Religious and Historical Developments in Sexual Morality and Gender Roles

*NOTE* I updated last week's post because I found my notes about "what I learned at straight camp" if anyone is interested.

Rev. Dr. Richard McCarty came to our campus this past Thursday and discussed how sexual morality and gender roles have constantly be evolving and developing throughout religious history and how traditionalists wanting to promote the "traditional" ways is not really the tradition.

The Traditionalists' View: hetero is the only moral norms for sexual morality and social order:
            - nature reveals this to be true (parts fit... but, a lot of parts fit)
            - this is the way it has always been (but has it really always been that way?)
     - Traditionalists believe that the single most effective statement to say is "Gays and lesbians have a right to live as they choose, they don't have the right to redefine marriage for all of us." But they never want to say "BAN same-sex marriage" because that turns people away.
     - They also want men to be in the "hard" public world and women in the "soft" private world of homecare, morality, and religion.

Focus on the Family believes that God created sex to help people seek God and what he made us for, not just to make us follow rules. But Gregory of Nyssa (335-395 CE) made everyone believe that sex is the ultimate sin and an absence of sexuality allows for "immortality and incorruptibility."

In the biblical days, women were seen as property to be owned by husbands and sold by fathers. Rape was punished in three ways in the ancient days:

1. If a betrothed woman is raped in town and doesn't scream out, she is killed (because she could've blown her whistle).
2. If she is raped in a field the rapist is killed (because there was no one there to save her).
3. If an un-betrothed virgin is raped the rapist has to pay her father 50 shekels of silver and marry her... because she is damaged goods.

- Deuteronomy 22:25-29

Remember, traditionalists would like to preserve traditions... but is this one they would include? If not, why do we get to pick and choose?

In Judaism, there were a lot of rules that viewed marriage as a religious duty for men. Men also had to please a woman as many times as they could depending on their job (men who worked a lot had to maybe once-twice a month), men who didn't have to work at all needed to please their wives every day. Every wife. So basically they were having sex all the time. That's fun.

In Plato's Symposium there is the "Speech of Aristophanes" which states that there were three beings in the beginning a male/male, female/female, and male/female. The gods were jealous of how happy these beings were so they severed them. Thus, some people are naturally more attracted to the same sex and some to the opposite because they are trying to connect with their original being. This wound is called "love." This was included in the film Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Worth a look. Also, I believe you can read Plato's Symposium online. It isn't very long.

Looking to Rome: they believed in marital monogamy (at least they could only father children with their legitimate wife). Same-sex activity was seen as dominance. Thus, free men penetrated slaves as a sign of aggression and hierarchy.

One of the "original beings" animated for the film
Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

Jesus on the other hand spoke often against marriage. In Luke 20 he says that marriage is dislocated as duty. Some take this as him meaning that sex is bad, some take it as him saying we should be
promiscuis. Jesus also critiqued divorce because he said women owned men just as equally as how men owned women. He was a feminist. Jesus was also silent on same-sex relationships but healed a Roman soldiers male sex-slave and didn't say anything about it. So maybe he didn't really care about it?

Another cute thing, men have physical perfection and women have "necessary deformities" according to many ancients and Christian leaders such as Thomas Aquinas. Women were once men and then a southern wind blew and inverted their penis, duh. Due to this, having sex with a woman is settling with 'less than perfection' but everything that is non-procreative is a sexual vice against nature: contraception, masturbation, same-sex, bestiality, casual sex. Thomas Aquinas helped make everyone freak out about sex, good job T.A.

One of the best parts of his presentation was his relating relationships to the fruits of the spirit. The fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against these there are no laws. So if a relationship is full of these traits then it is a good relationship. It makes sense, if there is abuse it is lacking goodness and kindness.

So in the end, what traditions do the traditionalists want? Rape? Celibacy? Female dominance? Traditions should change over time.

Alejandra took this picture. Look at our cute little rainbow.