After Rocco Buttiglione withdrew his candidacy as the Italian nominee to become the European Union’s justice commissioner, Matthew Thompson asks: Just what is sin?
The Italian politician who might have become an EU commissioner, part of whose brief would have included justice of all things, declares that women’s place is in the home and, oh yes, that homosexuality is a sin. Unsurprisingly, he at least claims to be a friend of the present Pope, whose views aren’t exactly poles apart from his own.
Since making those remarks, and under pressure from the European Parliament itself, among others, he has now withdrawn his name as the Italian nominee to the Commission, but it seems unlikely his viewpoint has changed. So would it have affected his behaviour in office? That cannot now be known. Would his perception of any kind of supposed sinfulness have affected his decisions? Would it have seemed to justify unfavourable treatment of gays? That, too, cannot now be known, but, on his showing, we have to suppose that it at least might have done so.
And would all sinners (as he sees them) have been disadvantaged somehow? Or would gays have been a special case, as so often?
What is a “sin” anyway? We find it defined in religious textbooks as a deliberate offence against God’s will. That has to mean, surely, that an atheist or agnostic is going to have to try very hard indeed to commit sin. For a start, either there isn’t, for him/her, a god in the first place or he/she is less than convinced that such a being exists. And who’s to say what that being’s will is, even if the agnostic half believes it does exist in some form or other?
Sin – let’s be sensible, even if the would-be commissioner hasn’t been so far – is a theological concept, no more than that. It has no place in any legal or social framework, much as fundamentalists of all faiths might wish it had. And that is the direction in which the US, under the influence of the “religious right” is drifting, to be followed in due course by the UK, unless we’re very careful and make our voices heard. Otherwise, we risk finding ourselves living in a state ruled by just another version of the Taliban.
There have been times when “sin” was publicly punished. Fornication, for example, meant public shaming for the wrongdoer (so-called) in eighteenth-century Scotland. More recently, a particularly ludicrous edict of the junta of the Greek colonels a few decades ago prohibited masturbation. How that ruling was to be enforced remains a mystery.
But there is one area where “sin” and legality have clashed over and over again, for centuries. This, of course, is homosexuality – the very issue on which the failed commissioner delivered his opinion. Punishment was commonly severe, from the pillory (a far more brutal experience than we tend to imagine: it could easily lead to blindness or brain injury, depending on the degree of self-righteous sadism of the assembled mob) to the gallows, until well into the nineteenth century.
By comparison, Oscar Wilde’s two years of hard labour, although it effectively broke his health and drastically shortened his life, was relatively mild. It’s not insignificant that the churches were among the strongest opponents of the abolition of the death penalty for homosexuality.
“Sin” or crime, why does homosexuality attract such hostility? So long as it’s consensual between people of responsibility, no-one else is affected. If there’s no victim, it can scarcely be a crime. The state isn’t affected in any way, for better or worse. To find the answer to the riddle, we must go back a very long way.
Legal condemnation and moralisers’ complaints are usually based on a few passages carefully selected from the Old Testament. This, we should remember, is a document dating back to the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age. It’s very probable that it was never set down in writing until well after the formulation of its rules, and was subject to oral transmission until then. We’re all aware of the distorting effect of so-called “Chinese whispers”. So, how reliable is the surviving written form?
More important, however, than any such consideration is the question of just how relevant it is to recent history and the present day. The long list of “abominations”, of which homosexuality is only one, may well have made some sort of sense to a Middle Eastern nomadic tribe, whose god was scarcely even to be named. Some undoubtedly were no more than ritual observances, of great age even then. Those were clearly very different times, a different environment and a very different prevailing mode of thought. It obviously makes no sense to claim that the strictures of Leviticus and Deuteronomy should apply in the greatly changed modern day. We observe no other Bronze Age rules, so why should only those apply and even be sanctified by law from time to time?
