“I am tired,” he went on, “of seeing ministers who will preach homophobia by day, and then after they’re preaching, when the lights are off they go cruising for trade…” Al Sharpton
Rodonline highlights an important contradiction in the stance of pastors, churches and religious groups obssessed with homosexuals. Desmond Tutu visited this particular subject in
2007 to defeaning silence from the anti-gay crusaders in Africa and America. But the Pope recently said something about this subject, urging human beings to
condemn gay behavior. Obviously, Pope Benedict can say whatever he wants from the splendor of his gilded existence but it would be interesting to ask him directly what he means by homosexual behavior.
If he is talking about homosexual love, the Pope has been curiously silent on the matter of why consensual love between adults is wrong. And please don’t go down the “because the Bible says it is” refrain because the Bible expressly condones slavery as well as demands that women obey their husbands but asks no such thing of husbands. Yet slavery is now universally condemned, and all sorts of accommodations are being made daily in Biblical teaching and marriage vows to have the husbands “obey” their wives. In addition, the Catholic Church has deigned to extend its interpretation of Biblical teaching, demanding that its priests take oaths of celibacy, even though the Bible demands no such thing from anyone. The Bible is, thus, subject to interpretation as the Vatican itself has allowed itself to do on a number of occasions.
If the Pope is talking about anal sex, then one has to assume that the condemnation doesn’t extend to homosexuals who don’t engage in anal sex. Which homosexual activity would the Pontiff be asking his masses to condemn then; holding hands, cuddling on a sofa inside their home, writing each other love letters perhaps?
But even if the condemnation is aimed at gays who engage in anal sex, the Pope surely never knows about it, just as the rest of the public doesn’t. Why is consensual sex conducted in private such an issue for the Pope? And what will the Pope say to straight couples married in Church who engage in anal sexual activity with their spouses? Ask them to go to confession before taking communion?
In any case, how does consensual anal sex affect the global recession, the wars in the Sudan, the Middle East and Afghanistan, corruption, neglect for health and education in Africa, the crisis in Zimbabwe for instance? Yet try accessing anything Archbishop Orombi, Pastor Martin Sempa and Archbiship Akinola have said on these problems in the last five years, compared to the acres they have devoted to homosexuals. Those are the issues the Rev. Al Sharpton and Archbishop Desmond Tutu keep trying to guide the global clergy to focus on, so far in vain.
Can Orombi, Sempa, Akinola, Pope Benedict be so parochial as to miss the contradictions and unfairness behind their homosexual fulminations?
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