IT CAN SCARCELY BE DOUBTED that the primary, and perhaps only sources of our culture's anti-gay hostility are the Christian denominations.
When most anti-gay zealots are pushed very hard, they do not come up with sociological or philosophical reasons for their hatred. Instead, they usually retreat to citing Leviticus, or the Epistle to the Romans, or the ancient Palestinian myth of Sodom.
As the bumper sticker says, "God said it. I believe it. That settles it."
One can only imagine how it might have been written otherwise.
The two male angels who sojourned to Sodom might have been welcomed as honored guests, lavishly fed and entertained by the townspeople who assumed they were a gay couple. When they departed the next morning with abundant provisions for their journey, the angels blessed the generous town for its hospitality and Sodom prospered for seven generations.
But no. The Hebrews of ancient legend were a nomadic people who could not even imagine such a thing as a "good city." They were deeply anti-urban, anti-technical, and anti-political. The Genesis legends of Cain and Nimrod, Babel and Sodom uniformly attribute impiety, pride, idolatry, luxury, crime and moral depravity to all cities and their founders, Sodom included.
And the Apostle Paul, the possible author of Romans, was never a better Roman citizen than when he grafted Stoic notions about "nature" and what is "natural" to the messianic Jewish sect he adopted as his own, producing a doctrine that reluctantly accepted sex only as a painful accommodation to human frailty and rejected homosexuality as wholly without value.
Had he been less a Roman, or, one might say, a better "Christian," he might have rejected such extraneous philosophy and written otherwise:
"The holy and loving are drawn to God who is their likeness in heaven, and God loves them because they are His image on earth, like cleaving to like. Just so among us those who are drawn to others like unto themselves should especially be valued and honored, for their love is an image for us of God's love for His creation and His people, their love holding no other purpose or consequence than mutual contemplation, emulation, and enjoyment."
But it was not to be.
Had it been so, where then could homophobia have arisen or how could it have become pervasive in a culture that took the Bible as its moral guide. No other primary cultural source preaches homophobia as a primary value.
Several years ago novelist Bette Greene, who writes young adult fiction, interviewed more than 400 gay bashers as part of her research for The Drowning of Stephan Jones, visiting jails in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Tennessee and Washington state.
I tried to find out where the hate comes from," she told Boston's Bay Windows in 1992, "and one of the places that it came from was the pulpits of America."
Greene said that when she asked teenagers why they attacked gays, "they got sort of exasperated with me and they talked about what their preacher said, what the televangelists have said. They felt they were doing what society wanted them to do."
"Again and again, I got the connection with the church," she explained.
When Greene told this to some of the teenagers' ministers, they insisted that they preached love: "love the sinner, hate the sin." But Greene shook her head. "Nobody I know has been able to make that separation."
In the same way, independent filmmaker Arthur Dong interviewed several men convicted of murdering gays for his recent film, Licensed to Kill.
"They were all influenced by their environment, whether that be the social environment, political environment, religious environment." he told ABC's Nightline.
Discussing one man he questioned about why he murdered a homosexual, Dong quoted the man as saying that he had no opinion about homosexuals except that "they ought to be all 'taken care of'"�i.e., killed.
Dong went on to report that the murderer remembered reading about homosexuality "and hearing about it in church and he, in the film, he actually says, 'Well if the Bible says it's right, that's what it is.'"
God said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Psychologist Karen Franklin, who studied anti-gay crimes committed by young college students, found the same thing.
Although Franklin discreetly avoided any specific reference to religion, she acknowledged that "many of the assailants view themselves as social norms enforcers who are punishing moral transgressions."
The point here is: No one is born hating gay people. They learn that hatred somewhere�from the culture and from its predominant moral influences. And the primary institutions teaching right and wrong are? The religious denominations.
Bette Greene is blunt: "If there's one problem we can end in a hurry, it's [anti-] gay violence. We just have to start preaching that it's wrong."
Not preach "hate the sin, not the sinner." That is a factitious distinction. You cannot denounce one without denouncing the other. You cannot punish one without punishing the other. You cannot beat up one, without beating up the other.
So we need to encourage ministers and priests and rabbis and bishops to speak out from the pulpit against anti-gay violence and gay bashing. We need them to speak out against hostility.
But we need to go further than that. We need to assert to everyone that our sexuality is not sinful at all. There is nothing wrong with homosexuality, nothing immoral.
Our sexual behavior is just as moral as anyone else's, with the same capacity for love, closeness, relatedness and harmless pleasure.
Nor should we let "moderate" religious people get away with condescendingly saying, "Well, the church welcomes gays because, oh, well, aren't we are all sinners, after all."
That is just another way of saying that homosexuality is sinful, but they are too squeamish, too "moderate," to say so explicitly. We need to smile and say, "Speak for yourself: The sin is not homosexuality, but homophobia."
Religions must stop preaching hostility to homosexuals or homosexuality.
They must begin condemning attitudes that lead to gay-bashing.
They must accept same-sex love for what it is�love�and, as such, deserving of all the encouragement and honor they traditionally offer to that emotion.
Churches and religious people are not accustomed to being held accountable by people claiming the moral high ground. They are going to have to get used to it because that is where our position legitimately is. It is up to you to make that clear to them.