Christians for Gay Rights

The article about Ruth and Naomi brings out something valuable, and also misses the whole point of their story...

1. Ruth DID pledge lifelong friendship to Naomi. This pledge was honored even after Ruth remarried.

2. Ruth did NOT demand that her friendship with Naomi be treated as equivalent to her marriage to Boaz.

In using the same word to describe Ruth and Naomi's embrace that is used to describe Adam and Eve's, were the Bible writers saying that Ruth and Naomi had sexual feelings toward each other--or that Adam and Eve, despite having sexual feelings toward each other, also had real, lasting friendship?

One of the most off-putting things about the homosexual lobby is their failure to understand that (a) sexual relationships don't last, or seem valuable to the participants, unless they also include friendship; and also (b) some friendships do last, and are valued by the participants, because they're sex-free.

As a woman I've always experienced other women's company as having an anti-erotic "chaperone" effect. That doesn't mean I've never given another woman my last dollar; it doesn't mean I've never made a commitment to help another woman raise a foster child; it doesn't mean I've never induced lactation to help another woman feed a lactose-intolerant baby when her own lactation was difficult. I've done all those things. And while I was doing those things, I was sexually attracted exclusively to men. And I would have felt that my relationships with those women had been betrayed, not consummated, if any of those women had approached me in a lesbian way.

So, did Ruth and Naomi feel that way, or did they experience hugging each other as some sort of substitute for hugging their departed husbands? We'll never know (unless, as many Christians believe, we get to ask them about it in Heaven).

Maybe what the Bible writers would say, if we could ask them, was that it's none of our business. As long as Ruth and Naomi weren't flaunting whatever private personal feelings they had, nobody has any right to judge their feelings--or even ask what their feelings were.

As for the Old Testament, some Christians cite Leviticus 20:13, which commands death for men who lie with men.

And it never gets into more detail than that. My suspicion is that it's a condemnation of anal sex (potentially hazardous in a society with no/few condoms and with more limited access to bathing), and possibly related to other nearby customs. As comparison, the dietary laws are far far more exhaustive, f'rex listing specifically what varieties of vulture you can't eat, and detailing that pigs, which should theoretically be okay to eat based on hoof type, are actually off-limits. Homosexuality was a really low priority for these people.

It bothers me that people always dredge up the nastiest, most brutal chunks of only the OT when trying to show how vicious and pointless biblical stuff is. Aren't there plenty of passages in the NT which are less than enlightened? And I'm gonna shut up before I go reeling off into more anger, there.

Anyway, I'm glad that people are starting to say no to this, I think in the USA religious-based homophobia is basically a political smokescreen. And the less people care about this social non-issue, the less they can be distracted away from crummy policy.