God vs. Gay: Does it Really Have to be a Choice?

Jay Michaelson was almost 30 years old when he came out to his Jewish parents and community. At first, Michaelson thought being gay meant the end of his religious life — but it was just the beginning.

Michaelson will discuss his new book, "God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality" (October, 2011 from Beacon Press) .

Berkeley Patch spoke with Michaelson about his new book and the ideas it represents. A Q&A follows.

What is your new book about? 

The book is called "God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality" and it argues that religious people should support same-sex equality because of religion, not despite it. An overwhelming majority of our ethical and religious values support inclusion, respect and dignity. 

Why is this an issue that you decided to pursue?

I wrote the book for two reasons. The first is my own story. I believe that God vs. gay was a real choice — it was either/or. I grew up in a moderately religious household. I actually became more religious as a young adult, and I thought that coming out was the end of my religious life. In fact, coming out was the beginning of my religious life. It was the most religious thing I ever did. To be honest with myself and with others — it was precisely that which I thought would end my spiritual life, but it really opened me up to the possibility of creating a spirituality that worked for me and was sincere rather than built on lies and fear, which is what I had before.

The second reason is that I started a national LGBT Jewish organization (Nehirim: GLBT Jewish Culture and Spirituality) and I’ve had the same conversation 100 times. I thought I was over this issue but people are always at square one. For lots and lots of people, it’s a primary dichotomy — even for queer folks or others who had picked gay over God. They still see it as a choice and it’s something that drives wedges between families. I’ve seen first hand that this is an incredibly destructive dichotomy. The book comes out of ten years of work in religious communities and lots and lots of conversations. Even just on book tours in the last few weeks, parents of kids who are gay or lesbian are coming up and saying they've felt that they had to just live with the contradiction — they have a religious background or belief but they love their child. And there is no contradiction. That’s the miracle about it.

What religious background do you come from?

I come from a Jewish background but I have a graduate degree in religious studies from Hebrew University in Jerusalem so I’ve done a lot of work with Christianity as well. The book is at the intersection of Judaism of Christianity. 

How did being gay affect your relationship with your parents?

My mother has really gone on a great journey. She was not so thrilled when I came out. I came out late, so I was almost 30 years old. She was worried about me. She wanted me to be safe, she wanted me to be healthy. It’s not what most Jewish mothers want for their kids. But she danced at my wedding two months ago and has been more than supportive and loves my partner. She’s an example of somebody who never signed up to be a LGBT activist. This landed in her lap. She has really been fantastic.

I know people whose parents see them in the grocery store and won’t acknowledge them. I know kids who have been sent to “reparative therapy,” which is neither “reparative” nor “therapy.” I know people who’ve been thrown out of their homes. We see it all the time. One of the dark sides of the last five years of change on this issue is that kids are coming out now and getting thrown out by their parents. There has been a rise in LGBT youth homelessness, particularly in New York and I just found out in L.A. and probably here in the Bay Area too. Kids are coming out and their parents are not in a position to stay on the side of love.

What are your arguments as to why Bible-based religions should support same sex relationships?

A lot of times, people question homosexuality because of three or four verses in the Bible. That’s three or four verses out of 31,102 — the total number of Biblical verses. Yet these three or four verses have been used to oppress people and are actually really subject to interpretation. 

I can play word games with the best of them and part two of the book does exactly that — I analyse the literal words of these literal verses. Teachings about compassion and love and honesty overwhelmingly outweigh the so called “bad verses" in the Bible. The book spends a lot of time with the positive teachings and not apologizing for diversity and the reality of peoples' experience. Those are things that I don’t think one needs to apologize for.

What are the Bible verses that refer to homosexuality?

In the Hebrew Bible, Leviticus 18:22 is sometimes translated as “thou shalt not lie with a man as with a woman” and that it’s an “abomination.”

In Romans 1:18-32, Paul describes any sexuality where men are not dominant over women as unnatural. 

In second Corinthians, Paul talk about lustfulness of different kinds, one of which has been interpreted to mean homosexuality.

There is also the story of Sodom and other stories, which are interpreted in a certain way.

What are some Biblical teachings that outweigh the verses used against homosexuality?

In the Genesis story, the first flaw of creation is that it is not good for a human being to be alone. Sometimes people say “it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” but Adam and Eve are the solution to a problem: the problem of aloneness. If I have a choice of how to interpret a verse, one way that leads to more love and the other that leads to more aloneness — I’m compelled to take the interpretation that leads to more love.

There also the notion that God loves people. Having been in the closet, it’s inconceivable for me that God would love people and want them to be closeted and lie about who they are all of the time. That’s just inconsistent with the very notion of a loving God.

There is also the fundamental value of justice. It’s unjust that people are discriminated against for a part of themselves they experience as a trait — not as a choice, not as a failure, not as a predicament, but as a trait — part of who they are. And that’s part of what is great about being human — being an embodied sexual and intimate being.

Religion is not supposed to be about looking up your answers in a book. It’s supposed to be about thinking and contemplating and use some discernment around real moral questions. It’s that process that, in my experience, leads inexorably to more liberation. I don’t know anyone who has thought carefully about this problem — the scriptural problem — who knows a lot of gay and lesbian people, whose eyes are open to the reality of our best understanding of human sexuality, and then who thinks about it for a while and becomes more anti-gay. It just doesn’t work that way. 

What about the idea of “love the sinner, hate the sin”?

Sexuality is not like stealing a chocolate bar, where you can love a person and just realize they made a little mistake. Sexuality is part of the soul. This is a way of being in the world that is connected to the most intimate parts of ourselves — how we love one another. So “love the sinner, hate the sin” may work well in some contexts, but not in this one, where the nature of intimacy and love is part of the essence of who a human being is.

