Let’s see now … I’ve been married for nine years. I was with my wife for a long time before we got married. Of course, that was before her promotion to the lofty status of ‘wife’. She took on the job as ‘girlfriend’ originally after seeing a body-language ‘situations vacant’ advertisement I displayed in a disco. She applied, was accepted and ultimately did so well that the firm put her on probation and she became a ‘fiancée’. Eventually after an excellent appraisal and a large company do she was finally promoted to ‘wife’.
Now, I would say that marriage has strengthened our relationship and moved us along together in a loving and occasionally equal partnership. We really value it … but, come to think of it now … when they brought in civil partnerships, it did undermine the foundations of our commitment to each other. I remember now, it was in the same week that they brought in civil partnerships for same-sex couples, I was in the kitchen listening to the radio telling me about the first two lesbians to marry each other and my wife walked in, and bless my soul if I didn’t turn round to the woman who up until then I had been in love with and say:
‘I hate you.’
I can only conclude that what had happened is that civil partnerships had undermined the foundations of what we thought we had together. I’m rather embarrassed to admit it now. On one occasion, when I’d recently been thinking about gay men celebrating a wedding anniversary, I inadvertently threw my wife out of an upper-storey window. The only way of explaining that barbaric act is that civil partnerships had somehow undermined the foundations of our married life together and that’s what made me do it. It’s terrible really. I got in the car and chased the limping, frightened figure of my wife up the road and in the end I ran her over. Thinking about it now, I can only conclude that what had happened was that civil partnerships had undermined the foundations of marriage to such an extent that I had no choice but to end our life together by killing my wife.
If you seriously think that two men getting married, or two women getting married, is a threat to your marriage – then get a divorce. You have nothing worth saving and you need some alone time in which to grow up. Of course, when gay couples divorce, it’s proof that marriage and long-term commitment are not for them. When straight couples divorce it’s because society (the poofs) has devalued the currency of marriage.
I’m not gay, but I stand shoulder to shoulder with the world’s lesbians, gays and bisexuals. Shoulder to shoulder, mind – not behind! No one wants that! You see, that’s the kind of harmless idiotic bigotry we want to keep alive. Straightforward bum phobia. Nothing deeper than that. It’s odd that when homophobes talk about homosexuality, so much of their focus is on the insertion of penises into bottoms. It’s like that’s all they can imagine when they think of anyone being gay. There’s so much more to gayness than bumming. Even the most cursory Google search will confirm that.
I went to a gay wedding. It was beautiful and fun. One of our closest friends from university married his long-term boyfriend and we were delighted to watch two adults who love each other declare a spoken and written commitment to each other because they see a future in which life without the other doesn’t make sense. As far as I know, neither of them is ill and in need of a cure. They may wish to be prayed for, but not so that God steps in and rips out the gay ‘cancer’ that has made them fall in love with each other. They looked happy. They wore really excellently tailored suits and there was music. Sometimes, when I’ve heard people talk about same-sex civil partnerships, there is the question, ‘Which one’s the wife?’ I can answer that for you, it’s neither or it’s both. It’s not some deviant copy of a male-female union in which they sort of have to pretend to be like Mummy and Daddy, or none of it makes sense – it’s a marriage and it has in common with all proper marriages the only property that is truly important and that is love.
Most of the Christian determination that gayness is wrong and evil comes from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis. The story has it that God made man in His image and it then turned out that man was a colossal pervert and just wouldn’t stop shagging things. The hotbed for this saucy action was Sodom and Gomorrah – try to picture Amsterdam crossed with Cardiff where the entire population are on a New-Year’s-Eve, Viagra-fuelled stag and hen night that lasts for ever. Good times. The rules were if it moved, shag it, if it didn’t move, shag it anyway and see if that gets it going. If it still didn’t move, nick it, take it home and shag it. God took a rather dim view of Sodom and Gomorrah and decided to destroy it and everyone in it. A shame, as Tesco had just bought land on the outskirts and planned a 24-hour hypermarket to bring employment to the place. There was one man who stood alone against the tide of sexual debauchery and perversion. This man was Lot. He had a wife and he had two young daughters. God favoured Lot, because he wasn’t bumming stuff like the rest of them. God sent angels of death down to Sodom and Gomorrah to destroy it utterly. This really pissed Tesco off as that’s exactly what they’d planned too. The night before the mass killing, the angels took shelter in Lot’s house. Lot let them in and refused to give them up to the men hammering down the door demanding to be allowed to have sex with the angels. Lot refused to let the men bugger the angels. Yay, Lot! Good for you! Nice one, Lot.
