* Yale Professor Liberates those Imprisoned by Bible

Yale's Sterling Professor of History, the late John Boswell

Half of the Bloomsbury Affair: Oscar Wilde

 A biblical scholar publishing her insights for all to read

Burying the Bloom of Youth and Unearthing the Rutgers' Hatred

In America it was never AGAINST THE LAW to engage in womanly behavior; or Jewish behavior; or African American behavior. However in AMERICA, LAND OF THE FREE,  until 1986 (24 years ago), when the Supreme Court overturned sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas, it was against the law to engage  in homosexual behavior.


This, it seems to me, makes the history of discrimination in our land against homosexual men and women qualitatively different from sexism, racism and anti-semitism.


In the latter, people just hated the oppressed for WHO THEY WERE GENETICALLY: Female, African, Jewish ( and Jewish folk insist there is a genetic component requisite to be an "authentic" Jew, although they permit conversion to the religion).


In the former, people hated the oppressed  not for their genes* but for what they chose to DO: Use erogenous zones of their body in a particular manner. I'll leave it up to you whether this makes it a more heinous form of discrimination than genetic discrimination, or not.


However,  unlike racism, sexism and anti-semitism, Americans  translated this hatred into legal punisment: It was ILLEGAL in all states in America for decades to engage in sodomy (non-heterosexual, non-missionary-position, sex) and punishable by imprisonment and social disgrace.

The taboo against sodomy was nurtured over thousands of years by biblical mis-translations which have been debunked by recent biblical scholarship, including that of the late Yale Sterling Professor of History, John Boswell, whose book, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, examines all of the biblical passages used as proof-texts for the prohibition of sodomy, and exposes them as mis-translations or worse.


It is no surprise then that a Rutgers student comitted suicide last week when his roomate and that roomate's girlfriend conspired against his privacy by videotaping and publishing on the Internet footage of the young man making love with another "dude" (as the conspiring roommate described the liaison of his soon to be deceased roommate, in a text message).


Would another male student have committed suicide if a videotape of himself making love with a "non-dude" (i.e., a woman) had been broadcast on the Internet?

Probably not.  Indeed he might have bragged of his sexual prowess.

However,  if such an act had happened 30 years ago, the female might have committed suicide.

It is always the the oppressed who fear.

Our society should be ashamed.

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* The nurture/nature question about the source of same gender attraction is still open to debate.