It’s hard to say that you love a sinner when what you’re doing is teaching that something so fundamental about their being is flawed. I know that first hand. I was on the receiving end of that — that, “oh it’s not you, it’s this thing you’re doing.” The thing you’re doing is coming from the depths of your soul and it’s naïve to think that we can just draw that distinction.

What changes do you seem happening in the next few years in terms of how Christians and Jews see this issue of sexuality?

We’ve already seen so much change. The Episcopal church has an openly gay bishop, the Presbyterian church just ordained their first gay minister, all of the branches of Judaism except for Orthodox Judaism — so that’s 80 percent of American Jewish denominations — are fully inclusive. There has also been a lot of change even in the so-called Christian fundamentalist world. Folks are really asking whether preaching sermons that cause kids to kill themselves is consistent with Christian values.

As people are wrestling with this issue I actually end up being optimistic because although religion has been used as a tool of oppression, it contains within it the seeds of liberation, which is to say things like introspection and contemplation. You can’t look a gay or lesbian person in the eye and tell them that they’re not fully human, that they’re diseased or perverted or sinful — whatever the negative comment of the month is.

Folks are opening their eyes and communities are changing. Where they are not changing as much is where authority structures are in place. So, in the Catholic church there has been a lot of resistance. But in those denominations, studies that have come out in the last few years show that the people in the pews are way ahead of the people on the pulpit.

I’m from New York, and in New York we just had a battle over marriage equality. Over half of the Catholics in the state of New York supported civil marriage equality. There are some in the Catholic church in the power structure who say they want to speak for all Catholics, but actually they don’t.

Why then did California vote in favor of Proposition 8, eliminating the right for same-sex couples to marry?

In California, it was a huge campaign of misinformation by the Catholic church and the Mormon church. People became convinced that homosexuality was going to be taught in schools, and that this was going to destroy traditional values and traditional families. It was a scare tactic, and scare tactics work. They’ve always worked, and they work particularly for conservative causes in America.

For a lot of folks, this is new. And if gay and lesbian people are only associated with a particular set of sexually expressive behavior — that’s my polite way of saying drag queens and the pride parade etc. — then some percentage of people are going to feel negatively about that. As a more truthful range of impressions comes in — that perception shifts. It’s just a matter scare tactics prevailing over the truth of experience.

There’s a lot of sincere questioning going on and that means it can be manipulated as it was in the Prop 8 battle. But it also means that we’re ready for a more sincere conversation.

But as attitudes change, isn’t it inevitable that homosexuality would be taught in schools?

I guess that depends on what we mean by “taught in schools.” I mean, there are a lot of things that are taught in schools. I think the concern — or the scare tactic — is that somehow kids were going to be given an instruction manual for sexuality. But that is not the way in which sexuality is formed in a human being. I don’t know of a single gay person who thought of himself as straight and then went to a class and decided, “oh wow, this sounds really great, I’m going to be gay instead.” Sexuality doesn’t work that way. We’re terrified of any notion that our children might be a stake or in danger, and so it’s easy to prey on those fears.

What choices do gay people have when most churches are teaching that so-called “contradiction”?

It’s not true that most are teaching it. Numerically, it’s not true. Again, 80 percent of American Jews are part of denominations that are fully affirming. So, only orthodox synagogues would continue to teach otherwise. Most Lutheran churches are affirming and inclusive, the national Presbyterian church is inclusive and affirming — these are some of the largest denominations. There are gay Catholic groups and gay Baptist groups and gay Muslim groups and gay Buddhist groups and gay Hindu groups, there are lesbian potlucks at the synagogue — there’s a huge range. The end of the book actually has an index of 50 or so LGBT religious organizations.

Here in the Bay Area, obviously it being the Bay Area, there are even more options than usual. There’s a particular LGBT focused Christian church called Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) that’s been around since the ‘70s. It started right here in San Francisco. There’s a wealth of options and fantastic books and websites and communities that are out there. It may seem like a minority opinion, but the resources here particularly in the Bay Area are just phenomenal.

But having said all of that, I definitely sympathize with somebody who goes into a church and hears a hostile message and just says “to hell with it.” I get it. I definitely get it. But for those who aren’t willing to let the bigots take over our religious traditions, there are a lot of resources.

Are negative perceptions about homosexuality based on a lack of education?

Lack of education is one thing, but there’s so much deliberate mis-education. It’s hard enough to educate folks about new information when they’re not being lied to in the mass media. You hear all the time about how bad homosexuality is for heterosexual marriage or for the family, but actually all of the numbers — the actual facts from the places that have had same sex marriage for a while like Massachusetts and some countries in Europe — actually show that the divorce rate has gone down. There’s been absolutely no impact shown on family stability and structure. Sometimes you hear that children do better with a mother and a father and that’s why we shouldn’t’ have same-sex adoption, when actually the statistics are that there is zero difference in all of the studies that have been done. There’s a big difference between having two parents and one parent, but there’s no difference if the parents are of the same sex or different sexes. None. That’s fact. But it’s hard to get facts out in a space where fear is the dominant mode of rhetoric.

My experience traveling throughout the country talking about the book is that there is definitely some percentage of people who are committed to their particular ideology, whether it’s religious or secular. They’ve been raised to believe — like I was raised to believe — that homosexuality was the worst thing in the world. And they just aren’t going to get out of that belief.

Then there is some percentage who are totally over this question and think "of course equality is great" and they’ve also made up their minds. But then there really are a lot of folks in the middle — people who are really questioning what they understand their religious traditions to say, what they understand their morality to be, and they’re questioning it not because they’re ignorant or bigoted but because this is new to a lot of people. Our understanding of sexuality is at most 100 years old — and that’s new in terms of a moral or ethical question for people.