The other night I watched the documentary “For the Bible Tells Me So” which is all about parents who raise their children Catholic in hopes of helping them fulfill a full life. However, once these people learn that their children are gay, the documentary shows their journey to learning to love and accept their children, as well as their faith as an interchanging aspect of life that has to adapt just like anything else.
The film really focused on four families and how they dealt with this issue of homosexuality and how they initially perceived this as an “abomination” just like how the Bible preaches. However the real concept of the film was to stress the Bible as a social construction just like most concepts that I have discussed within this blog. Concepts such as being a “man” or a “woman” and what traits and/or characteristics are necessary in order to keep up this “charade” of being such a thing. I say charade because, let’s be honest, masculinity and femininity is really just what society tells you what you are, more so than yourself. I truly believe that a person is a person, and yes, although you can judge sex by genitalia, defining what constitutes who is a man and a woman is truly up to the general population to judge.
Global Divas, by Martin Manalansan really touches upon this classification of people within his book about Filipino drag queens. He discusses how different the meaning of being gay is between American and Filipino standards. In the Phillipines, they call gay men “bakla” which constitutes men who are effeminate and tend to cross dress. (pg. 25) In fact, as a society they consider homosexuality to be just that, an outward, skin deep, manifestation, rather than a truly emotional aspect of human life. In fact bakla is a hybrid word that stems from the work that means woman (babae) and man (lalaki). Thus, a bakla is a woman-man, and “the main focus of the term is of effeminate mannerism, feminine physical characteristics, and cross-dressing.” (pg. 25) Indeed the people are not considered either a man or a woman, regardless of whatever they gender identify with. Society doesn’t allow them to identify themselves as man or woman, but rather as some hermaphroditic entity.
In contrast to this, America actually allows these women and men to be something more than just a bakla. Being gay in America isn’t just that skin-deep quality that defines who you have sex with and how to dress. In fact, in America “participation in same-sex acts is not the crucial standard for being labeled homosexual or identifying as gay.” (pg. 23) Now I argue that these people are considered more than just “gay,” but is this the truth? Yes, indeed the gay rights movement has been moving in a perpetual forward motion since the Stonewall Riots in 1969, but it has been and still in an uphill struggle to keep the humanizing of gay men and women since. Yes, it is true that as a gay man I still have the innate human right to my own opinions, but the rub lies in whether my opinions are legal to be voiced or not, due to my sexual preference.
Back to the film, there were some really interesting points made by the creator. One described how the Bible calls such homosexual acts “unnatural” while a man and a woman together are considered “natural.” He stressed that it is important to realize that these terms, natural vs. unnatural, could be changed to “customary” vs. “uncustomary.” At the time in which the Bible was written, homosexuality was not accepted among social customs, and thus the views of such an act were deemed “unnatural” because they were considered “uncustomary” and they deviated from the status quo. Therefore, now that homosexuality has become a part of social customs, at least within many parts of the United States (and other parts of the world as well), we much take the Bible’s stance on such a subject more metaphorically rather than literally. Most of all, it is okay to follow the Bible’s teachings, because it does introduce basic stances on morality and its importance to lead an honorable and fulfilled life, but not everything preached among its pages needs to be followed. If we did so, anyone who has ever eaten shrimp would have to be killed.
So the question lies in why the shrimp rule has been omitted, but the gay rule, which is among the same pages of the book of Leviticus, is not?
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