HOMOSEXUALITY AND THE WESTERN CHRISTIAN TRADITION

By Derrick Sherwin Bailey Longmans, Green & Co., London & New York, 176 pp. $3.50

Two years ago, a party leader in the British House of Lords warned hysterically of a new onslaught of the "vices of Sodom and Gomorrah," and while stating he didn't expect the nation to be directly punished by earthquakes and brimstone, he obviously would not have been surprised by such consequences.

A few months after, the Church of England's Moral Welfare Council (see ONE, June '54) released an interim report indicating that though homosexual acts were sinful, they were perhaps less so than adultery, and homosexuals per se, neither immoral nor unnatural, could often be valued members of society.

One of those who worked on that report, D. Sherwin Bailey, Central Lecturer for the Council, recently published this scholarly but readable. history of the Church's attitude toward homosexuality. The first thing. he upsets is Lord Samuel's notion, shared by most Christians, that Sodom was punished for homosexuality, and that a similar fate awaits. any nation giving free rein to this vice. With painstaking etymological analysis, tracing differing texts and backgrounds, he concludes that homosexual implications in the Sodom story were late accretions, current during the first century, or just in time to be borrowed by early Christians. Comparing the story to that of the Watchers ("The sons of God" of Gen. vi. 2) in the Apocrypha, he argues that aside from the general sinfulness of Sodom, there was the sin of Orders: illicit relations be-

tween men and angels, considered more serious than what since came to be called Sodomy.

Likewise he denies the homosexual interpretation of many other Biblical passages. (Almost he makes so good a case of this it might seem homosexuality was phenomenally rare in those days.) Aside from Lev. xviii. 22, and xx. 13, Rom. i. 26-7, I Cor. vi. 9-10 and 1 Tim. i. 9-10, he discounts most passages as not specifically or specifically referring to homosexuality. He rules out such implication in the Sodom-like account of the Benjaminite outrage at Gibeah (Judges xix) and discounts as well the imputation of sexuality between David and Jonathan. (Ruth and Naomi are not mentioned in this context.) He dismisses as groundless Kinsey's view that the Hebrew antihomosexual bias (and by derivation, our own) dates from the Babylonian captivity.

Against the charge that Christianity, thru Paul, imposed its anti-homosexual bias on a more tolerant Pagan world, he cites Roman laws and interpretations to show that the Romans were less than generally tolerant (but these laws, as he notes, deal less with homosexuality per se than with prostitution and rape of minors) and that in fact, Medieval laws were often rephrasings of earlier Pagan laws, with references to Sodom added. Contrary to Ellis and Westermarck who felt the Church was unduly hard on homosexuals, he argues that in clerical writings and canon law, mentions of homosexuality were surprisingly rare and recommended

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