I Love My Dead Gay Savior...

Let's make a few things clear: Bishop Gene Robinson did not actually say that Jesus Christ might have been gay, so all the headlines need editing. He merely pointed out that J.C. was a "non-traditional man," who "travelled with a bunch of men," (Hat Tip: Chris McCullouch)and allowed the rest of us to fill in the blanks (and his spokesperson to deny the validity of such inference). So this is less of a story than some are making it out to be, and for that, I can be only grateful.

But I'm more interested in the logic behind the supposition, given that the continuous press coverage of the things Robinson says makes him, for the moment, uniquely influential. Let us examine the evidence:

Jesus never married

He did, in fact, wandered around the desert with a bunch of dudes.

The Apostle John was known as "the one Jesus loved"

He had a very strong relationship with his mother.

He spoke out against lusting after women with severity above and beyond that of the Mosaic Law.

There are more than a few, who faced with this (deliberately incomplete) information, will say "Oh my god, like, HELLO!" and those won't all be gay people. One of the understated conflicts about modern discourse is the amount of disbelief in the possibility of chastity. It informs our arguments on abortion, sex education, AIDS prevention, and yes, gay marriage. To many on the left, the concept of virginity and chastity are things that, like "the troops," they will claim to respect but do nothing to aid. They will not submit to the preaching of chastity, to the preaching of disciplining the sex drive. That's "unnatural." The degree to which the supremacy, the complete irresistibility of the sex drive has been taken as an article of faith among the left, and never questioned, is fascinating. And many righties are so busy tuning in to South Park to demonstrate hipness that they can't be bothered to notice anymore.

Therefore, anyone who speaks to loudly on the subject is a warped freak who hates sex. Anyone who attempts to practice chastity is either a psychological eunuch or, somehow a hypocrite (this last has been the chief damage done by the child-abuse scandal in the Church). And anyone who practices chastity and then preaches to others about chastity is, in the view of many, little short of a genocidal fanatic if he does so in AIDS-ravaged Africa.

And therefore, a holy man who is the promised Godhead in the minds of billions of people worldwide cannot possibly have been acting according to the doctrine that his followers pronounced for millenia after him. Nope, he's simply queer.

Now, I write none of this as an exemplar of chastity, not in the purest sense of the term. My own opinions have never stopped me from doing things that would offend my mother if she knew of them. But I blame all this on my imperfect understanding of the need for chastity (which is not, strictly speaking, the same as virginity), not on the impossibility of chastity. I am reminded of Ghandi's line on Christianity: "It's marvelous, I wish somebody would try it!" Which works for chastity as well as for blasphemy.