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God, gays and double standards

By HAROLD MEYERSON Special to the Washington Post
Published March 24, 2007

WASHINGTON - Science is stealing up on America's religious fundamentalists, causing much alarm. Consider the dilemma of the Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and a leading figure in the Southern Baptist firmament.

Writing in his blog this month, Mohler acknowledged that "the direction of the research" increasingly points to the possibility that a "biological basis for sexual orientation exists." Should sexuality be determined in utero, Mohler continued, that still wouldn't justify abortion or genetic engineering.

Nonetheless, as Mohler noted, his admission that the data suggest that homosexuality may be as genetically determined as hair color produced a torrent of irate e-mail from fellow evangelicals. Up to now, the preferred theory among Christian conservatives has been that homosexuality is behaviorally induced and thus can be unlearned.

Once you recognize homosexuality as a genetic reality, it creates a theological dilemma for the Mohlers among us, for it means that God is making people who have a special and inherent predisposition to sin. Mohler's response is that since Adam's fall, sin is the condition of all humankind. That sidesteps, however, the conundrum that a gay person may follow the same God-given instincts as a straight person - let's assume fidelity and the desire for church sanctification in both cases - and end up damned while the straight person ends up saved.

Mohler's deity, in short, is the God of Double Standards: a God who enforces the norms and fears of a world before science, a God profoundly ignorant of or resistant to the arc of American history, which is the struggle to expand the scope of the word "men" in our founding declaration that "all men are created equal." This is a God who in earlier times was invoked to defend segregation and slavery.

That said, this God still commands so many followers that the initial tendency of presidential candidates who know better was to duck when they themselves were asked last week about the morality of gay sex.

Mohler's conundrum: how to reconcile a God who creates homosexuals with a God who condemns practicing homosexuals to hell? A mysterious God may be well and good, but a capricious or contradictory God can inspire so much doubt that he threatens the credibility of the entire religious enterprise.

After all, there are few American believers who don't profess at least some faith as well in the verities of proven science and the rightness of our national credo's commitment to human equality. By effectively insisting that God is a spiteful homo-hater, his followers saddle him with ancient phobias and condemn him to the backwaters of American moral life.

Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of American Prospect and the L.A. Weekly.

[Last modified March 24, 2007, 01:40:28]