Status Updates From Christianity, Social Tolera...

…this codification and consolidation of power entailed loss of freedom for distinctive or disadvantaged social groups…it seems that women steadily lost power after the twelfth century… Some groups became real minorities for the first time. Pressure for conformity and corporate unity was not limited to institutions.
It appeared in all classes.

…there may have been factors such as an increase in the number of rural immigrants to cities which affected later medieval sexual tolerance…another factor…the rise of absolute government…The Inquisition arose to eliminate theological loose ends and divergences of opinion.

Outside of Spain…gay people…often rose to positions of prominence and power…the early Middle Ages was not a period of consistent oppression for most minorities…the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries were periods of "openness" and tolerance in European society, times when experimentation was encouraged, new ideas eagerly sought, expansion favored in both the practical and intellectual realms of life.

…the last Jewish poet to continue the tradition of gay Hebrew poetry in Spain wrote in the thirteenth century. After his death the voice of Europe's gay minority was stilled, not to be heard again for centuries, and not until the present century with the variety and profusion of the eleventh and twelfth.

…characterize it unequivocally as ceremonially unclean rather than inherently evil… such behavior [homosexuality] had been forbidden the Jews as part of their distinctive ethical heritage or because it was associated with idolatry, not as part of the law regarding sexuality and marriage, which was thought to be of wider application…it was not the physical violation…but the interior infidelity of the soul.

The Hebrew word "toevah" (navin), here [Leviticus] translated "abomination," does not usually signify something intrinsically evil, like rape or theft (discussed elsewhere in Leviticus), but something which is ritually unclean for Jews, like eating pork or engaging in intercourse during menstruation, both of which are prohibited in these same chapters.

None of the terms…would have suggested homosexuality... The Vulgate rendered the terms as "effeminati" and "scortator." Only the former could be taken as relating to gay sexuality, but in fact almost no theologians invoked these passages as condemnations of homosexual behavior until after the mistranslations of the words into English.

Mistranslations of this word began very early. The Jewish scholars who effected the Septuagint translation into Greek in the third and second centuries apparently had considerable difficulty in rendering "kadesh" in Greek: they employed no fewer than six different terms to translate the one Hebrew word.

Even if these were accurate translations, the word [sodomy] would not necessarily imply homosexuality, since by the early seventeenth century "sodomy" referred to "unnatural" sex acts of any type and included certain relations between heterosexuals anal intercourse, for instance. But in fact these are simply mistranslations of a Hebrew word for temple prostitute.

Some modern readers may have difficulty imagining that a breach of hospitality could be so serious an offense as to warrant the destruction of a city… (in Genesis) the Lord was already inclined to punish the Sodomites… in the ancient world inns were rare outside of urban centers, and travelers were dependent on the hospitality and goodwill of strangers not just for comfort but for physical survival.

Sodom is used as a symbol of evil in dozens of places, but not in a single instance is the sin of the Sodomites specified as homosexuality. Other sins, on the other hand, are explicitly mentioned. Ecclesiascus says that God abhorred the Sofomites for their pride, and the book of Wisdom advances the same theory that Bailey and others have more recently propounded.

Its etymology [sodomy] is probably a misprision of history, and it has connoted in various times and places everything from ordinary heterosexual intercourse in an atypical position to oral sexual contact with animals. At some points in history it has referred almost exclusively to male homosexuality and at others almost exclusively to heterosexual excess.

In spite of misleading English translations which may imply the contrary, the word "homosexual" does not occur in the Bible… There are of course ways to get around the lack of a specific word in a language, and an action may be condemned without being named, but it is doubtful in this particular case whether a concept of homosexual behavior as a class existed at all.

Although it is hard to imagine a more profound change in popular morality than that which took place between the time of the later Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages,