“Body and Soul” by Marvin Olasky, World, March 5, 2005.
“From Mental Disorder to Civil-Rights Cause” by Marvin Olasky, World, February 19, 2005.
Gay Religion edited by Scott Thumma and Edward R. Gray (Altamira Press, 2005) 454 pp.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
The Right’s World interview with constitutional law specialist Robert P. George critiques a body/soul dualism he says promotes a pro-gay agenda. But it’s George’s antigay agenda that’s dualistic, for he demands that homosexuals split up their “dynamic unity of body, mind and spirit.” His ignorant reductionism to gross anatomy misses the fact that same-sex couples are “sexually complementary.” It’s their fascinating otherness to which each is drawn! And he fails to see that, in a culture that values partner parity, exclusivity is just as important in same-sex unions as in heterosexual unions and that thus, there is a rational reason to restrict marriage to two people. In accusing others of “equat[ing] sodomy with marital sexual love,” he uses a KJV term for which there is no Hebrew equivalent but which has a nasty history in Western law. And is he not aware of any same-sex sexual love? Alleging a “one-flesh union” is incompatible with same-sex union, he uses a Bible term that has been so distorted in Natural Law rhetoric that it fails to represent its original meaning in Genesis: two people not previously related to each other as family are now so related in marriage.
I was in Salt Lake City in 1974, keynoting a mental health conference on homosexuality, when Mormon social workers asked me about patterns of same-sex behavior among their young male missionaries. I said that most of these would not be instances of homosexual orientation, that when these young men – hormones raging, homesick, and isolated in hostile “gentile” territory – completed their service, they’d revert to heterosexual behavior. I reminded them of Churchill’s quip that the Royal Navy was all “rum, sodomy and the lash.” When heterosexuals are segregated by sex – in boarding schools, the military, prison, etc. – situational homosexuality occurs. And when same-sex oriented people engage in heterosexual acts to deny their homosexual desires and “pass” in homophobic society, these are instances of situational heterosexuality.
All this came to mind as I read World’s interview with Jeffrey Satinover, a psychiatrist and author of both an antigay book and one that hails a discredited “Bible Code” alleging secret messages hidden in the Bible’s text.
When Olasky asks about Satinover’s notion “that the idea of ‘sexual orientation’ is a fiction” – the term is in sneer quotes – Satinover switches the subject to situational acts and identity. He cites a study he says concluded “it is patently false that homosexuality is a uniform attribute across individuals, that it is stable over time, and that it can be easily measured.” Yes – if what’s on the table is situational homosexuality. But Olasky asked about orientation.
Olasky moves on to the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. He asks: “How and why did the [APA] misrepresent the evidence concerning homosexuality?” Talk about a loaded question! Satinover obliges the bias, claiming that it was all about disruptions by gay activists, “bogus work …false cover …political pressure and the ‘civil-rights’ argument.” Not true! As I wrote at the time: The APA has “recognized that homosexuality per se does not regularly cause subjective distress nor is it regularly associated with some generalized impairment in social effectiveness.” It was through this two-fold research-grounded criterion that all the categories in the DSM were screened – not just homosexuality. If homosexuality had been retained, it would have been the only entry in the DSM that failed to meet the criterion. So it wasn’t the APA that “merely presumed the ideologically correct response,” as Satinover claims; it’s Satinover who merely presumes the ideologically correct response of his Right-wing agenda.
Satinover takes a swipe at the straw man “notion that ‘homosexuals’ are in effect a ‘different species.’” He says that notion’s “ludicrous beyond belief.” Yes. That’s why it’s not a notion of any major gay rights group or any of the “well-respected national or state mental-health professional organizations” he admits disagree with him.
Ludicrous and worse is on display in Gay Religion, written by postmodernist queer theorists in culture studies and religion – apparently for each other. According to the editors, “No longer is faith simply ‘received.’” So they promise “a variety of choices from which to construct religious and spiritual beliefs and practices.”
One author hypes “spiritual meaning through sexual rites of bondage and SM [in which] leatherman rituals [include] a master[‘s] stripping a slave, having him kneel before him with his head bowed, having him kiss his boots.” A devotee calls this “powerful food for my soul.” A sociology professor says “his sexual arousal was especially heightened by trying to find the ‘key’ to making ‘a slave totally submit to him.’” Says another: “Leather is my religion and leather masters are my gods.” These “rituals” are aimed at precluding sexual rejection – but the writers fail to understand this.
“Rite to Party: Circuit Parties and Religious Experience” is by a former Catholic priest, “writing his dissertation on the concept of erotic conversion.” Huh? He celebrates this “all night, drug-infused, multimedia experience [as a] transgressive approach to worship.” He says “a circuit party is the queer liturgical rite that tries to do what homosex does. It’s erotic power and symbols of male beauty draw men together in a ritual form the way … the multipartnered practice of gay men creates communitas” (and transmission of STDs?). “Circuit boys make up the court of priests. Shirts off, muscled bodies fill the center of the dance floor. … mov[ing] through this sea of flesh continually rubbing against one another.” He notes: “this is where many of the drugs are used … ecstasy, GHB, and coke.” He’s “troubled by the drug use and the exclusiveness related to age, race, gender, and beauty.”
Says a lecturer in religion, “a sense of worship permeates the [gay strip bar]: from the dancers seductively grinding on their pedestals, tumescent and cocky in their nakedness, grabbing and enticing supplicants in bold, controlling ways, to the clients in the back lifting their unworthy hands to touch and adore naked torsos and rounded backsides or offer total and boundless praise to the phallic deities.” Shades of Aphrodite! He concludes pathetically: “The heady mixture of sex, alcohol, music, and money as a power medium sets the stage for the emergence of a very special form of intimacy.”
Tragically, these are but some of the “spiritual” options the church-rejected are offered when they’re refused the welcome that others are ready to provide – albeit abominably.