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“A one-night stand, maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s kind of self-indulgent.”
“Have you done that? Had a one-night stand?”
“A couple times. It was fun in the moment, but afterwards it seemed pointless to me. You’re not focusing on the other person, because you don’t even know her. You’re focusing on yourself. If you go around just having sex because it feels good to you—you’re not connecting to anybody. You might as well be masturbating.”
“I’d love to hear you say that in church.”
“I’d word it differently.”
“You’d kind of have to.”
“My personal feeling about why the church tries to promote sex only within marriage is that ideally it preserves the real life-affirming kind of sexuality. It’s not just about sensation and your own pleasure, it’s about connecting to someone else on a deep and serious level. Maybe churches are clumsy in how they express that sometimes.”
“Clumsy, like saying only straight people can have that.”
“Yeah, clumsy like that.”
“You don’t believe that?”
“Believe what?”
“Leviticus 18:22.”
“Oh, that again.”
“You think two men can have ‘life-affirming’ sex?”
“Yeah, I do. Of course they can.”
“Why? Don’t you have the same Bible as everybody else?”
“I do. There are a lot of different translations, but putting that aside…. My Bible tells me, in the New Testament, that Jesus Christ came with a New Covenant. That is why gentile men don’t need to be circumcised to be Christians….”
“Are you?”
“Am I?”
“Circumcised.”
“You’re easily distracted.”
“Sorry.”
“You don’t keep a kosher diet, right? You can mix cotton and linen. That’s all Leviticus. It’s the rules on how to be a good Jew. We keep the Old Testament to understand our tradition and heritage. To understand the context of Jesus’s life and teaching. But no Christian follows all of the Jewish laws in the Old Testament, as far as I know. There may be some sect somewhere, but….”
“So it’s only a sin for Jews to have gay sex?”
Paul laughed. “Well, I guess you could put it that way.”
“Too bad for Abe Cohen,” Ian said. “If the Bible says that, then why are so many churches anti-gay?”
“It’s from culture and tradition. There is a lot of the Old Testament that is worth holding onto. Churches try to pass along the best of the traditions. So there is a lot of interpretation in that. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“So what is that? Like, believe whatever you want?”
“No. Different churches have their own traditions. They’re not just making it up as they go along. They’ve decided that certain things are important. The church where you grew up—they were very focused on the fight between good and evil, right? A struggle to avoid temptation and sin.”
“Yeah.”
