like single people or people whose spouses have passed, are embraced as Christians.

Is the larger point that God’s design for Christian partnership is about reflecting the truest and sweetest love that anyone could know; that is the self-giving, ever-enduring, liberating love between God and creation made possible for us through Christ?

John 8:1-8 reinterpreted

But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the

people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a man caught in relations with another man. They made him stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this man was caught in the act of homosexuality. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such men. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first first to throw a stone at her.”

One of the Pharisees bent down to grab a stone anyway and when he stood up he looked at the accused. “This man is my son.” And then he ??????

I wonder why Jesus never addressed circumcision in the Gospels since I think he knew it would be the biggest theological hurdle the disciples would face. But now I see it was purposeful. The life and ministry of Jesus showed the disciples how to read Scripture and apply it in a way that doesn’t exclude, but instead offered life to as many people as possible. So even though the disciples knew what Genesis said about circumcision being an eternal sign of the covenant between God and the people of Israel, the disciples chose to remove the requirement of circumcision. They said that there shouldn’t be a stumbling block for those who choose faith in Christ.

*****If Romans 1 doesn’t address woman with woman relationships, then there are no passages in all of Scripture that condemn intimacy between women. This would make sense because much of the understanding behind what was “natural” is that sex ought to lead to procreation. Culturally, marriage between Roman citizens was valued primarily for cementing one’s status as the head of a household and contributing to society by opening the avenue for procreation. A marriage ensured offspring you could impart your inheritance to. So men pursued marriage and women accepted it not primarily because they fell in love, or because of attraction, but for social status and for procreation. Unlike today, Roman marriages were not based on

romantic attraction. A marriage was the result of two families coming together to agree on an arrangement. People whose marriage was arranged for them didn’t have a valid objection if their sole reason for not wanting to marry was because they weren’t in love. Having children was considered a social responsibility to one’s family and to the Empire. So one significant reason why gay marriage wasn’t addressed in Scripture was because it wasn’t a cultural issue; marriage between two people of the same gender was out of the question, since romantic feelings was not the reason for marriage—procreation was.

Vox

Most cardinals at the Vatican are gay, says Catholic academic

Rik Torfs, a professor of canon law at the Leuven Catholic university, made the claim after the Pope’s death was announced on Monday.

Bruno Waterfield, Brussels

April 23 2025, The Times

Most of the Roman Catholic cardinals who will choose the new pope are gay, despite the church’s doctrine that homosexuality is sinful, a Belgian expert has said.

Rik Torfs, a professor of canon law at the Catholic University on Leuven, has started debate with his claims, made on a popular Belgian news analysis programme after Pope Francis’s death was announced on Monday.

“A paradoxical situation remains,” Torfs said about Francis’s legacy. “On the one hand, homosexual relations are considered sinful but on the other, a significant percentage — probably the majority — of cardinals are homosexual.”

Asked about the statement, Torfs, a former Christian Democrat senator and a Catholic who is also a critic of conservative clerics in the Holy See, said: “People I know in the Vatican think it’s a large majority.”

Francis last year caused controversy when, during a private meeting, he used extremely derogatory language towards gay men. He criticised what he described as an “atmosphere of faggotry”, using the Italian word frociaggine, at the Vatican. He used the term, not for the first time, when asked during a meeting of clerics about arguments he had made about keeping gay men out of seminaries.

Francis was reported to have said: “A monsignore who works at the Vatican once said to me, ‘Your Holiness, I want to say something, I am worried about the gay culture inside here’. I said, ‘Yes, there is an atmosphere of faggotry. It is true, you find it in the Vatican’.”

Although the Pope’s comments about gay priests were in line with the church’s doctrine, his language seemed at odds with the compassion he sometimes showed to gay Christians.

In 2018 he told a gay man who was a survivor of sexual abuse by members of the clergy: “God made you like this and loves you like this.”

In 2022, he urged Catholic parents who believed that their children were gay “to accompany [them] and not hide behind an attitude of condemnation”, suggesting a more open interpretation of doctrine.

BIAS WATCH

Hate pastor threatens to kill gay pastors after same-sex couple delivers sermon

"They should get the death penalty, not be preaching behind the pulpit."

Wednesday, August 28, 2024

By Daniel Villarreal

Pastor Dillon Awes, a hate preacher at the Stedfast Baptist Church in Watauga, Texas, is upset that some Christian churches affirm LGBTQ+ people—or “sodomites” and “sexual predators,” as he calls them—and he’s especially angry that some pastors even allow queer people to speak from the pulpit.

“These faggots should get a bullet in their brain,” he said in a recent sermon. “They should get the death penalty, not be preaching behind the pulpit.”

Awes made his comments in response to Pastor Charles Andrew Stanley—founder and senior pastor of the nondenominational evangelical Christian megachurch North Point Ministries—who invited a married same-sex couple to deliver a sermon at a recent conference.

“In this conference, he invited two sodomites that were married to each other to preach,” Awes said. “These two sodomites were talking about how they’re so excited to be able to preach that because it’s the message that the children need to hear. So they’re literally just admitting their heart, like, ‘We’re here behind the pulpit so that we could defile children with our message.'”

“That’s where we’ve gotten as a nation by being nice to sodomites,” he ranted. “You know, first, it was, ‘They can get married.’ Then it was, ‘They could all have equal rights.’ Then it was, well, ‘We could have drag shows out in public.’ Then it was, ‘Well, we could take children into the drag shows too.’ Then it was like, ‘Well, we could allow homosexuals to attend church.’ Then it was ‘Well, we can now let drag queens attend church.'”

