The Visceral: Taboo
What makes homosexuality and same-gender marriage gut-wrenching for many is not simply that they are believed to be unethical, or legislated by others as illegal. It is because homosexuality is taboo, a human custom virtually prerational, part of our cultural mores (thus morality). In my first book, Uncommon Calling, I described my sister guessing my carefully guarded secret: “You're a homosexual!” “How did you know?” I asked. “Oh,” she said, surprised that she was correct, “if you were a maniac going around killing people, you could talk about that, even write a book about it! But no one can talk about homosexuality.” She was accurate; homosexuality is more taboo than violence in our culture, evidenced by the violence that permeates everything from children's cartoons to the plethora of crime dramas on television and at the theater. In contrast, the first television drama about AIDS, An Early Frost, depicted little if any physical contact between the featured male couple—even as one lay dying from AIDS—out of fear of a hostile viewer reaction. In Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, the late Yale historian John Boswell wrote that the homosexual taboo was second only to incest.
To support heterosexuals trying to understand their possibly negative feelings toward homosexuals, ranging from discomfort to repugnance, I explain in my presentations that lesbians and gay men usually suffer similar antagonism toward our own feelings, though this is changing among younger generations. This is why some of the harshest attacks may come from individuals anxious about and repressing their own sexuality or from self-proclaimed “reformed” homosexuals, and why community-building among gays and lesbians is hampered by what most marginalized groups experience as “lateral violence,” negativity directed “ laterally” among members of the oppressed community rather than against oppressors. When combined with the rejecting attitudes of others, including churches, many LGBT people resort to self- destructive behavior or outright suicide, which in turn, is used as evidence of our pathology. Antipathy toward homosexuality is learned by all of us in a way that sexual orientation is not, according to contemporary researchers.2
This underlying feeling must be addressed in any discussion on same-gender marriage. We cannot value, let alone champion, an institution that embraces individuals or behaviors that at the least make us uncomfortable, and at the worst make us sick, sick to our stomachs or sick at heart. Let me give a somewhat comparable example. With the late activist pastor William Sloane Coffin, I am a recovering racist, sexist, and homophobe.3 My racism was never explicit or boorish in its expressions. But, for example, I somehow “got” that mixed race marriage wasn't “the way things should be.” This attitude did not come from my mind, it was ingrained in my gut, and I have no idea where or from whom I learned it. And though my attitudes changed, for a while I still carried a small, strange feeling inside of me when I saw a mixed race couple. If I let that feeling get the better (or the worse!) of me, I suppose I could have offered all kinds of “rational” explanations for my prejudice. But, if push came to shove, my underlying argument against mixed race marriage would have been simply, “Because that's not what I'm used to.” In Same Sex Marriage?, ethicist Marvin Ellison explains that, historically, I was not alone:
As early as 1705, a Massachusetts law was enacted to ban interracial coupling. By the end of the nineteenth century, at least forty states had similar laws forbidding people from marrying a spouse of the “wrong race.” The California courts were the first in the nation to declare an interracial marriage ban unconstitutional, but that ruling was handed down only in 1948. Because of the unfettered power of Jim Crow segregation at the time, the decision was widely denounced as threatening the stability of Western civilization. As one Southern judge argued, “Almighty God created the races, white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”4
It took nearly twenty years for the U.S. Supreme Court to catch up to California in 1967's Loving v. Virginia decision, voiding similar bans and defining marriage among our “personal vital rights.” Given the present turmoil over same-gender marriage, it's interesting how Massachusetts and California have figured into both discussions.
Over forty years later, I may still feel a twinge of reservation when I simply “see” a mixed race couple I have not come to know. Yet, interestingly, never had that feeling when my friends na and Chris lived next door to me. She is Italian-American and he is African-American. This configuration of marriage was different from “the way it should be,” according to ingrained prejudice, my gut reaction, but I never had an inkling as their neighbor that it was not “normal.” Similarly, “Fred and Bob” or “Shirley and June” as neighbors or fellow church members help us see “their kind” differently, but not as wrong.
I believe that when human beings cannot identify the source of our discomfort about homosexuality, from whom or from where we learned our homophobia or heterosexism, we come to believe our feelings are natural, inborn, God-given. Opponents would be quick to say the same of homosexual feelings: since most lesbians and gay men report discovery rather than choice of our feelings, we come to believe our feelings are natural, inborn, God-given. The difference lies not only in the research of recent decades, which reveals sexual orientation of any kind is best understood as an unfolding, an unveiling in very early childhood related to a mix of factors, both genetic and psychosocial.5 The difference also lies in the fact that, according to the school of thought of cultural anthropologist René Girard, we learn how to be human by imitation, by mimesis, mimicking others. The fact that homosexuals come from heterosexual parents, peers, churches, and cultures belies the notion of homosexuality as learned behavior. On the other hand, that children often hold the same prejudice as their parents, peers, church, or culture suggest we have learned such prejudice through the subtle process of imitation. As the Rodgers and Hammerstein song from South Pacific about racial prejudice suggests, we have to be carefully taught.
Just Plain Dirty
In his book, Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today, Episcopal priest and seminary professor L. William Countryman describes the sense of “dirty” applied to human behaviors in the Holiness Code of Leviticus, where two prohibitions on males acting like females in sexual intercourse occur, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. Personal integrity and social harmony are the general principles underlying both the moral laws (right and wrong) and ritual laws (pure and impure) of the Holiness Code. The laws presupposed orders of creation, categories of existence, that were not to be mixed up. A familiar example of not mixing things up are the kosher laws still practiced as a spiritual discipline by many Jews today: certain foods are not to be served nor stored with other foods. Other examples are the laws against sowing a field with two different kinds of seed, or wearing a garment made of two different materials; both are common practices today.
Countryman illustrates “dirty” with a rather tame example of a contemporary taboo: putting quarters in your mouth, a taboo most of us were taught not to do as children for fear of germs. But I want to use a more vivid example: picking your nose in public. As did many bodily functions, this taboo became the subject of a hilarious Seinfeld episode. A woman Seinfeld was interested in misinterprets him scratching his nose for picking his nose, and is so disgusted, she loses interest. Now, I hope I'm not revealing “too much information” to say that most of us have probably stuck a finger up our noses. But to be “caught with a finger up our nose” is an idiom suggesting profound embarrassment. Public nose-picking is taboo. It is not morally or legally wrong; it is just plain “dirty.” As such, it elicits a visceral response. It's not like we haven't “been there, done that.” But to witness it in public elicits feelings ranging, for most of us, from discomfort to repugnance. That is the nature of taboo. “What is consistent from one culture to another is that purity rules relate to the boundaries of the human body, especially to its orifices,” Countryman writes.6
Countryman goes on to explain that this is the nature of the purity laws of ancient Israel. As with any culture, certain things or behaviors were considered