Column: Use your head--what's truly sinful?

"If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them." Leviticus 20:13

Valentine's Day is a celebration of love, an occasion where all Americans, by way of candlelight dinners and flowers, can revel in their love for another. Public displays of affection are not just tolerated, they are encouraged. Wait a minute. That's not exactly right, is it? Excuse me. What I meant to say is that on Valentine's Day all straight Americans can celebrate their love through candlelight dinners and public displays of affection.

This country's attitude towards alternative sexualities is depressing. Homosexuals are considered dramatically inferior to their heterosexual counterparts. In the eyes of too many Americans, they are second-class citizens.

All of my life I have been forced to watch in disgust as I see my gay and lesbian friends verbally abused and culturally denigrated, and it tears me apart. There are days when I have so much fury that I literally can't hit something enough to release it. Three hours at the gym may leave me limping slowly out on my way back to my room, but it does nothing to alleviate the fire in my eyes. Then there are also days, like this one actually, when I just want to sit and cry.

For millennia people have read the Bible and taken it as a carte blanch rejection of homosexuality as wicked, as something to be forcibly eradicated from the soil of God's great earth. In present-day America, tens of millions of people still believe that the Bible's condemnation of homosexuality is reason enough to deny acceptance of alternative sexualities.

I don't believe in God, so maybe the faithful would just disregard what I'm about to say as the evil words of a lost soul, but please hear me out.

First of all, anyone who actually reads Leviticus front to back will encounter pages and pages of condemnations that 99 percent of Americans scoff at. Chapter 15 concerns the uncleanliness and impurity of a menstruating woman or a man who has ejaculated. Take a look: God instructs us all to essentially quarantine a woman on her period. Any man touching her is unclean for 24 hours. Does anybody take that command seriously? Of course not.

Then there is the actual matter of basing one's life decisions on a text manipulated by the Church for the last 2000 years. Anybody who has studied the New Testament knows that there exists no actual copy of the Gospels when first written. We have only fragments until complete versions emerge decades after their writers' deaths. The inclusion of books was a human decision. A primary example is that the Orthodox faith decided early on to reject the book of Revelations, a key text in most Protestant faiths (faiths that have only existed for 500 years, or 1,500 years following Christ's death). Orthodox Christians don't acknowledge its legitimacy. Who is to say that the actual figure of Jesus didn't preach tolerance of all human beings? Who is to say his followers didn't distort his message to uphold societal beliefs?

The Republican Party, and especially its faith-based constituencies, want desperately to keep the current status quo limiting the rights of homosexuals compared to their heterosexual counterparts. On its official website, www.rnc.com, the Republican National Committee lists the official GOP 2000 Platform. Under the section entitled "Renewing Family and Community," the platform states:

"We support the traditional definition of 'marriage' as the legal union of one man and one woman, and we believe that federal judges and bureaucrats should not force states to recognize other living arrangements as marriages. We rely on the home, as did the founders of the American Republic, to instill the virtues that sustain democracy itself. That belief led Congress to enact the Defense of Marriage Act, which a Republican Department of Justice will energetically defend in the courts."

There's so much bullshit in this paragraph that it's actually a little overwhelming, but let's roll up our sleeves and sift through it.

First of all, "the founders of the American Republic" signed a document declaring all men to be equal under the eyes of God, and then promptly returned home to their slave plantations.

Second, what does "relying on the home" mean? These American "homes" 40 years ago instilled the American virtues of segregation and racism. To support the decisions of "federal judges and bureaucrats," the U.S. government had to send fully armed soldiers to protect a "colored" person's right to go to the same school as whites in order so that those nice young boys, "instilled with the virtues that sustain democracy itself," didn't tear them to pieces on the schoolhouse steps. There most certainly is a precedent for the national government to step in and physically force the 50 states to uphold the moral rights of a minority, and thankfully so.

Thirdly, and this is my personal favorite, the GOP supports "the traditional definition of 'marriage.'" What the hell is that? Traditionally, i.e., hundreds of years ago, marriage meant a union between families whereupon land and wealth could be exchanged. It certainly had nothing to do with 21st century concepts of love and romance. More recently, "traditional marriage" meant that a husband controlled his household, not that a man and woman did so equally.

Simply put, there is no reason why an entire group of Americans should be held hostage simply because they choose to love another person of the same sex. Alternative sexualities deserve every single right and amenity provided to heterosexuals, whether it be to join with another human being as a couple, to raise a family or just to walk up to the person they love in broad daylight and give them a rose and a kiss.

Nick Christie is a Trinity senior and an associate sports editor. His column appears every other Monday.