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An uneasy conversation with Michael Kirby

  • 25 June 2012

The homosexuality debate in church and society is an uneasy and often destructive conversation not entered into lightly. I write in response to the Introduction to and launch address  for Five Uneasy Pieces(FUP) by the distinguished Michael Kirby earlier this month at Eureka Street TV. 

On one occasion I enjoyed Judge Kirby’s engaging conversation at dinner at New College at the University of NSW. However this is a more difficult conversation where unfortunately he speaks with a more polemical tone.

I also write as co-editor of Sexegesis: An Evangelical Response to Five Uneasy Pieces on Homosexuality. This is a collection of writings by Australasian Anglican scholars in response to FUP’s invitation to conversation about Scripture and sexuality. 

Sexegesis is literally exegesis or reading out from texts on (homo)sex. We argue that the Five Uneasy Pieces (FUP) advocating a revisionist reading of the Bible on homosexuality, do not – apart from Meg Warner and Alan Cadwallader’s pieces – really do exegesis. 

Instead they generally jump quickly to wider hermeneutical or interpretive issues that relativise the relationship of Scripture and tradition to other authorities. These include science or (selective) experience (of practising gays, not celibate gays), or contemporary ethical and cultural standards like inclusivity, not the historical and global catholicity of the church across time and space. 

We don’t ignore these authorities, but first emphasise the text on sex, in context. As sociologist Peter Berger once said: ‘Whereas Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss, today we betray him with a hermeneutic’. 

Both sides thus need to beware: ‘Conservatives’ if they slip from opposing homosexual acts to opposing homosexual people, lacking grace; The ‘liberals’ for frankly writing, as Michael Kirby admits, ‘very easy pieces’. Well before Malcolm Fraser, Jesus said (Christian) ‘life wasn’t meant to be easy’. Kirby, and the FUP authors, in Bonhoeffer’s terms, are cheapening grace.

Here the rhetoric of the homosexuality debate seriously clouds the issue and raises the temperature. Gay activist and academic Denis Altman notes that making homosexuality into an identity, not an activity issue, was a stroke of political genius. It meant that anyone who opposes homosexual practice appears to be opposing homosexual people or homophobic or hateful, as Kirby’s rhetoric, GetUp’s, Sunrise’s and the Greens’ claim, making reasoned debate impossible. 

Only in a society practising sexual idolatry as the basis of identity could such confusion arise. As the gay sexologist Foucault said: ‘Sexuality has replaced the soul’. The over-heated rhetoric of denying people their
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