Is Homosexuality Against Religions And Society?

Is homosexuality against religions and society?

Throughout history homosexuality has been considered vulgar, perverse and immoral. What is truly immoral is homophobia and that it still prevails today. Firstly, homophobia derived from prejudice and escalated to panic. Secondly, homophobic attitudes are endorsed and practiced by many places of worship, which are hypocritical to God’s concept of the Golden Rule. Thirdly, the severity of homophobia has reached a point of no return, where the lives of many innocent have been viciously taken away. Lastly, many individuals choose to practice homophobia, whether it is a personal choice or not. Homophobia is the result of fear, ignorance and intolerance and that's not from today or yesterday's century, since the 1800's, psychiatrists and psychologists have concluded that homosexuality is a mental disorder. They have believed it is brought about by misguided upbringing and their social environments.

For instance, it was believed that if the child was lacking a male - figure in the home, he would most likely be gay. Or that child abuse can lead to lesbianism when the special needs of a little girl are denied, ignored, or exploited and the future womanhood of the child is in risk. However, inconsistencies in the research subjects' abuse records ruled these theories out. And if this were the case, then why is homosexuality present in different cultures? Some believed homosexuality was caused by a difference in brain structure. In 1991, Simon LeVay published research stating that sexual orientation may be the result of differing brain structures. The hypothalamus, a region in the brain that governs sexual behavior, was the structure that LeVay was pointing as the structure at fault. In his studies of the hypothalamus, he found that in homosexual men, the hypothalamus was smaller than that of heterosexual men. Instead, it was the size of the female hypothalamus, consequently explaining their sexual tendencies.

According to Oxford dictionary, homosexual is a person who is sexually attracted to people of their own sex and it doesn't say they don't share the same rights we have, it doesn't say they can't get married or have family because they are not from other planet, they are not a lie, they are not a joke, they are people just like us but they had begun to be seen as a different category of human, separate from the rest of society, a category that disrupts society ethically, legally and morally, consequently homosexuals were labeled as anti-social and psychotic people who were destructive due their sexual preferences (Janoff, 38).

Between the 1950s and 1960s homosexuals had been frequently harassed and ridiculed by many people, including the police. Homosexuals began to fight back after the civil rights and anti-war movements by asking those who were still “in the closet” to come out publicly. The closeted homosexuals came out knowing they had several other individuals to give them the support they needed, increasing the number of homosexual organizations from fifty to eight-hundred (Ojeda 12) The 80s was a tough year for homosexuals; they were unable to fight in wars, dubbed evil by the Pope and were blamed for the expansion of a new disease, AIDS. When AIDS had emerged in the 1980s many of the stigmas and stereotypes surrounding homosexuality had been created. Between 1980 and 1990 thousands of homosexual males had succumbed to the disease, giving the disease the title “The Gay Plague” (Ojeda, 13). Gay activists began to encourage condom use to the public, lowering the amount of AIDS cases by nearly 20,000. For many years have homosexuals have been named evil adversaries.

The idea of homosexuality is typically a taboo for many religions, especially Christians. The “Golden Rule” stated in the Bible is ‘treat others how you would like to be treated’, yet homosexuals are persecuted by many Christians today. Very few accept the concept of homosexuality and those who practice it. The Bible has made comments on the ‘sin’ of homosexuality in many verses. Leviticus 20:13 states,

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