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A selection of excerpts from John Lauritsen's Religious Roots of the Taboo on Homosexuality.
2003-07-11
John Lauritsen may be contacted by e-mail at john_lauritsen@post.harvard.edu.
He is also author of:
For analytical purposes, the taboo is easier to see in historical perspective than is homosexuality itself. Whereas homosexual love has been practised in all societies of which we have record, and among all classes and types of people, the taboo on homosexuality is an historical variable. ...antihomosexual attitudes and practices are limited in space and time, and derive from particular moral traditions. These moral traditions are in accord with specific forms of social and economic organization. The taboo on homosexuality is therefore not an eternal feature of human society, but a transitory historical phenomenon.
The history of the taboo is essentially a history of religion. The taboo, as we shall see, is a theological conception of Judeo-Christianity.
Homosexuality flourished throughout the ancient world: among the Scandinavians, Greeks, Celts, Sumerians, and throughout the "Cradle of Civilization", the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, the Nile Valley, and the Mediterranean Basin. The art and literature of these peoples offer testimony to an unhindered acceptance and often exhaltation of same-sex love. At this time, there were not "homosexuals" (as a noun), only homosexual acts. Nowhere is there evidence that anyone was set apart as different from his fellow men, even semantically, because of engaging in homosexual acts.
The antihomosexuality taboo was born among the ancient Hebrews. It first appears in the sayings of reformers in Hellenistic Judaism as they attacked the sexual practices of neighboring fertility Cults.
The ancient Hebrews developed sexual attitudes drastically different from the rest of the world. According to some authorities, the sex-negative orientation developed about 700 BC, following the Babylonian Exile; before this, the Hebrews, like other asiatic peoples, had also allowed homosexuality, including male prostitution as a part of temple worship.
The keynote of Hebrew sexual morality was PRUDISHNESS. The beautiful sculpture of the Greeks and other "heathen" peoples was anathematised as "uncovering of nakedness". Indeed, dozens of Old Testament passages apply exclusively to prohibitions against viewing the unclothed body (e.g. Leviticus 18:6-9). Anxiety on this score became an obsession of pathological degree.
The Hebrews considered themselves the "chosen people" of a jealous and vindictive god, morally superior to their neighbors. They developed a sexual code unlike anything in the ancient world. Mosaic law made thirty-six crimes punishable by death; one-half (18) involved sexual relationships of one kind or another.
For two men who made love to each other, the law stated: "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." (Leviticus 20:13)
The penalty for males guilty of homosexual acts was death by stoning, the most severe penalty. Adulterers, in contrast, were put to death by the more humane method of strangulation.
There was no prohibition against female homosexuality per se. In consequence, for the nearly three millenia following, it was almost always male homosexuality but not female homosexuality that was outlawed. The taboo on homosexuality is a taboo on male homosexuality.
Rigid sex-roles were imposed for both men and women, including a ban on transvestitism; "The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abominations unto the Lord thy God." (Deuteronomy 22:5)
The Hebrews came to associate homosexual practices entirely with foreign customs. They referred to the "way of the Canaanite" or the "way of the heathen" rather than name practices which in time became unnameable. To them, the Sodom and Gomorrah story vividly illustrated the wrath of Yahweh against an alien people for their alien practices.
Let theologians quibble over exactly what elements went into the melange that became Christianity. For our purpose, we can say that the Christians carried forward the Jewish code. To this were added elements of ascetic neo-Platonic philosophy and bits and pieces of the mystery cults that were flourishing in the decay of the Roman Empire.
A strident note of erotophobia was added by Saul of Tarsus, sometimes known as "St. Paul". His neurotic formulations left a great impress, and did much to influence Christian practices towards homosexuals. Paul's hysterical railings against sensual pleasure account for dozens of New Testament passages. He writes:
"God gave them up unto vile affections; for which their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature. And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of the error which was meet". (Romans 1:26,27).
We note the phrase "that which is against nature", a formulation to enter the criminal code of Christendom. ...Paul associated male homosexuals with effeminate males, and he excluded both from the "kingdom of God". ...And for sheer arbitrary silliness, Paul condemned long hair for men as being unnatural!
