For The Bible Told Me So movie Extra Credit

Desmond Tutu said something along the lines of I can’t image God saying you were black, you should have been white, you were female you should have been male, and you were homosexual, you were heterosexual.  This quote really struck me. I find it to be true and very insightful.

The movie For the Bible Told Me So tells stories of people who have struggled to deal with their children’s homosexuality; some people have handled it better than others.  These people are all Christians, though they come from different denominations. Many of them are or were fundamentalist Christian or are very conservative. Another discussion from the movie was the discussion around literal interpretations of the Bible. First of all, this is quite impractical we do not sell our daughters anymore; we do not think that stoning is an acceptable punishment anymore, things change. Also as one theologian commented how different people interpret the Bible is affected by their social standing, literal interpretations can be very different for many people. Also, it is important to recognize historical and cultural contexts of specific texts. For instance many words have different meanings in English then in Hebrew. One example of this is the word abomination, it did not typically mean bad but abnormal.

 There was one story that was very fascinating. The mother had been a very conservative Christian and believed that homosexuality was an abomination against God. Her daughter informed her that she was a lesbian, and she shamed her daughter. After not talking with her daughter for several months she tried to make up with her but her daughter informed her that she did not want to forgive her mother, the daughter later committed suicide. After her daughter’s death, the mother began to read and understand homosexuality. She used her daughter’s death as a catalyst to begin to see the need for homosexual rights. She reported feeling blessed because now she has many gay and lesbian sons and daughters, and that she can do for them what she wasn’t able to do for her daughter. Stories like this dishearten me. It is necessary to correct systems of oppression. A parent’s job is to love their children unconditionally no matter what. Children and young people should not be afraid to be who they are and to freely express themselves.

I was also interested in some of the science that was discussed in the film. The movie argues that we do not know why people are gay just as we do not know why they are heterosexual. Science and genetic research suggests that homosexuality is probably genetic. It also suggests that the more boys a women has the more likely she is to have a gay boy. This is potentially because a women’s body sees the male baby as a danger to herself and attacks it with anti-bodies. The more boys she has the more successful her body is at feminizing the boy, thus the more likely he is to be gay.

The movie For the Bible Tells Me So is very interesting.  It examines people of many different Christian backgrounds and how they were taught to deal with homosexuality and how they have realized that was wrong, mainly because of their children.