Then he offered his two virgin daughters to the men to be raped. He said, no, you cannot have the angels, but I have two daughters here, who are both young virgins. Would you like to have them to rape? Yay! Good for you, Lot! That’s the spirit. Offer your children up to be raped. No wonder God favoured Lot. He sounds like an absolute brick. Then he offered up his wife too … Perhaps there had recently been a spate of civil partnerships and that had undermined the foundations of Lot’s marriage to Sarah. The men refused to have sex with Lot’s wife. That’s just rude, frankly. The man had offered them his wife, for goodness’ sake! Surely decorum demands you at least try it. Then the men went away and the next day the angels killed everyone apart from Lot and his wife. Sadly, though, Lot’s wife looked back over her shoulder at the genocide in her town and was killed instantly by being turned into a pillar of salt.
From this charming story we can conclude that being gay is wrong. Nothing else to conclude here. Nothing to see. Move along please. Don’t be gay. Gayness is bad. God abhors it. Hellfire for the bad gay people. Lot was saved. Hooray for Lot. He wasn’t gay and God spared him. Good old Lot went on to be a single parent in what I suspect was one of the most awkwardly dysfunctional families in pre-Christian history.
‘Eat up your dinner now.’
‘Or what, Dad? You’ll offer me up to be raped again?’
‘Look, I was under a lot of pressure. OK? I’m sorry. Could you pass the salt, please?’
‘Oh, that’s right, let’s sprinkle some of Mum on our food and then all go out and see if we can’t get raped.’
‘Wow, you’re hostile. Abraham tried to kill his little boy, you know, so think yourself lucky.’
‘Piss off, Dad. God may like you, but I think you’re an arsehole. And we had to move house. They were building a Tesco there you know. I was down for a Saturday job.’
There are so many strange rules one can take from religious books. Some are followed and thought important, many are not. I’m wearing mixed fabrics right now, which is expressly forbidden in Leviticus. I don’t even care, they’re comfy, and I haven’t offered my children to anyone to be raped, I’m a maverick. Call me immoral if you wish, but I make my own rules. Jesus said, ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven.’ Now that may not be a hard and fast rule, but it seems that one of the main aims of being Christian is to enter the kingdom of Heaven. If you remind most wealthy Christians of the ‘camel and eye of the needle’ statement, they will most likely respond with:
‘No, no, it’s fine. We’ll have the eye of the needle knocked through. I know a little Polish man who did our conservatory. He’ll widen the whole eye of the needle up, and we’ll get the camel through the
re no probs. By the time Marek’s done with that needle’s eye we’ll have camels, donkeys and my huge 4×4 charging through in seconds. Now, what time does the kingdom of Heaven open? It’d be nice to get a good seat away from the plebs.’
*
There are some good rules that come from religion. Turning the other cheek seems like a decent idea, though there are only two cheeks to turn so it’s still really two strikes and you’re out. Unless you include the buttocks, but that can be more provocative than it is forgiving. Personally I quite like the Ten Commandments. As collections of rules go they’re not bad and for me some of them are well worth following. That said, I’m sure that mankind had figured most of those out before Moses came back down off the hill with his stone tablets. I have my doubts about humanity, as I’ve said, but I certainly have that much faith in our species. I don’t imagine that people were standing around in clusters, waiting for Moses, just indiscriminately having sex with each other, insulting their parents and murdering each other willy-nilly. Men and women stealing anything that wasn’t bolted down, lying about each other’s families, screwing each other and eyeing up the neighbour’s spouse. The return of Moses with the word of God held in his mighty grip was not met by some biblical version of The Jeremy Kyle Show.
‘He had sex with my wife!’
