First Things RSS Feed - Melinda Selmys

Porn for the Privileged

Tue, 13 Oct 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Years ago, when I was a young radical feminist, I recall marching in the annual Take Back the Night Rally in my hometown. We marched through the streets, occasionally stopping to shout slogans in front of various institutions which were considered bastions of male privilege. One of the stops on the route was always a local porn shop where we would chant, “Porn is the theory, rape is the practice.”

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James Joyce: Right About the Church?

Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0400

In the opening line of James Joyce’s Ulysses , stately, plump Buck Mulligan bears “a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” Holding the bowl aloft he declares, “ Introibo ad altare Dei .” Mulligan, in this symbolic action, expresses Joyce’s critique of Christianity: a combination of sadism, the razor, and narcissism, the mirror.

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What I Mean By Acceptance

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 14:51:52 -0400

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How to Speak About Homosexuality

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Michael Voris’ “ FBI (Faith Based Investigation) into Homosexuality ,” a 94-minute video he recently released on his website ChurchMilitant.tv , was not easy for me to watch. It is harder for me to review. I’m tempted to rip into its bloody meat and leave behind a mangled carcass as a warning to others who might desire to make something similar. To do so, however, would be to misunderstand what Voris’ presentation is, what it is for, and how it needs to be addressed for the Church to speak to the LGBTQ community.

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The Pastoral Response to Homosexuality

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 00:01:00 -0400

In his September 1, 2011 column “Gay and Christian,” Russell Saltzman addressed my article in the New Oxford Review , in which I sketched a brief history of homosexual politics over the past two and a half millennia as a background for understanding the present controversy. I wrote that: “It is an uncomfortable fact that for a long time a campaign of hatred and persecution has been waged against those who experience same-sex attractions.” Saltzman takes issue with what he imagines to be an argument against the authority of St. Paul’s theological views on the morality of homosexuality. He interprets my argument as proposing that: “The contemporary gay experience [is] non-exploitative, mutually enriching, and increasingly monogamous [and] ought to be accepted as a normal alternative.”

That is not my argument at all. There are two basic elements to the Christian response to homosexuality: the theological, and the pastoral. I have absolutely no disagreement with the theological argument that was put forward by St. Paul. What I was trying to explain is the harsh pastoral tone so often taken in early and medieval writings on the subject of homosexuality.

While it seems obvious to me that we can’t simply throw out the moral teaching on homosexuality without completely unraveling the fabric of Christian sexual teaching, it seems equally obvious that we can no longer justify the persecution and castration homosexuals have experienced for much of history. In other words, it is necessary to distinguish between the visceral, emotional reactions which ancient writers”including St. Paul”had towards homosexuality, and the theological doctrine which developed out of a holistic Scriptural vision of sex.

This distinction must be made by orthodox Christians, not in order to weaken St. Paul’s teaching on homosexuality, but rather to strengthen it. Let’s look at Romans 1, the most often quoted and detailed examination of homosexuality in the Pauline corpus:

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