A reader asks

A reader writes:

Somebody has sent me a link to a brief piece on the history of same-sex marriage in the Church and I don’t know what to make of it. Do you know of any scholarship about this subject? According to the link, there is a history of same-sex unions, including liturgical rites for them, in the Church from the early days of the Church up through the 13th century.

The piece is referring to John Boswell’s Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, a piece of advocacy scholarship that basically attempts to argue that gay sex was just peachy with early Christians, who even had something like a “marriage” ceremony for happy gay couples. It’s all crap, of course. It willfully interprets every male relationship of friendship or camaraderie as sublimated homosexuality while misreading both the New Testament and the practice of early Christians in order to emphasize whatever might lend credit to gay agitprop. First Things took it apart in 1994. But in our theologically illiterate culture, people who are looking for a scholarly veneer for gay enthusiasms still routinely refer to Boswell.