In honor of Pride month, actress Gwyneth Paltrow took to her GOOP (I’m sorry, but that will never be a nice word to say … goop. Gooooooop.) to discuss what exactly it is in the Bible that says God hates gays.
In the post Paltrow says, “A few months ago, in the heat of the tragic teen suicides that came about from intolerance of homosexuality, I saw a man on television who was apologizing for wishing death on gays from his facebook page. This member of an Arkansas school board was contrite for the violence in his words, but maintained that his values pertaining to homosexuality would remain, as he felt homosexuality was condemned in the bible.” She continues, “This concept, while foreign to me, is interesting, as it used to justify so much judgement and separation in our society. When my daughter came home from school one day saying that a classmate had two mommies, my response was, “Two mommies? How lucky is she?!” The 38-year-old actress and singer then asks, “What does it actually say in the bible that will cause some people to be upset by my line of thinking?” SOURCE
All right, here’s where five years of Bible study comes into play. The actual quote that people often turn to regarding gays is in Leviticus, a particularly ornery part of the Bible. Unfortunately, Leviticus also bans things like eating shellfish, wearing polyblend and rotating crops (rotating crops being a pretty major part of modern agriculture that would cause a major food shortage if we went without it). So clearly, people pick and choose what parts of the Bible to follow based on whether or not it holds up today, and based on scientific evidence and basic moral principles, homophobia doesn’t hold up today. But people still hate gays, and so far all arguments about it basically boil down to “Gay sex is icky”, despite the fact that anything two men can do in bed can be done by a man and a woman with some slight variations. If the best you can do is “Well, what they do in the privacy of their own homes, completely out of the sight of others, is gross to me, so they can’t have the same rights as me”, you’re standing on shakey ground.
