Pride Month 2023: The Root of Anti-LGBTQ+ Bigotry is Misogyny

“Why do we no longer consider people with epilepsy to be demon possessed and treat them with exorcisms (or stoning if they cannot be cured), but we cannot adapt to better scientific knowledge of human sexuality?” ~ Me

 

This is my annual post for Pride Month. Here are my prior posts:

 

2022: Neurodiversity and Intersex as ways of understanding the LGBTQIA+ Experience

2021: Possible Christian Responses to LGBTQ+ People

2020: The Moment I Became a “Side A” [affirming] Christian

2016: (unofficial) If You Support Anti-LGBTQ+ “Religious Freedom” Laws, You Aren’t Really Different from Omar Mateen

 

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The Root of Anti-LGBTQ+ Bigotry is Misogyny

 

One of the most dangerous things a person can do is read the Bible for themselves. The whole thing. Even as a kid - and definitely as a teen, I started noticing that the Bible didn’t actually say what people (Evangelicals) said it said. And also that it contained a lot that made me ask awkward questions. 

 

For example:

 

Why are male homosexual acts mentioned in the Torah, but female homosexual acts are never mentioned once? 

 

For that matter, why is the only possible mention of female homosexual acts in the New Testament really vague and seem to be about taking a male role in sex? 

 

Why does female consent to sex seem to be irrelevant in the Torah? 

 

Why does the Bible seem to endorse keeping women as sex slaves? (Concubines) And why is this never condemned anywhere in either Testament?

 

Why does the Bible say a woman can be forced to marry her rapist?

 

Why are women listed along with slaves and donkeys in the Ten Commandments and elsewhere? 

 

Why does Ezekiel’s description of the Sin of Sodom have nothing about sex?

 

Why would an entire population of men want to rape a stranger who comes to their town?

 

Why would the response to that demand be to sacrifice a helpless woman to the mob?

 

Why is there no penalty for a man who grabs the genitals of a woman, but a woman who grabs a man’s genitals gets her hand cut off?

 

Why is “sexual immorality” never actually defined in the New Testament? 

 

What does “sexual immorality” even mean? 

 

This was just while I was young. As I got older, and learned more about the original words underlying our modern translations as well as the historical contexts that the books of the Bible were written in, I had even more questions. 

 

If the Bible were meant to be the last word on sexual practices, and literally written by God, why does the Torah so closely resemble the older Ancient Near East legal codes? 

 

Why does the Torah assume that women are chattel, to be bought and sold and taken as plunder? 

 

Why did Saint Paul just make up words that are found nowhere else in contemporary writings? 

 

And why do we translate those words to mean male homosexuality, when Paul could have used common and existing words to mean that? 

 

What did Saint Paul mean to do in addressing the Domestic Codes? 

 

Since Roman freemen could rape their male or female slaves without legal or social penalty, what does “slaves submit to your masters” mean in practice? 

 

Is it a sin for a male slave to be raped? 

 

The Romans were obsessed with the idea of penetration versus being penetrated, and the relationship of those roles to social status. Does that understanding shape how we understand a ban on male homosexuality? 

 

And, of course, the really awkward ones about modern conservative Christianity.

 

Why do we consider sexual sins to be the very worst sins?

 

Why have we changed our minds about so many other things, but this is the one we cannot change?

 

Why do we no longer consider people with epilepsy to be demon possessed and treat them with exorcisms (or stoning if they cannot be cured), but we cannot adapt to better scientific knowledge of human sexuality?

 

Why are the people who are most opposed to LGBTQ people also the ones most obsessed with male power over females?

 

And for that matter, why are they significantly likely (if white) to be strongly racist? (This is a pattern borne out both by my personal experience and survey data.) 

 

These questions demand an answer, and I have been thinking about the issue for many years. And also reading and learning, and searching through the historical context for clues about why this particular issue has become so resistant to modern knowledge and increased empathy. 

