Leviticus & Christian homophobia
• Homophobia
From a review of Louis Crompton's Homosexuality and Civilization. Leviticus is Fred Phelps favorite book of the Bible.
Mr. Crompton argues that Christianity created the most radical change in attitudes toward homosexuality. "The debt owed by civilization to Christianity is enormous," he writes; but so, he believes, have been Christianity's sins. In Japan, for example, before the mid-19th-century Western influence, homosexuality was "an honored way of life among the country's religious and military leaders so that its acceptance paralleled, and in some respects even surpassed, ancient Athens." It was common among Buddhist sages, part of samurai culture and an accepted aspect of the Kabuki theater world.
Christianity attacked such customs when it gained access, Mr. Crompton argues, but its assault began in the West as early as the 4th century (not the 12th century, he says, as the historian John Boswell believed).
Mr. Crompton traces Christian hostility to Leviticus, which may have been written around 550 B.C., at the very time that homoerotic poetry was thriving in Greece. It mandated death for homosexual acts. Mr. Crompton suggests that this law was an attempt to differentiate the Jews from Mediterranean cults in which transvestite priests, eunuchs and sexual activity played a central role in ritual and worship.
Edward Rothstein, The New York Times: Annals of Homosexuality: From Greek to Grim to Gay.