‘Yes, I did, you whining little bitch. She loved it. By the way, your mum’s a slag and a thief.’
‘Yes, I know that, of course she is. My mum’s always been a tart. Oi! That’s my stuff you’re nicking!’
‘So what? Fwoarrrr, look at your ox! She’s gorgeous. I’m having that ox. Look at her. Lovely. Covet covet covet.’
‘Oi, look, Moses is back.’
‘What’s he got there then?’
‘New rules apparently. Let’s have a look at them, Moses …’
Then Moses would reveal the new top ten rules for better living and various looks of horror and disbelief would grip the faces of the assembled murderers, adulterers and thieves as, for the first time in their lives, they realized everything they’d been doing was now off-limits.
‘What? We can’t do any of it? You are kidding. Have you seen his ox? She’s lush.’
‘Let’s kill Moses!’
‘No, no, look at number six.’
‘Thou shalt not murder? What? This’ll never work.’
There are plenty who would have us believe that without the moral framework suggested by religion, we would be utterly lost to a selfish, violent and monstrous existence. These are usually the same people who give a knowing, self-congratulatory smile when they hear that someone has died of AIDS. ‘As ye reap, so shall ye sow.’ Yes, and as you dress your vindictive pious bullshit up as some closeness to a loving God, so shall you be alone. These people are wrong. Morality does not belong to the faithful and it never has. People are able to distinguish between what is good and bad because unless we are insane, drunk or a Conservative, we are able to empathize. Empathy is the privilege and the curse of mankind. We are ultimately selfish creatures out to create the best environment for ourselves and our offspring, and yet we are kind enough to know what that means for other people. Even arms dealers cry at funerals. They are oddly comfortable with mass burials, but a funeral for one will often make them shed a tear. If it looks like they can’t coax one out, then a tiny sniff on the tear-gas handkerchief will coax the teardrops down their cheeks.
God chose ten rules to pass on to man. Just ten. He could have squeezed another one or two on the bottom of the tablets if He’d tried, but no. He could have used both sides if He’d chosen to. Perhaps He could have added a suggestion that people keeping other people as slaves was not OK, but He didn’t. In fairness to God, that might have clashed with the values of the slave-owners whose job it was to get the Bible all written down exactly as it happened. In politics there must be compromise and God was in an awkward coalition government with Man by the time He thought up the commandments and He didn’t want to push it. There was no mention of abstaining from child abuse in the ten – hence the current confusion in all of the Abrahamic faiths. Hardly their fault, is it, when God never specifically suggested that adults avoid touching bits with children? Maybe it was on His provisional list along with not driving a donkey on to an ox junction unless your exit is clear, and if you sprinkle when you tinkle please be sweet and wipe the seat. Personally I’d have liked to see some mention of what is an appropriate bonus to award a hard-working city banker. You have to remunerate them somehow or they’ll go to the Channel Islands or Bahamas apparently. Off you pop then. A simple ‘Thou shalt not give massive bonuses to people who do nothing more than move numbers about and hope they get bigger’ would have done it nicely. Perhaps with an added ‘Thou shalt pay thine share of the taxes in the country you got the money from, lest ye be known as a selfish greedy bastard and have the front of your shop smashed up by angry taxpayers’.
But He narrowed it down to the ten big, important ones. You’d think if you were choosing just ten you would choose carefully, wouldn’t you? But no. He wasted the first four being prissy. He blew 40 per cent of the top ten rules for Man on His own vanity and paranoia. How needy are you, God? He spent the first four commandments essentially telling Man that we’d better bloody love Him or there’d be trouble.
‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me, because I bloody hate that. I am your number one God, OK? Who’s fabulous? I am! And don’t you forget it! Thou shalt not make graven images, because I’m right fussy when it comes to art. I don’t know much but I know what I like. Thou shalt not take my name in vain. I mean it, coz that really pisses me off, OK? Don’t you dare talk about me like that, you bitch! Ooh, in all my eternity … Thou shalt keep one day a week that is special just for me, because, really … is that too much to ask? One day? Is that really too much? For me? Your creator? Come on, please. Just for a bit of “me time”. I may be God but I have needs too, you know. Ooh, I’m filling up here. Look, the other six days you can do what you like. Except make graven images of me, I know what you’re like, you’ll give me a big fat arse. I am never that old. Oooh, stop it. Don’t you talk about me behind my back. I can hear you, you know. Honouring other Gods!? I was here first! I am what I am! I am my own special creation!’