 

***

 

I remember a few major epiphanies in my journey away from the fundamentalist view of human sexuality, but one of the biggest ones has to be that passionately anti-gay sermon my former pastor gave. But also, I remember one of the Patriarchy Bros (I forget which one) stating that the only viable defense against gay marriage was “complementarianism” (Christianese for Patriarchy.) 

 

That last one really got me thinking: was he right? 

 

Was the only viable counterargument to gay marriage the idea that men should rule - exert power and control over women? 

 

From there, I started researching the history of anti-gay beliefs - particularly in the ancient world - and started to realize that anti-gay bigotry didn’t just come out of nowhere. And it certainly wasn’t some divine revelation. It came from a very specific place:

 

Misogyny.

 

Let me explain this a bit. The Bible was written in a cultural context – contexts in fact – and understanding what is being said requires understanding the culture. The water in which the human authors swam and the frames of reference from which they understood the world.

 

***

 

The Old Testament

 

In the culture of the Ancient Near East - the context in which humans wrote the Torah - women were chattel. Let’s get that straight at the outset. Women were chattel, just like donkeys and oxen and slaves. They were owned by men. And this ownership was justified by a belief that women were congenitally inferior to men, subhuman, and incapable of making their own decisions for their lives. 

 

Any understanding of the sexual rules in the Torah needs to start with that basic reality.

 

Why is polygamy just fine? Why are sex slaves permitted? If you can afford a lot of donkeys - or women - go for it. That’s the benefit of being rich. 

 

If you look at the list of awkward questions at the top of this post, every single one of those makes sense if you understand that women were chattel. And also, they do not make sense outside of that context. 

 

How does this fit with the prohibition on male homosexuality? 

 

Well, if a man allows himself to be penetrated by a p---s - as if he were a woman - he is degrading himself. He is throwing away the symbol of power and dominance - his organ of penetration - and taking on the role of the dominated. He is - in essence - becoming a woman. He is lowering himself to the status of chattel.

 

And, on the other end, a man who penetrates another man as if he were a woman is degrading that man. This is the real story of Sodom and the real story of the Levite’s concubine (sex slave) - men wanted to degrade and do violence to another male. This is also why rape has always been a part of war. To penetrate the enemy - females, males, and children - is to utterly dominate and humiliate them. 

 

Again, look at the underlying belief: women are less than men. They can be raped and humiliated, bought and sold, and penetrated at will by their owners. For a man to “lower” himself to the status of a woman is shameful. To degrade another man to the level of a woman is wrong because of what it means for that man’s status. 

 

If you think about it, this also explains why Lot offered his virgin daughters to be raped, and why the Levite let his concubine be raped and murdered - women exist to be brutalized and penetrated, so it is a lesser evil to sacrifice them than to let a male be humiliated. 

 

Going deeper than that, it becomes obvious why female homosexuality isn’t even mentioned. 

 

The issue isn’t about orgasms. It is about power and dominance. 

 

You can see this in the penalty against a woman who grabs a man’s p---s. She gets her hand cut off - without mercy. (No such penalty for a man who gropes a woman.) A woman asserts dominance over a man when she grabs his d--k, and that turns the hierarchy on its head. 

 

But women getting each other off carries no particular weight. The chattel can do what it likes with themselves, as long as they do not violate the hierarchy. 

 

By the way, this question about lesbian sex - is it even sex, without a p---s? - has persisted into the modern era - I’ll discuss that below. 

 

***

 

The New Testament

 

By the time we get to the New Testament, there have been some cultural changes. Polygamy is on its way out, for example. Multiple wives means too many legitimate heirs. In a herdsman society like the OT, property rights aren’t quite as important - just split the herd up among the sons. But when land is the source of wealth, it can be diluted by too many heirs. Thus, one wife, a handful at most of legitimate heirs, and the other women a man wants can be mistresses or sex slaves who do not produce legitimate heirs. 

