"It's been a while since I read the Bible," Roy Edroso wrote on Monday night. "Was this Jesus guy Dreher claims to worship as big an asshole as he is?" Maybe Roy ought to read the Bible again and decide for himself, but then it was only a rhetorical question anyway. Roy knows that Jesus was whatever he decides he was, based on whatever Bible verses he remembers from Sunday School.
That's not to say that Rod Dreher is right about Jesus either. Jesus is just a blank wall on which people project their wishes and fantasies about the ideal big brother / son / best friend / scourge of the Bad Guys. (Shane! Come back! Even so, come, Lord Jesus!) The less you know about him, the easier it is to invent him. Roy does much better showing where Dreher goes wrong humanly and politically, because Christianity has no moral content. No one can know what Jesus would say on the subject of the poor, healthcare, and government programs as we know them today; he lived in a completely different world, and he's been dead for two thousand years anyway. If you do want to claim you're following Jesus' teachings and example, you had better be able to heal the sick, raise the dead, drive out demons, and make the little girls go out of their head. Since nobody nowadays can do that, Jesus simply isn't a moral authority for any of us, not even Christians.
But what I want to address today is a comment on that post by an alicublog regular, Fats Durston. It's still on the first page, so the lack of permalinks needn't keep you from reading it yourself if you want to. First "Mr. Wonderful" asked rhetorically, "Wasn't it Jesus who said, "Fuck ye the poor, for they are nuts"? Or who am I thinking of?" Mr Durston replied,
I believe it's Luke 16:19-25. "Now there was a certain rich man, and he habitually dressed in purple and fine linen, gaily living in splendor every day. And a certain poor man named Lazarus was laid at his gate, covered with sores, and longing to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table; besides, even the dogs would come and lick his sores.That's actually a rather witty reversal of the biblical parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. In the original, of course, it's the Rich Man who goes to Hades for enhanced interrogation, while Lazarus is borne by the angels to the bosom of Abraham, which sounds pretty gay itself, doesn't it?
Now it came about that the poor man died and he was carried away by the demons to Hades to be tormented; and the rich man also died and was buried. And in Heaven he was lifted into Abraham's bosom and cast down his eyes, and saw Lazerus far away, getting fucked by demons in every orifice."
The detail about "getting fucked by demons in every orifice" is Fats's special contribution, though. If I dood it, I get a whippin'! I reflected... I dood it! So I commented:
That's my favorite part of the whole Bible! I bet poor Lazarus had never gotten fucked properly in his whole life, and the Lord gave him hot demon 2 man action for eternity! (I'm always glad to see how liberals really see homosexuality, with a male's being penetrated as horrible torment; but it's okay, you'll let us get married and serve in the military, so I know you're on my side.)That got me a keyboard-lashing, and not for the first time, because only fundamentalists' ignorance of the Bible is supposed to be risible in them parts. I was accused of being "Leftier-than-thou," and of thinking that the other regulars are not worthy of me. This doesn't hurt my feelings -- they're rather tough -- but it does confuse me. It seems that only Jesus, and in particular liberal kissyface huggybear fantasies of Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild, is off-limits for discussion at alicublog. I've noticed it before: you can attack Christians, but leave my Jesus alone. The best part was when aimai -- who isn't even Christian as far as I know -- accused me of being a gay conservative.
To their credit, a few commenters tried to address my remark about straight guys' feelings about penetration. Fats himself tried to split hairs -- nose hairs: "A male's what? Now, if I'd written 'getting fucked in the ass' by demons, you'd have a point. But I, for one, see demon-nostril-rape as rape, irrespective of the sex of the victim. Maybe it's your own sexism that assumes the demons are male." True, the demons could have been dildo-packin' females, but Fats had written of Lazarus getting it in "every orifice", which includes the anus. And I hadn't said that the demons were male myself; I'd only said that straight males consider being penetrated to be degrading, without specifying the sex of the penetrators or the orifices they ravage. But as Fats said, this is like quibbling over the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin; it's just that he was the one who tried to confuse the issue by throwing dust in our eyes.
Tom Allen wrote "Well, you know what they say -- nothing funnier than a gay rape joke, amirite? Haha -- rape!" I couldn't tell whether he noticed that it was Fats, not I, who made the "gay rape joke." John D. wrote, "I'm a gay male, Duncan, and I understand the distinction being made here. But then, I wouldn't appreciate being brutally gang banged on my first day in prison, either. Go figure, huh?" This only confirms what I was saying: Fats didn't say "raped in every orifice", he said "fucked in every orifice." That he, and others, confused the latter with the former, just confirms my claim: to many straight men, rape and consensual sex are too often indistinguishable.
As I noticed about George Carlin a few years ago,
The Politically Correct especially made the steam pour from his ears, for allegedly referring to “cornholing” as “anal intercourse, anal rape.” (Like so many straight guys, Carlin was vague about the difference between intercourse and rape; the jokes which followed confirmed that he preferred to think of sex as a violation if not outright violence.)And then there are the guys who try to rehabilitate "faggot" by claiming that they only mean to put down "kneelers," "servants of power ... you know - faggots..." Which doesn't work, because these terms derive their meaning from the association of penetration with degradation.
It's not only gay men who have an interest in this issue, after all; we're really secondary targets, after women. The reason a penetrated male is despised, especially if he enjoys being penetrated and seeks it out, is that 'he's acting like a woman.' (If penetration is forced on him, on the other hand, his rapist exults at having made him into a woman.) A lot of the tension in heterosexuality comes from the conviction that a woman is polluted by being penetrated, and yet under male supremacy every woman must be penetrated. Mothers are holy, and their honor will be defended unto death by loving sons -- yet the Mother was penetrated, and therefore a Whore. The difference between a Good Woman and a Whore is entirely in the eye of the beholder, and every woman knows that she can lose her Good status in the blink of an eye, regardless of her actual behavior. This isn't just splitting hairs: it's a major factor in all kinds of violence against women around the world, and throughout history.
That's why I keep challenging this association when I encounter it, even if I do get a whippin'. It's not innocent. Even if gay marriage is legalized, there will still be faggots and whores. (That's one purpose of marriage: to draw a line between good women and bad, between Mothers and Whores.) What's striking is how deeply entrenched it is. Maybe people can't change their attitudes about this, it may for all I know be encoded in our bodies (though I don't believe it is); but we won't know unless we try. And we can't try unless we realize that it's happening, all around us, every day.
