Homophobes and Donkey Sex

From time to time, my inbox is swamped with homophobic emails. Normally, it’s a single deranged person who wants to get even after I have pulverised him or her in some online chat room. Most commonly, it’s the lazy intellectual Christian who never read more than the back cover of his mass-market edition of the Bible but still thinks he knows everything there is to know about theological interpretation. An interesting feature of many of these emails from angry Evangelicals and Catholics is the bizarre use and knowledge of hard-core pornography and weird sexual practice. I suppose the idea is that I will recognise defeat and accept that gay people are perverse after looking at a picture of two men urinating on each other. If one gay man does a thing like that, all gay men must be doing it.

Anyhow, some of these emails are very funny. Today I received an email from an angry man who had read an article I wrote about American philosopher David Bradshaw and his claim that homosexuality is immoral on the same grounds as bestiality because both practices violate the body’s moral space. Bradshaw’s core argument is that God created the human body for a purpose and that every sexual act diverging from this divine intent is immoral. In short, my counter-argument reads that even if we assume that God exists and have a purpose for our bodies, we cannot know what this purpose is and must presume that the strong emotions and pleasures linked to sex are in themselves purposes. Therefore, true sexual morality cannot be sought in the bodily functions but in the situations in which people practise sex. If all participants are mature enough to act of free will, neither God nor society ought to label the act immoral.

After reading my article, the angry emailer assumes that I defend the right to rape children and animals. I will burn in hell, he writes.

Now, I don’t care much about slander in private email conversations. I have debated controversial issues like gay rights and drug legalisation since I was a teenager. It has made me thick-skinned. What makes this particular email different is a link to a video clip of American military surveillance of an Iraqi man having sex with a donkey. Maybe I’m morbid, but I really think it’s ironic when a person who calls me a "defender of bestiality" sends me a video clip like this. Unfortunately, this strange behaviour is symptomatic for the angry homophobe.