 

Key to understanding everything about sex in the New Testament is a work by Aristotle, Politics. He writes about the proper organization of society, including the “natural” hierarchies that he sees as key. 

 

And by “natural hierarchies,” Aristotle means that (in his view), females were males that failed to develop properly, and were thus subhuman - like children, in fact, who needed to be controlled and guided their entire lives. But there is more to the hierarchy than just gender. 

 

Namely, there are freemen at the top of the hierarchy. Below them are women, slaves, and children. This is similar to the ownership of women as found in the OT, but not quite the same. There is less of the transactional nature of marriage, and the emphasis isn’t on ownership, but obedience and submission. 

 

When it comes to sex, the key issue here is penetration. Who penetrates whom is the issue. 

 

For the Greeks and Romans, penetration was an act of dominance. A person higher in the hierarchy could penetrate someone below, but a person below could not penetrate someone higher up. 

 

(All other things being equal - a woman or slave belonged to their freeman, so adultery or abuse of another’s slave was still considered wrong - and illegal. But the reason isn’t that the slave had rights - but that the wrongdoer was messing with another man’s chattel. It was a property crime.) 

 

This led to some realities that we find abhorrent today. A freeman could rape his slaves at will - male, female, and even children. This was not considered immoral. Homosexuality was permitted, as long as the higher status person was the penetrator. 

 

(Note here: the same basic dynamic was present in American Chattel Slavery too. A white enslaver could rape his slaves at will - particularly the female ones - but there was great fearmongering about the reverse - the black man having sex with a white woman. This later became the justification for lynching, and remains a pernicious stereotype about black people and sexuality today.) 

 

So, it is easy enough to see why male homosexuality would be a problem for early Christians. In a radically equal community, one man asserting dominance over another would be problematic. Certainly, a Christian man could not in good conscience degrade another man - that is not loving your neighbor.

 

I’ll get to female homosexuality in a bit, but I want to look at how this egalitarian instinct also affects the discussion of heterosexuality. The passages on female submission, if read in the light of Aristotle and in context with the entire passages, are actually quite radical. Spouses are to submit to each other, to care for and love each other. The sexual needs of both spouses are important. (In a culture where women were considered to be sexually insatiable, a command to not withhold sex from your spouse was a pretty feminist statement. A modern application would be that men should make sure their wives orgasm.) 

 

Thus, even within the heterosexual sex act, the NT pushes back against the culture in an egalitarian direction. That this also involved a pushback against Greco-Roman tolerance of male rape is unsurprising - and this fact should play into how we interpret passages involving homosexuality. To leave out the power and rape dynamic in the New Testament context would be as absurd as to interpret stories in the Old Testament that are clearly about gang rape as being about consensual gay sex. 

 

Now, to discuss a bit about female homosexuality. 

 

The one passage (Romans 1) that might be referencing female homosexuality has been much debated in the centuries immediately after its writing. I noted in a previous post that some early church fathers believed it referred to a specific cult wherein women penetrated men with dildos. 

 

More recently, though, I found this fascinating academic article by a local college professor. (My wife took one of his classes for her BSN, and that is how I ended up reading The Sacred and the Profane.) In it, he looks at the issue of cunni!ingus. Apparently, the Romans were smart enough to understand that the clitoris is analogous to the p---s - it is kind of a little penis. Or, alternately, a p---s is an enlarged clitoris. Take your pick. 

 

What this means is that when a woman’s clitoris penetrates another person, she is taking on the “male” role - the penetrator. Hmm, this sounds interesting, doesn’t it? So, for a woman to oral s-x another woman would be to be penetrated - and that would, essentially, be a violation of the hierarchy. A woman asserting dominance, rather than being dominated. Which is why, in Roman culture, it was actually worse (from a social perspective) for a man give oral s-x on a woman - it was being “penetrated” by a woman - than it was for a man to suck of another man. At least in the latter, the social status might be equal. 