The Council of Elvira in 300 AD denied last rites to pederasts.
Early in the 4th century AD, Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. From this point begin the sufferings of homosexuals on a world scale.
324 AD. A decree of the Emperor Constantius imposed the death penalty for sodomy.
390 AD. Valentian instituted death by burning, a mode of execution which recalled the punishment meted out by Yaweh to Sodom and Gomorrah.
395 AD. An edict of Theodosius banned all religions other than Christianity. Loyalty to the State demanded loyalty to the tenets of the Christian religion, including its code of morality. Here begins the equation: heresy = treason, an equation which in time will become three-way: homosexuality = heresy = treason.
529 AD. Justinian the Great closed the Platonic Academy in Athens, thus putting an end to classical learning. The Academy had flourished for nearly a thousand years.
538 AD. Justinian codified Roman law. He prescribed torture, mutilation, and castration for homosexuals. His edict, Novella 77, condemned sodomites to death "lest, as a result of these impious acts, whole cities should perish together with their inhabitants", a reference to the Sodom and Gomorrah myth. The edict spoke of "diabolical and unlawful lusts" and reasoned that because of such crimes there are famines, earthquakes and pestilences.
Justinian's edict portrays homosexual acts as a clear and present danger to the State, thus articulating the equation of homosexuality with treason.
Justinian issued a second edict, Novella 141, against homosexuality in 544.
...the edict refers to homosexuality as "very madness of intercourse", "plague", "disease", and "conduct so base and criminal that we do not find it committed even by brute beasts". Those who committed such acts "have been contaminated by the filth of this impious conduct". (translations of the Novellae from Homosexualiy and the Western Christian Tradition by Canon Bailey).
This language is most interesting in that it not only contains phrases virtually identical to those in Anglo-American sodomy statutes, but it also anticipates the decadence theories...and the disease notions...
From this time onwards, laws in all Judeo-Christian states were stamped in the mold set by Justinian. Sodomy was not treated rationally in Christendom until some thirteen centuries later, when penal reforms in France followed the Great Revolution.
During the dark ages, homosexual offenders were punished by excommunication, denial of last rites, castration, torture, mutilation: death by burning, and burial in unsanctified ground. Some Christian fathers even felt it necessary to perform mutilation upon the corpses of the offenders. Sodomy, heresy, and treason became equated (foreshadowing the McCarthy period in America, when again homosexuality and treason were linked.)
Christianity did not come to power in Europe because the pagans rushed ecstatically into the arms of the Church. In fact, worshippers of the pre-Christian religions indigenous to Europe generally preferred the old faiths, and indeed, those whose rites included fresh air, music, dancing, food and drink, and sexual orgies, must have found Christianity morbid. It was through force of arms, over the broken bodies of pagans, that Christianity held sway over Europe.
Heretical cults were repressed ruthlessly...
From the repression of a related heretical cult originating in Bulgaria comes the English word, "bugger". [...and the French "bougre"...]
...yes, Christianity has had its good features -- Christianity, like everything else, contains contradictions. But we must make the appropriate generalisations. No matter how much the gentlemen of the cloth may blather about "charity", etc., the fact is that historically the Christian Church has been an egregious practitioner of hatred, intolerance, and violence.
No doubt there have been persons sincerely inspired to kindness or noble action by the stated "Christian principles" of love, peace, and brotherhood. But a correct evaluation says that Christianity represents not the realisation, but rather the alienation of these principles.
Before the possibility that human beings might behave in a civilised and rational manner towards each other, Christianity has imposed, like a prophylactic, the demand for physical and intellectual mortification.
...the taboo against homosexuality is a transitory historical phenomenon, rooted in superstition from the past... Homosexuals were not persecuted over the centuries because of the revulsion good, decent, healthy people felt at loathsome and unnatural deeds. Far from it. We were persecuted because of arbitrary theological conceptions of morality peculiar to Judeo-Christianity.
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