SRF Heavy Industries

Don’t think I don’t know chapter and verse on this.

Here. Here is the Biblical source all the gay-hatin’ folks are quoting:

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, King James Bible, Cambridge edition

And here are about a zillion other translations and paraphrases, with some commentary and cross references as well.

I know the Bible. Additionally, I know history and context as well.

The first five books of the Christian old testament is a fourth- or fifth-generation translation of the old Hebrew Torah, which contains — and some famous and learned rabbis will back me up here — some 613 commandments. These were the rules you had to live by to be a Hebrew in the days of the Temple, constructed c. 950 BCE, destroyed by the Bablyonians in 586 BCE, rebuilt over a 23-year period from 538 BCE to 515 BCE, desecrated and reconsecrated a couple of times over a four or five hundred year period, then destroyed again in 70 AD. This destruction rendered huge chunks of these commandments a bit moot, because quite a number had to do with how to perform sacrifices at the Temple, and what you had to do to be able to actually be allowed in to worship and make your sacrifices, and a huge chunk of those only applied to the priests anyway.

Go look. Seriously. It is, indeed, an education.

But get this. This is the United States of America. Most of us aren’t Jews, and none of us are Jews 2000 to 3000 years ago in Judah. We don’t kill guys we catch having gay sex. We don’t. There are seven billion people on Earth now. We don’t have to keep up the numbers in our populations to make sure we can compete with the neighbors for drinking water and grazing land. All the borders are drawn and most of them are pretty firm. Also, we don’t buy slaves from Canada and Mexico. We don’t sell our daughters. “Traditional” marriage is no longer a guy, as many wives as he can afford to buy from the daughters of his fellow tribesmen, a couple of concubines, and whatever housemaids can’t run fast enough. We don’t make our rapists marry their victims. We have refrigerators now. Because we understand the intricacies of trichinosis and salmonella and botulism, we can eat all the bacon and shellfish we want. Because we don’t need to make a symbol of our purity as God’s Chosen People, we don’t have to eat kosher and can wear cotton/wool blends. With the blessings of indoor plumbing, we don’t all have to discreetly wander thirty paces outside our roving encampments with a shovel to bury the morning bowel movement.

I wonder, quite frequently, how pissed off Jewish people get at the ignorant Christians who pick and choose among their holy ancient 613 mitzvot to try to pretend piety in whatever ways further their own interpretations of what’s icky no matter how much it disrespects Jewish culture. Seriously, if you want to try to keep whichever of those 613 commandments are still relevant in the absence of a Temple in Jerusalem, in an age where we don’t keep slaves or invade our neighbors and kill every last woman and child and all the pets and livestock and take their land, where the use of the death penalty — especially at the hands of a crowd armed with rocks — is severely frowned upon by the local constabulary, where you only get to have one legal spouse, and where you can’t kill or sell off any family members you’re not fond of, then by all means go talk to a rabbi about becoming a Jew.

They’ll look at you like you’re crazy — and do interviews and run a background check to make sure you aren’t — but they’ll be happy to talk to you about it.

For everybody else, please understand where you live and what year it is.

Understand that, in a nation of modern Gentiles, the 613 mitzvot do not apply to us in any way. We have our own laws that, for the most part, work out fairly well for us. These laws allow us all a metric crap-ton of freedom to decide what’s a sin and what isn’t, and when you try to make the laws enforce your moral whatsits, you can be assured someone else will get the law to enforce theirs at the expense of your freedom, and it will all go downhill pretty rapidly from there.

And Christians — Gentile Christians — let me remind you that the entire purpose of the New Testament was to give you a break on that huge list of commandments. You were given two. TWO, and that’s all. Here they are:

But when the Pharisees had heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

— Matthew 22:34-40, King James Bible

If you have the same edition I had growing up, those last four sentences would have been in red, for having come out of the mouth of Jesus Himself.

If you don’t think your neighbor includes anyone and everyone you can bump into at work, on the sidewalk, at the store, at the cinema, in a restaurant, or online — wherever — and that includes the one in every ten people on Earth that were born with a predisposition to be attracted to their own gender, then you don’t understand the word neighbor. And if you don’t want all of your neighbors to have every right that you have and every joy that you’ve ever experienced and every opportunity for advancement and happiness that you’ve ever had or could ever have, then you don’t understand the word love, and certainly not in the context of as thyself.  I would also go so far as to say that if you think your God endorses bigotry against any portion of His own handiwork, then you don’t understand the word God either.

But by all means, declare your opinion that gay sex is icky and that guys marrying guys or women marrying women squicks you out, and go out of your way to declare a special holiday to go eat a chicken sandwich at your gay neighbor. Because you’re doing that out of love, right?

Right. Just count your blessings that this isn’t the era of fire and brimstone. Because I wouldn’t want to be standing anywhere near you.

[*]