Burning Like A Thousand Rainbow Suns, Part One

I’m a vehemently Side A queer individual (Side A = I think God permits same-sex marriage), but I follow a number of queer people who are Side B (those don’t think God permits same-sex marriage) on Twitter.  I should state at the outset that while I will not spare traditionalist Heterosexual People With Opinions, I’m not out to bash LGBT+ folks who choose to be celibate for religious reasons. If I thought they were right about Scripture, I’d put my nose to the grindstone and try to survive as a perpetually single and abstinent Monastery of One, so on some level, I get it. There are also Side B queer folk I’ve learned things from.

“Learning from” though, doesn’t equate to “shouldn’t criticize” and it’s criticism time. So, over the space of a couple of posts I’ll be critiquing Gabriel Blanchard’s response to a specific argument for Side A convictions.

In Gabriel’s summary of the affirming argument, it is “based in the text It is better to marry than to burn, which in the Greek means being inflamed with desire. Especially taken along with Christ’s statement that All men cannot receive this saying [that it is better not to marry], save they to whom it is given, this is taken as showing that celibacy is a calling and gift not everyone receives, and that the Scriptural remedy for those who do not enjoy this gift is to marry. And, well, it’s a fact of experience that not every gay person appears to be capable of celibacy, and heterosexual marriages don’t make us cease to be flamers. So how can we refuse the obvious solution of permitting gay marriage?”

The issue I take with this is that I don’t think it’s an accurate statement of what the argument says, at least in the version of it that I’m most familiar with (cf. chapter 6 of Karen R. Keen’s “Scripture, Ethics & the Possibility of Same-Sex Relationships”). Every Side A Christian I know would agree that (1) the mere fact of having a desire doesn’t make fulfilling that desire morally legitimate and (2) cruciform suffering exists, but the question is: at what point does cruciform suffering (which Christian are called to) become reckless self-immolation (which Christians are not called to)? Celibacy mandates seem to me very much like the latter.

Also to be brutally honest, I halfway think that traditionalist Heterosexual People With Opinions would like it if LGBT Christians (whether Side A or Side B) self-immolated. They won’t straight-up say that they’d prefer that The Gays™ were baptized in palm oil and then had a distinctly Pentecostal experience with a match, but that’s what it seems to come down to. When for example, I venture into straight conservative Christian spaces on the web, and see people squawking that a *nonbinding* resolution in California which says in essence “Conversion therapy is bad, m’kay? Y’all should stop promoting it” is ANATTACKONRELIGIOUSFREEDOMOMG! is there another conclusion I should reach? I’ve had my faith questioned, been told I was going to Hell, heard “Have you tried reading the Bible, Daniel? If not, I recommend it! Great read!”, seen memes portraying LGBT people as Goliath, and…yeah. All sorts of fun. I don’t think people who say this sort of thing understand that I live and breathe Scripture or that I spent hours in my adolescence literally sobbing with an open Bible, wondering if same-sex desires meant God hated me, nor do I think they’d care to understand.

Job’s friends could at least speak in poetry when they were being awful, but the Straight Morals Police, what do they have? Divine Grace: The Horatio Alger Version, where God loves you, but only if you can haul yourself up by your bootstraps to His throne?

I’ll get to the critique of Gabriel’s points in my next post.