To Be Straight With You
Lyttelton
American Briefs
Above the Stag, 15 Bressenden Place, SW1
It’s been said that the Catholic Church has always known how to deal with extremists. It also knows — or used to know — how to deal with homosexuals. Monasteries populated by ‘celibate’ bachelors, nunneries teeming with wimpled lesbians, these were the discreetly sanctioned gay playgrounds which gave the Church licence to exploit a talent pool it would have lost had it rigorously pursued the technical prohibition against homosexuality. In fact, the Old Testament God isn’t a particularly virulent homophobe. Cattle-rustlers and liars are mentioned in the Ten Commandments. Gays aren’t. And you have to read the Bible, and the Koran for that matter, pretty closely to find the specific verses of denunciation. But in recent times these scriptural footnotes have provided Christian and Islamic fundamentalists with a worldwide charter for persecution.
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