The Christian right and pornographers: brothers in arms

We’ve all heard the anti-gay vitriol spouted by Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, and all the other right-wing Christian leaders who make their fortunes hectoring and persecuting LGBT people.

What, really, makes such Christians tick? What defines their ethos? What is the true taproot of anti-gay Christianity? Underneath all of their posturing and hyperbole—even underneath their belief that they are only being true to the Bible—what core conviction is really informing the Christian right’s condemnation of homosexuality?

It is that human sexuality can exist separate from the human spirit.

In the mindset of the anti-gay Christian right, same-sex relationships are about nothing but soulless bodies engaged in animal acts. Such relationships must have everything to do with sex, and nothing to do with love.

When’s the last time you heard any anti-gay Christian so much as mention love between two gay people? You never have, because they cannot afford to go there. Doing so would be like flipping on the light switch in a darkroom. Everything would be ruined.

Foundational to the Christian condemnation of homosexuality (and, indeed, of all sexuality) is the conviction that it is possible for a person to divorce their sexuality from their soul—from their heart, from their emotional core, from the very locus of their awareness of who they are.

You know who also bases everything they do and are upon that same assumption? Pornographers. Without the belief that a person’s sexuality can exist separately from their heart and mind, pornographers would also be out of business.