Noah's Rainbow
During the most recent round of Republican gay-bashing — i.e., the national "debate" about the "gay marriage" amendment — I listened to the rehash of the usual vacuous and specious arguments about why gay people should not be allowed to participate in the institution of matrimony, and reflected on some responses. I suffer from l'éspirit d'éscalier to an acute degree, so I'm only now getting around to them.
This one is for the "God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" crowd.
Okay, let's work with this idea that the Adam and Eve thing really was God's signalling that the human club was to be exclusively heterosexual, and let's overlook for a moment that the first thing all that unbridled testosterone led to was original sin, closely followed by the world's first murder, just as soon as there were enough people to have a murderer and a victim. Skip ahead through lots and lots and lots of begats until we get to another of the biblical literalists' favorites: the flood in the time of Noah.
Remember this one? The one that killed everything and everyone except those who were on the ark (and also, evidently, spared fish, but no matter). Why the flood? Recall: God was so put out with the way humans had turned out that he decided to wipe them off the face of the Earth and start over with something better. So, what's the obvious deduction here? That the heterosexual-only version of humankind didn't work out so well.
And so, the flood. Before the flood: straights only; after the flood: gay people were part of the new, improved version of humankind. Where did they come from, one might wonder?
Although it doesn't really matter, there area couple of options. The best option for the creationists is simply to assume that God did it as part of his new, improved design, for whatever inscrutible reason He happened to have had. (Perhaps he thought the pre-flood Earth was too drab and underdecorated.)
Another option, for those inclined towards a genetic cause of homosexuality, is that one or more of Ham, Shem, or Japheth — Noah's boys — were gay and his (or their) progeny inherited. Or, to be more precise if the "gay gene" is inherited through the female line, one or more of their unnamed wives could have been lesbian. The probability that at least one of the sons or daughters-in-law was gay is > 35%.*
But the details don't really matter. The big picture is this: antediluvian: straights only, didn't work; postdiluvian: gays and straights together in a new, improved creation, still going strong.
And don't forget this bit of symbolism, usually overlooked by the fundamentalists: God was so happy with his bold, new creation — which evidently differed from version 1.0 by the introduction of gay people — that he sent Noah a rainbow, the universal symbol of gay pride, as a sign of his covenant that this time He got it right.
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*Apply the binomial distribution, with pgay = 0.1; if pgay = 0.05, the probability is >23%, still a good bet.
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I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Tuesday, 13 June 2006 at 02.30
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This is truly remarkable. So much so — and owing to the fact I'm laid low with a flu bug or something — I scarcely know what to say. It's certainly a very original thought.
on Thursday, 15 June 2006 at 11.32
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Brilliant deductions Uncle!
on Monday, 19 June 2006 at 20.47
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