“Oscar & Ellen” by Calvin Miller; “The DeGeneres Degeneration” by R. Albert Mohler, Jr.; “Freedom from Homosexuality” by Linda Joyce Zygiel, SBC LIFE, August 1997.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
How is it that so many heterosexuals who claim to be “saved by grace” (rather than by heterosexuality) and who know that they are to “do unto others” as they themselves wish to be treated, find it so easy to oppose homosexuals’ meeting needs for sexual love that heterosexuals reserve only for themselves? This Southern Baptist paper continues the assault.
Contrasting his revisionist accounts of Oscar Wilde and Ellen DeGeneres, Miller states: “Homosexual or not, [Wilde’s] literature was gloriously heterosexual.” He attacks DeGeneres and all other lesbians and gay men, insisting that “Whatever the natural state of their sexuality, homosexuality seems based on a kind of hedonism that never speaks of self-denial.” But what does he think came before their “coming out?” What does he think “the closet” is, if not denial of the sexual self? He flatly refuses to admit that desire for sexual intimacy among homosexuals is the same sort of desire that heterosexuals feel. Miller faults homosexuals for not giving up their deep-seated sexual selves while he himself won’t give up even his prejudices. For all his celebrating of what he pretends was Wilde’s shame and lauds as “the sting of British propriety,” he is oblivious to Wilde’s observing that “selfishness is not living as one wishes to live; it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”
Insolent as it is for a teacher at a Southern Baptist seminary to mock the gay civil rights movement as “sin” as over against the black civil rights movement of the 1960s, that’s what Miller does. Objecting to the idea that “Ellen is liberating her corner of her oppressed world as Martin Luther King once liberated his,” Miller boasts: “I am a Martin Luther King fan and I hate to cheapen his incredible role in world history.” That was not the view on King in the Southern Baptist schools, churches and press when King was alive! He complains that “What’s sin in one generation is civil rights in the next.” Well to make that move, it took more than a mere generation for Southern Baptists — founded to preserve slavery and fighting the “sin” of racial integration in King’s day. Miller claims his antigay “world view [is] based upon the Bible.” What Bible? Over a century ago Frances E. Willard said: “The old texts stand there, just as before, but we interpret them less narrowly. Universal liberty of person and of opinion are now conceded to be-Bible-precept principles; Onesimus and Canaan are no longer quoted as the slave-holder’s mainstay.” She spoke too soon.
Malicious meddlers are still making much of their take on what Southern Baptist Seminary president Mohler proudly calls the “withering legacy of biblical ethics based on ‘Thus saith the Lord.”‘ Here we need to turn, in this, his centenary year, to C. S. Lewis, warning of those who “use the Bible … as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and not read with attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons.” Besides, as Lewis points out, there are many other than Bible-thumpers who fulminate against homosexuals. Mohler himself tries to enlist such non-Christians to his cause.
Calling the Ellen phenomenon a “sympathy cry designed to manipulate America’s sentimentalism and emotion,” Mohler stirs up his own readers with references to “a striptease of publicity” and the supposed links of homosexuality to pederasty and sadomasochism. And in spite of all the Southern Baptist antihomosexuality, Mohler says “It doesn’t take courage to come ‘out of the closet’ in 1990s America.” Courage is exactly what it does take, wherever Mohler and his cohorts reign through America’s largest Protestant denomination.
This SBC monthly contains a report of an “ex-gay” TV ad run during the Ellen show in Beaumont, Texas and Zygiel’s article pushes this same claim to “freedom from homosexuality.” She tells of an Oklahoma Baptist official’s son who, she says, found such “freedom” before he died of AIDS. She proof-texts I Corinthians 6:11 (“and that is what some of you were”) without acknowledging that Bible scholars don’t agree on what “they” were! She quotes an SBC missionary’s saying that such work with homosexuals “is a long-term commitment. It takes a long time to change behaviors.” (How long did that dying young man have?) Besides of course, stopping behaviors doesn’t even begin to address the involuntary desires that prompt one’s behaviors and efforts at intimate connection of which the SBC do-gooders would rob them. But hear again the wisdom of C. S. Lewis: “Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience …. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason … You start being ‘kind’ to people before you have considered their rights, and then force upon them supposed kindnesses which they in fact had a right to refuse, and finally kindnesses which no one but you will recognize as kindnesses and which the recipient will feel as abominable cruelties.”