When the Bible Enters the Fray

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At 12:01 a.m. on July 1st, gay and lesbian couples in Vermont became eligible to receive the same state law protections and responsibilities that are available to spouses in a marriage, thanks to the state’s recently passed Civil Unions bill. The first civil unions were performed that day.

For gay and lesbian couples, the fight for this legislation has been long, involving an initial suit heard in 1997 in Vermont’s Chittenden County Superior Court; a subsequent appeal of the Superior Court’s negative decision to the state’s Supreme Court; the decision by the Supreme Court in December 1999 requiring that the legislature create a system providing the benefits and protections of marriage to same-sex couples; and several months of legislative hearings in early 2000 before Vermont’s governor, Howard Dean, signed the Civil Unions bill on April 26, 2000.

Like many people across the country who care about gay and lesbian issues, I closely followed these events, which transpired just across the Connecticut River from the small New Hampshire town where I live. As a biblical scholar, I paid special attention to the way the Bible was used. To be sure, state officials repeatedly reminded Vermonters that the Bible really had no place at all in the civil unions debate; the issue, the Vermont Supreme Court decision had made clear, was constitutional, not religious. Nevertheless, the Bible was on call quite a bit, especially in the Letters to the Editor section of our local paper.

The citations were generally of two types. Those letter writers who opposed civil unions tended to cite Genesis 19, which describes how God destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah after the Sodomites demanded that Lot, who was sojourning in their midst, give them access to his two male visitors (really angels) so that “[they] may be intimate with them” (19:5), as the New Jewish Publication Society translation delicately puts it. Opponents of the legislation also cited Leviticus 18:22 (“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman”) and its parallel in Leviticus 20:13 to label homosexuality an “abomination.” To describe homosexuality as “unnatural,” they cited Romans 1:26–27 (“God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another”). First Corinthians 6:9–10 (“Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers—none of these will inherit the kingdom of God”) was used to argue that gay men and lesbians were to be counted among those who could not enter the “kingdom of God.”

Conversely, those who wrote in support of civil unions cited passages that call for acting justly and with kindness, for example, Micah 6:8 (“What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”), and passages that reach out to the marginalized and alien, for example, Matthew 25:31–46 (“…I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me”). Supporters of the legislation also pointed out that Jesus never once spoke out against homosexuality, and that the Bible celebrates a homosexual relationship in 1 Samuel’s stories of David and Jonathan.

Two things struck me about the contentions in these letters. First: The two groups of letter writers were talking past each other, each group quoting its chosen prooftexts over and over, while never offering any comment about the other group’s citations. Second: No one asked me what I thought.

Now, I know that sounds arrogant, as if I’m claiming that I know better than anyone else and if I had just been asked my opinion, I could have straightened everyone out. But, in fact, as a biblical scholar I do in some sense know better than many other people what the text is saying. To put the matter more diplomatically: We biblical scholars have an expertise in the Bible by virtue of our years of study and of specialized training, and it would have made sense to ask us experts what we thought the Bible’s teachings on homosexuality were. This is especially true given the first point I noted about the Bible-citation debate, that neither side was discussing the texts quoted by the other. In my opinion, that’s because each side just assumed that its opponents were right in their interpretation of their chosen texts, but nevertheless believed that the importance of the opponents’ texts was “trumped” by that side’s chosen passages. Thus the pro-civil union people seemed to agree with the “cons” that Leviticus labeled homosexuality as an abomination, but the “pros” understood Leviticus’s teachings to be outweighed by the teachings of Jesus. Or, from the cons’ viewpoint, Jesus’ lack of a stance regarding homosexuality was trumped by the definitive statements found in Paul’s letters to the Romans and Corinthians.

Here, though, is where we biblical scholars have a role to play. We could have told the pros, for example, that the cons’ prooftexts may not have been as absolute as they assumed. For example, we could have advised that the sin condemned in the Sodom story is not homosexuality but a failure of hospitality, as Ezekiel suggests in Ezekiel 16:49050 when he writes, “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” We could have pointed out, as Jacob Milgrom did in BR many years ago, that Leviticus 18:22 (and the parallel 20:13) applies only to male-male homosexual acts and says nothing in prohibition of lesbianism.^a We could have also noted Saul Olyan’s thesis that only certain male-male homosexual acts are condemned. We could have directed them to the recent work of Bernadette Brooten and others on the meanings of “natural” and “unnatural” in Romans 1:26–27 and suggested that what Paul means by these terms is very different from what we mean today (for Paul, “natural,” when used in a sexual context, refers to the penetration of a subordinate person by a dominant one). Finally, we could have suggested that, rather than condemning homosexuality entirely, 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 (and a related passage in 1 Timothy 1:9–10) seems only to condemn homosexual behavior that God is said to find abusive or degrading to human dignity, especially homosexual prostitution and male-male pedophilia.

And we would have had some things to say about the prooftexts used by the pros as well, especially their use of the David-Jonathan story. There, the word “love,” which is used four times to describe the relationship between the two characters (1 Samuel 18:1, 3, 20:1, 7; 2 Samuel 1:26), should not be understood in terms of a tender psychological feeling of personal attachment and genuine affection, which is how the pros would have it. Rather, David and Jonathan’s love is politically grounded, rooted in the notion of covenant; it refers to the loyalty and fealty covenant partners owe to one another, regardless of what their personal feelings towards each other might be.

In Vermont, of course, the pros won in the end: Civil unions are now law. And my personal opinion is that the pros win the Bible debate as well, especially regarding the sorts of long-term, committed gay and lesbian relationships we often find in our society: These are not condemned by the Bible. Still, it’s not the pros’ own arguments that have convinced me of this position; it’s the work of my fellow biblicists. Experts really can help, and my neighbors in Vermont might have served themselves well by turning to some local Bible scholars to ask us what we think.

At 2:01 a.m. on July 1st, gay and lesbian couples in Vermont became eligible to receive the same state law protections and responsibilities that are available to spouses in a marriage, thanks to the state’s recently passed Civil Unions bill. The first civil unions were performed that day. For gay and lesbian couples, the fight for this legislation has been long, involving an initial suit heard in 1997 in Vermont’s Chittenden County Superior Court; a subsequent appeal of the Superior Court’s negative decision to the state’s Supreme Court; the decision by the Supreme Court in December 1999 requiring that […]