A christianpost.com opinion piece by Chuck Colson (linked on realclearreligion.org on Tuesday) was titled "God's Plan for Sex--Judaism's Sexual Revolution." In it, Colson, referring to a Dennis Prager article, asserts that the ancient pagan world was a "sexual free-for-all that debased women, boys, and religion itself in the service of male lust." Colson via Prager quotes the Brown University philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who explained that the central distinction in ancient times was between active and passive sexual roles, and that boys and women were treated interchangeably as objects as male desire. Colson claims that "we already know what happens when a society promotes sexual license and devalues marriage, [we] just have to look at history." This leads to the central claim of the article, that by restricting sex between only men and women in marriage, Judaism (and Christianity) ensured that sex no longer dominated society, created the possibility of love within marriage, and began the elevation of the status of women.
Colson is of course disastrously wrong, factually and morally, about the meaning and nature of same-sex relationships. It is apparent that he believes, as do many conservatives, that same-sex sexuality is about lust, about physical gratification and predation, with boys (underaged males) as a particular target. Colson appears to be completely unaware that same-sex relationships are very often founded on love, love that is as strong and durable as that within opposite-sex relationships---as anyone with gay friends, relatives or coworkers will know. By repeating the falsehood that gay men are only interested in sexual gratification, by implying that gay men are a threat to children, and by saying that homosexuality is a threat to Western civilization, Colson is guilty of hate speech. I suspect that in a generation, this column and ones like it will read exactly as do the writings of 1960s-era segregationists read to us now. The truth of course is that gay people are now celebrating all the recent progress on marriage---just this week, the appellate court ruled against the anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 in California, and the state of Washington moved towards legalization of same-sex marriage. Many gay people are now getting married, including a variety of friends of mine. Colson believes that Christianity is not compatible with gay love, but I am grateful to belong to a church, the Episcopal Church, that accepts monogamous same-sex relationships in its clergy as well as its laity.
By the way, I ran across an interesting number this morning: the fraction of the adult male population that self-identifies as gay or bisexual: 8%. This is based on the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, a recently completed survey of 5,800 adolescents and adults conducted by researchers at Indiana University. This is not far from the old (and widely-regarded as discredited) number of 10% of the population being gay. Conservatives often claim that the number is much lower; less than 2% of the male population. Such claims appear to be intended to make homosexuality appear to be an uncommon aberration---to deny gay people the legitimacy the higher number would confer---but they are based on a narrow definition of 'gay': a person with no history of sexual activity with the opposite sex; a person with no desire for such sexual activity. The dishonesty of this definition is drawn out by what would happen if we adopted a similar definition of 'heterosexual,' a person with no history or desire for same-gender sexual behavior---this would exclude 8% or more of the population.