But there’s more. Professional moralisers wail about what they describe as “moral relativism”. Surely all morality, that of the Bible included, has to be relative to the times. I’ve never once, say, coveted my neighbour’s ass (forgive the term), for my neighbour, unsurprisingly, doesn’t have one. So am I allowed to covet his motorbike instead? If I do, is that an example of the contemptible moral relativism? The only ass here, I’m convinced, is the moraliser – and we all know a few of them, either personally or from broadcasts or, worst of all, from government.
The strangest aspect of the whole affair is the selectivity we observe in imposing those long-outdated biblical injunctions. Only the sexual prohibitions seem to matter. The rest are conveniently disregarded or forgotten. Of those who were shown objecting to Canon Jeffrey John’s elevation to bishop, almost all were clean-shaven. But that’s an “abomination” too, isn’t it? Had none of the ridiculously garbed convention of bishops, who meekly accepted a demand that the American church apologise for the appointment of the gay bishop of New Hampshire, Gene Robinson, really never committed the “abomination” of tucking into a pork chop or two?
Certainly, their elaborate dress was composed of more than one fibre – yet another “abomination”. Had they really never been in the presence of a woman, say their housekeeper, during her menstruation period? How would they know? But, if they had, that meant another “abomination”. But at least they weren’t gay, which is all that seemed to matter far more than anything else, though it’s hard to see why.
Some at least of our moralisers point instead to the early Christian thinker, Paul (originally Saul), and use his words instead to justify, they imagine, their condemnation of homosexuality. We shouldn’t forget that he came from a background that was strict in its observation of the Old Testament, and that he never so much as met Christ, except, it’s claimed, in a vision of some kind, which (speaking from my personal experience) may well have been an epileptic seizure. These are his longest actual remarks on the subject (Romans 1: 26 and following, in my own translation, which may be treated as reliable):
And this [i.e. disloyalty] is why God delivered them over to their disgraceful desires. Their women abandoned their natural practices for unnatural ones. And in the same way their menfolk gave up their natural desires for their women and became consumed with passion for one another. Men carried out shameful acts with each other and were made to suffer due punishment for their drifting from the proper path. Just as they failed to give due honour to God in their thoughts, God abandoned them to shamelessness, to carry out vile acts.
There’s much, much more in the same vein, but this is enough to give a flavour of the passage most commonly cited by the religious as divine hatred of homosexuality. It also appears to be the only passage, incidentally, where reference is made to lesbianism. But it’s worth reading through more than once, for there’s something else about it worth noting. The point is: homosexuality here is classed as a punishment for sin, at least as much as a sin itself.
In his lather of fury, Paul’s logic seems to have failed him. Quite simply, it doesn’t make sense. Punishment for sin is to be made to commit another sin, the loathsome “abomination” of homosexuality. And if the punishment for that is to be made to commit yet another sin (and it might well be by this argument), it’s hard to see where this process can possibly end. It’s the perfect vicious cycle.
It’s oddly significant that the illogical passage above should appear in a letter to Rome. It’s in the Vatican, we might say, that the world centre for contempt for homosexuality and much else sexual is to be found. Rome is also, of course, the capital of the country of origin of the would-be commissioner mentioned in this article. He may hold, like anyone else, personal views and beliefs, even if they do seem more suited to the 1850s than the present century. But his outburst on “sin” was unnecessary and inappropriate, we might even say sinister. In making this statement, he forfeited in advance the confidence of not just gay people. There will be other groups who must feel that there’s a guiding hand behind any other pronouncements he might have made in that role, had he not withdrawn.
Objections to his becoming a commissioner were derided in the usual quarters as just “political correctness” yet again. No, it’s more than that, much more. Whether we believe in “sin” or not (and I had any such belief beaten out of me in Catholic education), he has gratuitously insulted not just the gay minority but the 50 per cent or so of the population who happen to be female, single parents included. From any person associated with justice, not only a man who aspired to be an EU commissioner, we might expect just statements, which he has not exactly demonstrated. Dragging God and “sin” into the picture is going too far still. The only justice seems to have been Buttiglione’s withdrawal following the uproar that greeted his attempt to become a commissioner. For, had he assumed his seat, how could there have been any confidence in him in that role?