Readers Reply

Face Up to What the Bible Says—And Then Ignore It

There is an unfortunate tendency for people to reinterpret passages from the Bible that seem to advocate ideas with which they strongly disagree. Susan Ackerman seems to be doing this in her column “When the Bible Enters the Fray,” BR 16:05. For example, in commenting on Romans 1:26–27, she writes: “For Paul, ‘natural,’ when used in a sexual context, refers to the penetration of a subordinate person by a dominant one.” Now, it might be true that Paul had a peculiar notion of what is “natural” and “unnatural,” and I’ve read a number of fascinating articles that have put forth something very similar. But any suggestion that Paul warmly embraced egalitarian same-sex erotic relationships and only wanted to condemn nonegalitarian same-sex erotic relationships is utter nonsense. There is simply no evidence to support such a claim.