Christianity as a Bypass for Homophobia.
Being gay or a member of the LGBTQIA + community has always been a very difficult situation to navigate especially in minority households. Homophobia is deep-rooted in many cultures, but for this particular little tangent that I am about to partake in will be mainly focusing around the LatinX household, this being because that is my community and I would hate to speak on behalf of all minorities when the struggle of homophobia in LatinX culture is what I am most familiar with.
I have a firm belief in which I am still uncovering that areas of society like homosexuality and gender equity are things that were much more accepted and appreciated in pre-colonial LatinX culture. There is so much erasure of precolonial history for Aztec-Mexican and Latin culture that it is difficult to pin-point when the roots of homophobia began to ascend and at what points of history did the Aztecs and Mayans express gratitude for gender being absent in terms of love. In Eastern philosophy traditional Chinese culture was apparent in being tolerant of homosexuality, Plato had distinguished love from gender, stating that love had no physical form of body, writers such as Herodotus and Xenophon explored aspects of homosexuality but their messages were primarily in the subject of pederasty.
Catholicism being grounded in Hispanic culture has much to do with the lack of acceptance for the LGBTQIA + community and it also has much do with why so many hispanic men and women are conservative. But, the actual breakdown of homophobia in the bible was never written in the first place. In 1946, the word pedophile was translated to homosexual. All text prior to 1946 did not contain the word homosexual nor did it have any mention of the angst against same sex love. The actual term of homosexuality was developed in the 19th century by Austrian-born Hungarian psychologist, Karoly Maria Benkert.
Gender equity was a foundational element of Aztec culture. 16th century documents exhibit that the birth of all living things required that male and female contributions were to be complimentary of each other without gender hierarchy. In Aztec culture, the earliest cosmic gods were complimentary male and female figures: two primordial gods, Ometecuhtli (Lord of Duality) and Omecihuatl (Lady of Duality). Spanish colonial influence reigns in our culture to this day and it hurts our queer communities. So often we mention colonization as a catastrophic blow to our culture, but we also dismiss that homophobia is a product of that colonial influence. It makes sense that the predominately conservative catholic church transcribed homophobia into our culture, especially given that in early colonial history indigenous and LatinX people were unable to access a lot of religious enterprises and were therefore picking up only oral and forced upon ideas.
The point of this is that, conservative christians too often use their religion as a bypass for homophobia. “I don’t say that homosexuality is an obstruction, the bible does”… except that the bible has no actual history or documentation of being anti-gay. There is no message of homosexuality being an innate dimension of sexual orientation. Gender and sexual preference was not even understood in biblical and early historic times… probably because of the lack of gender inequality in pre-religion times.
So christianity is not a bypass for your homophobia, but your homophobia is a bypass for your personal ignorance.