 

This started to sound familiar, from another book I read, Geoffrey Stone’s excellent Sex and the Constitution. In an early chapter, he discusses Medieval theology regarding sexuality (which is fascinating and horrifying at the same time), including the all-important question of what “sex” even is. (Shades of Bill Clinton here.) 

 

The conclusion of Medieval theologians was - surprise! - that sex was about penetration. Hey, does this sound familiar? So, if penetration wasn’t involved, it wasn’t sex. It was merely m@sturbation, which was a pretty minor sin. 

 

Thus, women could do a lot of things that weren’t sex. Particularly since the theologians had forgotten about the clitoris altogether. So, women having oral s-x with each other? Not sex. Women tr!bbing? Not sex. 

 

Women penetrating someone with a dildo? Yeah, definitely sex. It ain’t sex without a p---s, yo. 

 

So again, we see that male homosexuality is an issue, with female homosexuality an afterthought at most. I think this is helpful in understanding what the NT might be meaning when it talks about women forsaking their proper role or function in sex - that is, being the penetrated party. 

 

***

 

Now let’s fast forward to today:

 

In my own everyday life, I have found that the moments when a person’s genitals matter are really rare. In fact, for the most part, the only moments that require knowing genitals are sexual encounters with my wife - genitals definitely matter there. 

 

I also have had a handful of cases (particularly one involving an intersex person two decades ago) where genital configuration became important - but these are really rare. 

 

My wife has more moments where genitals matter - as a nurse, care can be different when it involves the reproductive system. But even there, the issue is giving appropriate care, NOT evaluating a person’s worth based on their genitals. 

 

In contrast, for cultural conservatives, NOTHING ELSE is as important to know about another person as their genital configuration.

 

I am using “cultural conservative” here for lack of a better term (although sexist comes close, and I have used “cultural fundamentalism” in the religious context) for people who believe in gender essentialism, gender roles, and gender hierarchies. As I noted at the beginning, these are the people most likely to be anti-LGBTQ+ bigots as well - they are inseparably linked. 

 

My experience has been in American Evangelicalism, but you can fill in other conservative religious traditions, conservative cultures, and so on - any subgroup that holds these beliefs about women. 

 

So let’s look at this more closely. What do genitals determine for cultural conservatives?

 

 

Do you get to lead/preach in the church? Can you do so on a truly equal basis? 

 

I have found that even in more liberal churches, it is rare to see true equality: equal representation on the board, equal time in the pulpit, equal say in major decisions, equal pay. 

 

But in culturally conservative churches - like the Southern Baptist Convention - the single most important qualification for leadership is having a p---s. If you don’t have one, you are relegated to secondary status. 

 

This flows into other areas too - a general belief that people with p---ses are uniquely qualified to be leaders, while those with v----s are not - they must instead submit and follow. 

What is your role in a marriage and family?

 

In culturally conservative circles, it is an article of faith - non-negotiable - that the person with a p---s is in charge. He gets to have the final (and often the only) say in major decisions, and the v----a person is expected to submit and obey. 

 

But there is more too: while not universal, the more conservative subcultures believe that only the person with a p---s should do paid work, particularly outside the home. (Oh yes, this was a huge reason why we are estranged from my parents. My mom never forgave my wife for working outside the home. And made things unpleasant for my wife for a decade and a half before my wife decided to get out of the situation altogether. See below for more on that.) 

 

Along with this comes the belief that menial labor should be primarily done by the person with the v----a. Things like household drudgery - cooking, cleaning, organizing - and also the childcare and the emotional labor of the family. The way you know these are considered menial tasks isn’t just that males don’t want to do them (in conservative subcultures) but also that wealthy people farm these out to low-wage people - also usually women - as soon as they have the money to do so. 

 

There is also a LOT of stigma for being a stay-at-home dad. 

 

Oh, and one more thing: does your sexual pleasure matter? Have you noticed all the ink spilled in conservative circles on how men need sex, and wives had better put out on demand? And then contrast that with how little attention is paid to female pleasure? I cannot think of a single Evangelical sex book that insists women have the right to an orgasm every sexual encounter. Most don’t even mention the clitoris. And NONE mention that most women cannot come to orgasm by penetration alone. This could be a whole post itself. But Rebekah Mui already wrote a great one. 