“Now they’re behind the pulpit. Why? Because of nice guys like Andy Stanley that won’t say what needs to be said, which is that these guys should get a bullet in their brain, that they should get the death penalty, not be preaching behind the pulpit.”

Of course, LGBTQ+ people do not have full equal rights, and children have viewed age-appropriate drag performances in cartoons, TV shows, and films for decades. Also, numerous Christian churches embrace queer congregants, preachers, and drag performers as a way to spread the gospel.

“What a nice guy Andy Stanley is,” Awes added. “What a nice guy you are for letting children in your congregation be abused by pedophiles. How nice of you, Andy Stanley. How nice of all the pastors today that are enabling sexual predators in their church to harm people permanently, to scar them for life, to hurt them spiritually, because you just want to be nice. Well, you know what? Go to Hell, Andy Stanley, and every single pastor like you—go to Hell.”

Notably, anti-LGBTQ+ figures who accuse LGBTQ+ of sexually harming children rarely, if ever, comment on the tens of thousands of documented cases of child sex abuse happening in Christian churches.

This isn’t the first time that Awes has made such comments. In June 2022, he said the government should criminalize homosexuality because of the Bible and then line homosexuals against a wall to be shot in the back of the head. Two months later, he said that allowing a woman to preach in church is like “spitting in the face of God.”

In August 2023, locals in Watauga protested the church’s hateful messages.

“I cannot believe you expose kids to that garbage,” town resident Mandi Skinner said at a protest outside the church. “That’s not freedom of speech. That’s vile, threatening, slanderous, dangerous language. And I don’t think it should be protected just because they call themselves a church.”

Awes and others like him call themselves New Independent Fundamental Baptist (New IFB) preachers. New IFB isn’t affiliated with any mainstream Baptist denomination, although both Baptist and New IFB teachings exhibit anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry, antisemitism, and misogyny. But while Baptists merely condemn queer people to hell, New IFB goes a step further, calling for the execution of LGBTQ+ people.

The Southern Poverty Law Center considers Stedfast Baptist Church to be a hate group.

Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker says Pride Month is example of 'deadly sin' during commencement speech

by Lukas Weese May 14, 2024 12:35 PM

Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, speaking during a commencement speech at Benedictine College, referred to Pride Month, the events in June demonstrating inclusivity and support for the LGBTQ+ community, as an example of the “deadly sins” as he advocated for a more conservative brand of Catholicism.

“Not the deadly sins sort of Pride that has an entire month dedicated to it,” Butker said, “but the true God-centered pride that is cooperating with the holy ghost to glorify him.”

Butker spoke for more than 20 minutes to students at the Catholic school in Atchison, Kansas, saying he wanted the graduating class to prevent political leaders from interfering with social issues that impact their relationship with the church.

Butker, 28, criticized an Associated Press article on America’s Catholic Church, which detailed the institution’s shift “toward the old ways.” It highlighted Benedictine’s rules that “seem like precepts of a bygone age,” which include “volunteering for 3 a.m. prayers” and “pornography, premarital sex and sunbathing in swimsuits being forbidden.”

Butker said the story was an “attempt to rebuke and embarrass” places like Benedictine, and that it would be met with “pride” instead of “anger.”

Benedictine, a college with more than 2,100 full-time undergraduates as of September 2022, describes itself as a liberal arts institution aimed at “the education of men and women within a community of faith and leadership.” Butker, who called on religious leaders “to stay in their lane and lead,” praised Benedictine for embracing what he called traditional Catholic values.

“When you embrace tradition, success, worldly and spiritual, will follow,” Butker said.

In October 2014, the school ordered basketball player Jallen Messersmith to remove a Pride flag from his dorm room window.

Butker also used the speech to criticize President Joe Biden on several issues, including abortion and the coronavirus pandemic, and questioned Biden’s devotion to Catholicism. Butker also addressed gender ideologies and said that a woman’s most important title is “homemaker.”

“It is you, the women, who have had the most diabolic lies told to you. Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world,” Butker said.

The Chiefs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

While the NFL isn’t in season during Pride Month, the league participates in LGBTQ+ initiatives. On the Wednesday before Super Bowl LVIII, the NFL hosted a “Night of Pride” event in partnership with GLAAD, the LGBTQ+ advocacy organization. The Chiefs are among the NFL teams that have a Pride selection of apparel with rainbow colors.

Kansas City is among the many North American cities that host Pride events during June, led by the KC Pride Community Alliance.

Butker is a three-time Super Bowl champion with the Chiefs. He was a seventh-round draft pick in 2017 and made 33 of 35 field goals in the 2023 season.

Chiefs Kicker Spreads Antisemitic Lies In Benedictine College Graduation Speech

Harrison Butker claimed Congress “passed a bill where stating something as basic as the Biblical teaching of who killed Jesus could land you in jail”

MAY 15 AT 9:53 AM

Rolling Stone

Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker kicked the hornet's nest last weekend when he encouraged the women of Benedictine College's 2024 graduate class not to embrace their roles as wives and homemakers rather than putting their degrees to use. While the speech drew widespread criticism for his characterization of women and LGBTQ people, Butker also promoted an insidious piece of antisemitic misinformation pertaining to legislation in Congress.

"I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you," Butker said in his commencement speech. "Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world."

The three-time Super Bowl champion went on to describe how his wife, Isabelle, never achieved her "dream of having a career," but that "if you ask her today if she has any regrets on her decision, she would laugh out loud without hesitation, and say, 'Hey, no.'"

Of course, Butker earns millions of dollars per year as an NFL player -- so a second income isn't exactly necessary. Ironically enough, during his commencement speech, Butker quoted Taylor Swift, a woman who has built a wildly successful career and billion-dollar fortune without a husband, who is now dating Butker's teammate, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.