gaydar

[freckles_and_doubt]

A Smart Bitches link to a blog describing anti-gay shenanigans at an erotica convention hosted in Texas has sparked a random musing attack. What is it about homosexuality which makes it so utterly anathema to fundamentalist Christianity? It's not just a "thou shalt not", it's a deep-seated, frothing, disproportionate response which suggests that somewhere, something is being very profoundly threatened.

• I mean, yes, it's us/them othering, a defensive terror against a perceived threat to a particular lifestyle, but surely gay relationships aren't the worst threat to Christian family values? Heterosexual divorce strikes more deeply at those values, as do heterosexual relationships which eschew marriage, because they both partake of and reject the ideal. Reactions against gay marriage make more sense in this context, but it doesn't explain the more general fulminations against homosexuality as a whole.
• It's not just the "sex is only for procreation" thing, because that should apply equally to non-procreative heterosexual sex, and really it doesn't: a lot of fundamentalist rhetoric only really has a problem with hetero sex when it's convenient to invoke it as a means of controlling women. Uninhibited hetero male sex is frowned at, not frothed at, and in fact is often condoned. The anti-gay thing is on a wholly different level.
• It also isn't the direct biblical prohibition bit, either, those have always been completely selectively applied in fundamentalist rhetoric. (I know whereof I speak, here. Baptist teenagerhood).
• Frustrated patriarchalism? My sense is that fundamentalist rhetoric is more directed at gays than lesbians, which is all terribly Victorian (you don't have to worry about the women because they don't enjoy sex anyway), but which also suggests a kind of outrage that actual men should have moved over into Eve's camp of transgression instead of upholding male order.

I dunno. All of the above? still doesn't really explain the profound level of unease. I am at a loss. Also, very tired after the Thursday Vampire Tut and four days of sinus headache. Also, my jaw aches, my throat hurts, my stomach twinges. Woe. Send new body, this one defunct.

Random distraction: animated Bayeux Tapestry. Not just for you SCA geeks, this is beautifully done.

Bunny Threat Level: gah.