First Steps

I was having a conversation with Eldest Son earlier this week. He asked me what "gay" means. I answered his question by saying that when two people are in love and they want to stay together forever and make a family we have different names for those couples depending on who the partners are. If they are a man and a woman then we call that relationship straight. I used his father and I as an example. I said that if those two people are both men, or both women they call those relationships gay. He thought a minute and then said "Is gay bad?" I said "What do you think?" He said "I think it's weird, but I don't think it's any of my business." I said I didn't think it was any of my business either. He asked "But why do some people think it's bad?" I said that some religions thought it was wrong, that G-d had forbidden it. He asked "Why do they think that?" I told him that I didn't know about other religions because I just didn't know enough about their beliefs and their holy texts to say, but that Christians look to the Bible for their morality and that there were a few passages, mostly in the Old Testament, that seemed to say that being gay was offensive to G-d. He interrupted me at this point and said quite forcefully "The Old Testament? But G-d killed off thousands and thousands of the Egyptian's children in the Old Testament! That's supposed to be moral??" He seemed quite outraged. I was taken aback, and we wound up the conversation after that. 

It reminded me of when I was around his age. In my church growing up we were all encouraged to read the bible.Every year I got a little check card that was supposed to help me read the entire bible through in one year. Something like this, if I recall correctly.

I remember that I got awards for reading the bible through about eight times while I was growing up. The first one was when I was about eight years old, but I missed a couple of years in high school. 

Thinking about what my son said, I remembered when I was really young and I had read disturbing things in the bible and I would ask my parents about it. Their advice was always the same: to talk to our pastor, Brother Williams. As I remember him, Brother Williams was a very kind, soft spoken man. He wasn't a fire and brimstone preacher. We got those a lot, in the semi-annual revival meetings. We would bring in some preacher and he would scream and pound the pulpit. Brother Williams wasn't like that, but in retrospect it was pretty insidious. He would read the passages and give a sermon that used a lot of pleading and exhortion. It was like he regretted telling us this ugly truth, but he was compelled because it was in the Bible and he just didn't want us to not have this essential information.

Brother Williams always seemed patient and kind to me. He never told me to stop bothering him with my questions about the bible. I had a real problem with the Old Testament and G-d's actions throughout. I remember I kept saying that things didn't seem fair, like the bears that ate the children for teasing Elijah. That was an especially hard conversation because at the time I was being bullied at school rather mercilessly. I had to somehow reconcile the fact that I was supposed to forgive any offense, no matter how bad, seventy times seven (which I was instructed did not mean 490 times, but forever) but that G-d himself had the option of sending motherfucking bears to eat kids for calling a prophet bald. When I pointed out that wasn't fair I got told, ever so gently, that it didn't have to be fair, G-d can do what G-d wants because he's G-d.

So looking back over my life, it seems that the things I'm wrestling with now aren't new. They certainly aren't new to human discourse. These are big questions that people ask, especially about fundamentalist religions. And the answers I was given are pretty classic thought stopping answers designed to shut down dissent and bring the questioner back into line. 

I still wonder when Eldest Son read the Old Testament.