Because Jesus

During my three years as a graduate student at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Brother Jethro was a fixture on campus, if only one day out of the academic year. See, our campus had an area of roughly 45 square feet on its front lawn called the Free Speech Zone, where you basically had ethical carte blanche to voice your opinions without fear of reprisal. There is of course a hilariously disturbing irony about the existence of the Zone, which is that it implies GCSU — a public university — does not support the notion of free speech in general. I’m not sure how old the Zone is, and it very well could be an antiquated holdover from a bygone era, one that our comparatively progressive policies simply overlooked. There’s nothing on it in the school’s handbook, yet there it sits, encompassing within its parameters a stretch of sidewalk, a few hedges, some geraniums and — somewhere along the Fourth Circle of Irony — the campus’ American flag. But that’s not what this is about. Brother Jethro looks like someone hired a scarecrow to preside over Colonel Sanders’ funeral. He wore a coal-black suit at least two sizes too big, a bolo tie, and black-rimmed Coke bottle glasses. A stranger might guess his age to be anywhere from 60 to 85. I’d guess 138. His hair was blackened with shoe polish and slicked back into a combination ducktail and widow’s peak. He couldn’t have been more than 5’5”, and his walking stick towered over him. Sometimes, when he would lift it a few inches off the ground in a fit of spiritual fervor recalling equal portions of Puritan and professional wrestler, the weight of it would tilt him forward, and he would slam it back down to keep upright. One more thing: Brother Jethro hated, hated masturbation. It was the key point of his stump speech, and he shouted about it to the heavens and to any co-ed who happened to be passing by at the time. All day he maintained his post, railing upon the inherent evils of self-pleasure, occasionally getting so worked up that his assistant (I know, right?) would have to ease Brother J into a folding chair strategically placed behind him, whereupon he would rise again and continue the tirade. If it were staged, it would be a piece of performance art on par with an Andy Kaufman bit. More than once I held out hope that we were simply the victims of some sort of flesh-and-blood Rick Roll. But we weren’t, and it wasn’t. It was, to paraphrase the great musicians/philosophers Anaal Nathrakh, “real, all too f***ing real.” It was conspicuous, embarrassing and supremely awkward to boot. Georgia College & State is a pretty small campus in terms of physical dimensions, and you had to be clear on the other side of the grounds to hope that Brother Jethro was out of earshot. Words like “masturbation” and “semen” are not negative in and of themselves, but any word can be made discomforting by screaming it at someone. Imagine me walking up to you in a restaurant and shouting “KIWIS! THE SEEDS OF THE KIWI ARE GRITTY! KIIIIIIWWWWIIIIIISSSS!” Go on, imagine it, and sleep well tonight. Brother J, when pressed by college students with an inferiority complex and nothing better to do, of course justified his views by referencing chapter 38 of the Book of Genesis: 8And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother’s wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother. 9And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother.10And the thing which he did displeased the LORD: wherefore he slew him also. The typical argument here is that God slew Onan because of the inherent evil of the act itself, ergo, masturbation royally pisses God off (it’s not even really masturbation in the story, but go figure) Most Biblical scholars, however, have thoroughly debunked that theory, noting that the author (whoever it was) took pains to contextualize the situation: Onan’s brother had died, and so, in an arrangement known as a Levirate union, he was responsible for impregnating his sister-in-law. He willfully and knowingly defied God in this sense, merely through the whole seed-spilling incident. I don’t know how Brother Jethro votes, but there are some parallels to be found, I think, between him and the current selective, hypocritical social conservative agenda. Social conservatives exhibit a remarkable ability to cast themselves as staunch defenders of faith and religion, marginalizing low-income, gay and women voters through a series of initiatives based on religious conscience. Never mind for the moment that the Bible never mentions abortion, contraception or any other form of birth control, because how could it? No, the truly telling discrepancy lies in how the current social climate regards the handling of homosexuality and poverty. There are several mentions of condemning homosexuality in the Bible: Leviticus, Deuteronomy, 1 Samuel, Isaiah, etc. So if we’re basing our current social actions on a word-for-word reading of a 2,000-year-old text, then okay, maybe they’ve got a point here. But if we’re going to condemn homosexuality based on that, then what about this: Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. (Ezekiel 16:49) It’s right there: God says help the poor, damn the rich. And yet there are initiatives in place to defund Planned Parenthood (the only means by which most low-income women can even get healthcare), to cut back on Medicare, etc. Mitt Romney says he wants poor single mothers to have “the dignity of work.” Because their lazy asses are sitting around, y’know, caring for their children and all that, not able to pay their bills because they can’t afford daycare, and in poor health because Planned Parenthood got stripped. This striking tendency to so selectively, self-servingly read a text like the Bible is laughable at best, damningly hypocritical at worst. We’ve managed to transcend what the Bible says about slavery, the blatant subservience of women to men (I’d like to think) and even minutiae like haircuts and red meat (Leviticus is nuts). Though, regarding the whole poverty thing, I guess I can’t blame Republicans: they could sell what they possess, give to the poor and follow Christ (Matthew 19:21). But with Christ apparently pulling them in so many different directions, it’s probably simpler to just stay rich.You Might Also Like: