One Nation Under God?
Religion and the
Queer Community
By Jasmin Haddad
Story time: Recently I overheard a presumably 12 year old boy peer up at his father and ask him a rather interesting question. I had the misfortune of hearing the father just before the boy’s question speak loudly and prominently about his adamant distaste for all “gay propaganda” based on his belief of “gayness” of any sort being “sinful in the eyes of the Lord”. The boy looked up very innocently and asked “But doesn’t the Bible also say tattoos (Leviticus 19:28) and writing with your left hand are sins (Matthew 25: 31-34)?”. Watching the father’s face searching for some form of an answer made eavesdropping on this conversation relatively worthwhile. When speaking about religion in America most individuals instinctively associate religion with Christianity, which people have a variety of gut reactions towards.
This is because Christianity has oftentimes been seen to be at war with progress.
The Bible has been used as justification for slavery, racism, sexism and, of course, everyone’s favorite, homophobia. Members of the LGBTQ+ community cringe as flashes of “God hates fags, and “You will burn” signs come into their minds. Now the question that has most stumped individuals that do get most of their not practice religion, and therefore get most information from the media is,
how can a religion that preaches “God’s love” also be responsible for discrimination?Logically, it wouldn’t make sense to say that one must “love everyone equally,” while making exceptions if your X,Y and worst of all Z. Well, I think, in order to break down what is seemingly a good catch phrase of a belief, we have to examine how people look at religion according to text. The overwhelming majority of people interested in holy text are interested in grasping the essence of the work and how it relates to their current 21st century lives. Clearly, it wouldn’t be extremely useful to look at old text laws for agriculture while trying to run a Fortune 500 company. Much of what is explicitly stated in the Bible simply isn’t for our modern view of religion and God. To take everything as is in the Bible would simply be chaos.The Bible is, after all, a text written during a specific time period, and while it can have great value in discovering spirituality, it's incredibly crucial that anyone observing the text, understands that any literature, no matter what it is, needs to be examined in context. For instance, many writers and contributors of the holy work simply didn’t understand how a women could bleed every month and be perfectly fine.So,