American Academy of Religion meeting to include gay group's promotion of homosexual practices By John H. Adams The Layman Online Friday, October 8, 2004 Robert A.J. Gagnon, one of the leading Biblical scholars and researchers on why homosexual behavior deviates from Scripture, has issued a stinging criticism of a program that is scheduled to be part of the American Academy of Religion [AAR] meeting. The "Gay Men's Group" of the academy has planned its own adjunct program – including a seminar to promote sadomasochism and multiple sexual partners as a religious experience. Gagnon, an associate professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian school, has posted on his Web site a commentary titled "Courtesy of the Gay Men's Group?" In contrast with many of his writings, including his 1,000-page The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Text and Hermeneutics, Gagnon's critique of the AAR meeting is terse. He reproduces on his Web site a listing of the program of the Gay Men's Group and offers brief comments at the end of each section. He begins by identifying the AAR: "For the uninitiated, the American Academy of Religion is the U.S. national umbrella organization for professors of religion – church historians, theologians, ethicists, scholars in world religions. Biblical scholars have their own national organization: the Society of Biblical Literature." He makes it clear that the AAR embraces a wide variety of unorthodox views. For instance, he notes that Donald L. Boisvert of Concordia University will present an abstract titled "Power and Submission, Pain and Pleasure: The Religious Dynamics of Sadomasochism," which says, "Sadomasochistic or bondage/dominance practice (sometimes also referred to as 'leather sexuality') . . . offers a particularly potent location for reflecting on gay men's issues in religion." In response, Gagnon comments: "Of what other group seeking validation in the church today can it be said that 'sadomasochistic practice offers a particularly potent location for reflecting on their religious experience?' Is this not a searing indictment of male homosexuality?" Gagnon cites and comments on 13 other abstracts, whose titles include the following words and/or phrases: "leathersex," "S&M rituals," "sadomasochism in Jeremiah," "the construction of sadomachistic theologies," "dominance and submission and Christian sacramentality," "spectacles of pain and trajectories of desire," "trans-inclusion in queer communities of faith," "the transvestite Christ," "polyfidelity (multiple partners) as Christian theo-praxis" and "Trinitarian tango." In his brief summary, Gagnon warns, "Look out." He argues that a group with a stage and an important-sounding name will try to give credibility to a wild assortment of sexual behaviors. The text of his wrapup: One wonders what is next for the Gay Men's group at AAR: the promotion of incest, "pedosexuality," and bestiality? There is certainly little or nothing in the presenters' theology that would lead away from such ultimate absurdities. There is no understanding anywhere here of the notion of structural prerequisites to sexual relationships. Eroticism and sexual intercourse is nothing more than greater intimacy. The conclusion following from the premise is inevitable: then intimacy with one's parents and children should be ever open to the "logical" progression of sexual intimacy. For sexual intimacy is for the presenters merely more love. Spread it around. Jesus' view of the relationship of love and sexual intercourse was obviously very different. For while Jesus expanded the definition of love to embrace everyone he narrowed the definition of acceptable sexual intimacy to embrace only one person of the other sex for life. Who is missing something here? Jesus or the Gay Men's group at AAR? Duh. Churchgoing Christian proponents of committed homosexual practice often get hysterical when those opposed to homosexual practice make comparisons between homosexual practice and incest, polyamory, or other forms of aberrant sexual behavior. They scoff at the "slippery slope" theory. They claim that eliminating the most basic structural prerequisite in Christian thought for acceptable sexual relationships (i.e., the two-sex prerequisite) will have no bearing on structural prerequisites regarding number (monogamy), degree of blood unrelatedness (no incest), and age. It also won't promote transvestism and other forms of transgenderism, they say. And yet it is the Gay Men's group at AAR (and an occasional lesbian) that is promulgating exactly such a vision. Like most things, the bizarre stuff that makes its way through the religious academy of scholars eventually filters down to church leaders. It represents the coming wave. Look out. The embrace of homosexual practice logically and experientially demands it.

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