I don’t know for sure whether God’s that camp, to be honest. In my head, I think God might be Alan Carr. It seems pretty reasonable to conclude that God’s a ‘friend of Dorothy’s’, if you think about it. There is quite a lot of evidence to support the idea He’s gay. He’s highly creative. He only turns up if the music and lighting are exactly right. He wanted to father a child and He couldn’t do it himself and He hates women. You tell me what’s going on. I have an image of God on day one of the creation, draped in His best kimono, with ruby slippers on His moisturized feet and a very early recording of Judy Garland playing in the background … resplendent in a throne of mother of pearl, nonchalantly fingering His firmament … suddenly He leaps to His feet, claps once, throws His hands in the air and screeches, ‘Let there be up-lighters!’ And lo, there were up-lighters and it was good.
No one knows for sure if God is Arthur or Martha, or whether He has any preference one way or the other. The deliciousness of the irony of God turning out to be gay is too much for me to leave it alone as a thought. It’s the moment one of the Westboro Baptist Church ‘God Hates Fags’ people goes to meet his maker and discovers that not only does God love fags, He is one. Bye bye, hater … Then Hell turns out to be not so much the eternal burning fire it was made out to be, but a never-ending, compulsory karaoke bar playing songs from the shows.
Some people might find the idea of discussing God’s sexual preferences upsetting or base, but to be frank – they started it. Religious people have much to say about sex. Little of it helpful and almost none of it relevant to this time and density of population. If God prefers one sex to another or one way of doing it to another, then He’s in the game and as such it seems perfectly reasonable to ask what, if anything, He prefers
himself. There are no other Gods, we are told. We are made in God’s image, we are told. God might well be a prodigious wanker.
Religion has involved itself in issues of sex with both theory and practical exams. It has failed and needs a re-sit. Show your workings, religion; most of this looks like plagiarism. A great many religious people claim exclusive insight into what God does and doesn’t like in terms of sex. Mainly He hates gays and women, that much is clear. He frowns on masturbation, and though little is mentioned in the major religious texts, I suspect He holds a dim view of mechanical innovations such as the Rampant Rabbit and the Butt Plug. He likes procreation and in most branches of worship the conception of new followers is encouraged. Newly married couples are invited to ‘go forth and multiply’. We have. It’s not working. There’s too many of us because the going forth was easier than we’d anticipated and didn’t take long and the multiplying was fun and sexy. Got anything else? ‘Go forth and role play’? ‘Stay here and experiment’? ‘Check into a Travelodge with consenting strangers and for goodness’ sake wear a condom’?
Sex is often described as sinful. There’s no way of knowing for sure if it actually is, but there seems to be a feeling that anything as enjoyable as that must be wrong somehow. If what I’ve read is correct, it was only a few years ago that women discovered that sex might actually involve them too. Obviously for many generations women have ‘taken part’ in sexual encounters, but it seems they were thought of as little more than the garage in which the shiny boy’s car was to be parked. Religion has scorned women’s enjoyment of sex and the much-mentioned virgin status of Mary even suggests that if only women could find some way of not dirtying themselves with penises then they could pop out new followers and still be accepted in polite society. Why’s it so damn important that Mary was a virgin? The creation of a new life through sex between a man and a woman is brilliant both scientifically speaking and in practice. It even makes for very enjoyable viewing if you’re that way inclined. Mary was no better than any other mother for not having done it with Joseph. In fact, between a married couple, it’s odd and a bit sinister that they had never managed it. A womb isn’t magic and special and full of virtue before sex and then vile and ugly and full of sin afterwards. It’s a womb and upon sexual and emotional maturity it is able to facilitate new life if its owner feels inclined to have sex with a man, or turkey baster if the circumstances are different.
God Collar Page 17