Asked how she reconciled her position on homosexuality with specific passages in the Bible declaring sexual relations between men an abomination, Jefferts Schori said the Bible was written in a very different historical context by people asking different questions.
"The Bible has a great deal to teach us about how to live as human beings. The Bible does not have so much to teach us about what sorts of food to eat, what sorts of clothes to wear -- there are rules in the Bible about those that we don't observe today," she said.
"The Bible tells us how to treat other human beings and that is certainly the great message of Jesus to include the unincluded."
OK ... let's parse this. The Bible has a lot to say about the meaning of life, but nothing about diet and dress. Fair enough, in itself (I'm Catholic, not a fundamentalist; I can hardly deny that statement, as far as it goes).
So what then, must the bishop be saying about homosexuality? Presumably, to make her categories fit her analogy, it would have to be that homosexuality fits into the diet-and-dress template, and not meaning-of-life issues (like ethnic diversity, say). Diet and dress are matters of indifference, of accident. Or at most, a temporally-defined matter -- prohibitions that might have been valid at one time but not now. "Don't eat shellfish" was right in ancient times, but made obsolete by refrigeration, Saran Wrap, Tupperware, etc. If sexuality, or the sex of one's beloved, truly is a "meaning of life" matter, then what the Bible has to say about it presumably would be salient -- and none of it is *good,* whatever ambiguities we might read into Romans 1, "para phusin" and "pathe atimias"). But we don't need to worry about that.
But, but ... if homosexuality is a matter resembling diet and dress -- why is it so important to anybody's life? Why is gay "marriage" so necessary? How could any teaching against its practice be as ornery, inhumane or degrading as we constantly hear the Church's teaching on it described as. "Don't mix cotton and silk" or "don't eat crabcakes" might be stupid or asinine or any other number of unkind adjectives, but they could hardly be called "oppressive" "hateful" "phobic" or the like. I could never see another shrimp scampi in my life and I would hardly be any the worse for it (in fact, my waistline might be the better for it). Nor does the fact I can't sue people for discriminating against the Langostavore Community any great hardship on me.
On the one hand, homosexuality is a matter of indifference; with the other, it's the essence of life, the meaning of existence and all that. When it suits the gay propagandists, as in exigesis of the Old and New Testaments, sexuality is a mere taste preference, with no great import. And when it suits the gay propagandists, as in exigesis of (say) civil-rights laws and the 14th Amendment, sexuality is the immutable WHO I AM, and everything depends on it. Heads I win; tails you lose.
