The evolution of thought on gay marriage shows how religions can adapt to humanistic trends of society, but religious fundamentalists refuse to budge from ancient prejudices, a challenge confronting not only Judaism and Christianity but Islam, as ex-CIA officer Graham E. Fuller describes.
By Graham E. Fuller
Human sexuality has always been a deeply controversial social issue in all societies. So is religion. Put them together and you have a powerful emotional brew.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week legalizing gay marriage poses a new challenge to Islamic communities in the U.S. The same goes for Christian and Jewish communities as well – at least to their most conservative elements.
One of the families featured on TLC’s 2011 series, “All-American Muslim”
Religions throughout human history are the historical source of most morality and ethics, not easily overturned. Hostility to homosexuality, for example, is embedded in the Old Testament, was inherited into Christianity, and later into Islam by much the same process; all three essentially viewed it as an “abomination,” even though the practice is as old as mankind. In reality of course there is little that is “unnatural” in almost any aspect of human behavior, even when it is not mainstream.
With human evolution, however, humans have slowly come to perceive religion and the nature of the sacred in an evolving light; this is brilliantly discussed in Karen Armstrong’s study, A History of God – how thinking about the very nature of God has slowly changed.
And so religions over time have split on questions of the meaning of religion in society and the range of what should be prohibited. Such debates are still underway (even if often in secular guise) on issues of the degree of sanctity of marriage, divorce, abortion, minimal age of sexual permission, alcohol, drugs, incest and “out-of-wedlock” children. Every religion has both conservative and liberal wings interpreting these issues.
The public sphere and the private sphere can differ. Publicly, religion establishes norms (evolving later into more “secular” laws) that it imposes upon societies. Privately, there can be latitude for what…