 

Together, this makes clear that females are assigned a lower status in conservative subcultures. 

What is your expected role in society? 

 

I have blogged about this before, and probably will again. In the most conservative of subcultures, women are relegated completely to the home, excluded from economic and political life. But even in less conservative societies, there is still a wage gap, and the expectation that if children need care, the woman sacrifices her career rather than the man. 

 

Even for career women, there is an expectation that they take on subservient roles, or prioritize family life (in a way men are pressured not to.) Leadership at the highest levels still tend to be male, although this is shifting. 

 

One could also mention the belief that men should be ruthless competitors, while women have to provide society’s compassion. 

Do you have the right to follow your calling?

 

I blogged about this a good bit in my most recent post on the Duggars. The basic belief is that women – v----a people - are subhuman and thus do not get to determine their own lives for themselves. Certainly not in the way men are. A woman cannot simply follow her calling in life, and serve others in accordance with her gifts. She must instead resign herself to motherhood, submission to males, and domestic drudgery. 

 

This was anathema to my wife, of course. She now is a manager at a local hospital, responsible for nearly 100 employees - a true leadership role. Her refusal to accept the relegation to domesticity first got her shunned by the cultic group she spent her teens in, then eventually led to her rejection by my parents. Because vagina people don’t get the right to do as they wish with their lives and bodies. 

Do you have the right to be treated with respect?

 

The further I get from Evangelicalism, the more I see the general disrespect that women are treated with in that subculture. Particularly when they don’t “perform gender” to expectations. 

 

In my own birth family, I see this too now. Respect for a v----a person had nothing to do with common humanity, but with how well that person performed the gender expectations. Unsurprisingly, this system attracts narcissists of both genders. Attention based on performance, plus the right to look down on those who don’t perform? That is crack cocaine to narcissists. 

 

So, if you actually look at how daily life looks to an egalitarian like me, we find that very few moments have anything to do with genital configuration.

 

But to a cultural conservative, every interaction with other humans turns on what genitals they have.

 

Should they lead or be subservient? Should they be seen as a colleague, or as an inferior? Do you have to treat them with the same respect? What standard of gender performance should I demand of them? Do I have to listen to them seriously, or dismiss them as having the wrong genitals to know about theology or politics? 

 

Boiled down, the question is where do you fit in the hierarchy?

 

Without knowing a person’s genitals, you cannot determine this. 

 

***

 

So what does this idea of female inferiority have to do with LGBTQ+ people?

 

Back to the idea of misogyny. I intentionally use that word rather than “sexism,” because the element of inferiority is key here. It is disgusting and humiliating for a man to “lower” himself to the role of a woman. A woman is considered not merely “less than” a man, but a degradation of maleness. 

 

Once you realize this, it is clear that the Patriarchists are indeed correct: the prohibition on homosexuality (and being transgender) depends on and is inseparable from a belief in the inferiority of women to men. 

 

As it was in the past, the real issue with men having s-x with men is “who is the girl in the relationship.” Likewise for female homosexuality. 

 

Because, for cultural conservatives, there HAS to be a hierarchy - someone has to “wear the pants,” “make the decisions,” “lead,” and so on. Someone has to be the boss - someone has to have power over someone else, and that person has to have a p---s. 

 

So, homosexual relationships challenge the idea that a true marriage can only exist if it has a power differential. 

 

Similarly for being transgender: refusing to stay in the lane assigned to you at birth threatens the hierarchy. (This is also why, regardless of what they claim, fundamentalists cannot actually - in practice - admit that intersex people exist outside the binary.) Any person who cannot be crammed into the gender binary is a huge threat to a hierarchy of men over women. 

