To presume that God blesses such arrangements and to ask the Church to echo such a presumed blessing is perilous to those involved, and to the unity of the Church.
The story of Sodom, the “Holiness Code” of Leviticus, the lists of dark behaviours in the epistles, and the more extensive illustration of Romans 1 all register disapproval. The biblical teaching is not unconsciously coloured by cultural norms; rather, it adopts a decisive counter-cultural stand for its time.
Sexual disorder is at once, then, profoundly personal and clearly communal in its effects.
In summary, the Bible presents sexuality as a divinely-prescribed mode of being for human beings, valuable in itself and in its iconic representation of divine-human relations. From the beginning, sexuality entailed interdependence, companionship and procreation; the distortion and strained fulfilment of these good things, subsequent to the Fall, has not completely thwarted the original intent (the celebration of human love in the Song of Solomon, and the explicit blessing of marriage in the New Testament).
A response to a proposal for the UMC to allow diversity in relation to homosexuality
I first fell in love I think when I was nine; it’s a terrifying experience and it was when I first realised I was gay, realised that. Some people realise it way before puberty, and of course at the time, living in an entirely fully evangelical Protestant world, had no real notion; actually one of the very few books we were allowed to read of course, was the bible, so I found myself reading bits of the bible at that age, and realising that it was all to do with love, and having a strong sense, even at that time, that if Christianity is true, then it can’t be true in the way that I was perceiving it, because of the element of love. It was talking about love, and here was this love, so Christianity must be different from what it seemed.
You see, in the city in which I live, a city of eighteen million or so people, and one where the annual Gay Pride parade features a minimum of three million people – and that’s the police estimate – there is no Catholic LGBTQ pastoral. In a city named after the apostle Paul which is also the largest city in the country with the largest Catholic population in the world, our Church is entirely absent from any realistic involvement in the life of the segment of society which in Brazil goes by the name of “GLS” – Gays, lésbicas e simpatizantes – Gays, Lesbians and those with similar affinities. And here we are back to a different sort of impossibility. For of course, our Church is dependent on the same teaching in Brazil as it is everywhere else. The current teaching of the Roman Congregations, which has as its premise that all humans are intrinsically heterosexual, and that gay people are objectively disordered. Defective heterosexuals if you like.