 

For just a recent example of this thinking, here is a (laughably bad) imitation of the Screwtape Letters, asserting that egalitarian marriages are essentially gay marriages. 

 

I mean, I guess I was in a gay marriage all this time and didn’t know it? Because my wife and I shoulder the same amount of burden (or at least try to), offer the same amount of sacrifice, both lead and follow as the circumstances dictate. (Although neither of us feels responsible to God for the other - we are freaking grownups, not children.) And yes, we very much identify our relationship as “teammates, best friends, enlightened, liberated, progressive, and egalitarian.” 

 

It is sad that there are so many people who do not experience the joys of an egalitarian marriage. I greatly prefer the freedom to function in our relationship according to our gifting, rather than be forced into a gender performance that would make both of us miserable. 

 

But notice - marriage is about power to cultural conservatives. Gender is about power. Sex is about power. 

 

And in that sense, the Fundies are right - the root of anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry is the power differential - and let’s be clear, it is p---s people having power over v-----a people. And the root of that belief is misogyny - the belief that v----a people are inferior to p---s people, and can be treated with contempt and disregard. 

 

I also need to mention my parents at this point. Regular readers know we have been estranged for a few years, but the seeds were planted many years ago. Years later, the toxic fruit has poisoned everything. 

 

Early in my relationship with my wife, we decided that, although we would be flexible based on circumstances (before you have kids, you are just guessing….), the goal for us would be to split childrearing and breadwinning duties. She would go back to work at some point after the kids were born, whether that was after they started school, or, as it turned out, 3 months after each birth. 

 

This was never accepted by my parents. The idea that my wife - a woman - a v----a person - could have the right to decide how to live her life - to the same degree that a p---s person could - was unthinkable. I was blindsided by how important it was to them that a woman “stay in her lane.” As in, it was more important to them than a relationship with me. Likewise, they were willing to lose our relationship over my wife’s decision to wear normal clothing, which they viewed as an impermissible assertion of her own sexuality. (That they sexualized her body is still something I find incredibly offensive and gross.) It was seeing that my parents did not feel obligated to respect my wife the same way they would respect a man that helped me understand the misogyny underlying conservative religion. 

 

This really helped to clarify some things. The reason that Fundies cannot accept our modern understanding of human sexuality is that to do so would destroy their preferred hierarchy. 

 

For Fundies - and unfortunately a lot of people in our broader culture - the most important thing you can know about someone is their gender. And this isn’t because we expect to f--k them. It is because knowing gender tells us how we are allowed to treat them. 

 

If they are male, best not disrespect or condescend to them. And certainly, you can’t tell them how to live their lives to a significant extent. But if they are female, you don’t have to respect them. Hell, grab ‘em by the p----y - if you are a star, you can get away with anything. 

 

So, if someone tries to tell you that their choice to consider LGBTQ people sinners is about “biblical authority” or some other bullshit, remember that the REAL root of it is what it has always been: misogyny. 

 

***

 

It is beyond the scope of this post, but I have come to realize that literally everything about the sexual rules of religious conservatives of all sorts (not limited to Christianity) is based on misogyny. Rebuilding a truly Christian sexual ethic, one not based on the inferiority of women and the right of men to control them, would result in a very different (and far better) set of rules. Here is one of the best discussions of that I have read:

 

The Bible and Non-Marital Sex

 

Anti-LGBTQ hate is costing organized religion a lot of people. The polling backs this up. For younger people, this is pretty much a deal breaker (for my own kids, for sure.) As Beau of the Fifth Column put it, the reason the pews are empty and churches are losing money is simply that it is cheaper to be a good person. For me, letting go of the “Christian duty” to withhold affirmation to LGBTQ+ people was one of the most freeing experiences of my life. I will never put those chains back on again. 

 ***

 

What's up with the bleeping? Originally, Blogger's algorithms flagged this as "adult: sensitive content" - probably because I used anatomical descriptions of genitals. I knew the correct names at age 3, so I guess I was an "adult"? Whatever.