Homosexuality and Civilization

Christians have sometimes suggested that homosexual practice is universally condemned. In Homosexuality and Civilization , Louis Crompton, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Nebraska and a longtime gay activist, shows that homosexuality was common and accepted in various forms in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as in China and Japan prior to the modern period. This is not an “every creative person was secretly homosexual” kind of book. Crompton is careful with his evidence, and he challenges some of the central conclusions of the late John Boswell, the most prominent of homosexual activist historians, who argued that early Christianity was never fundamentally hostile to homosexuality. Crompton demonstrates that the West’s prohibition of homosexual practice, and the severe punishments dealt out to offenders, are not the historical norm but the historical exception. Boswell notwithstanding, he shows that this Western difference is entirely due to the influence of Jewish and Christian sexual morality, derived from the Jewish and Christian Bibles. Civil penalties against homosexuals spring primarily from Leviticus 20, which “became the model for laws decreeing capital punishment for homosexuality in Europe and in as much of the world as came under Europe’s sway, down to the end of the eighteenth century.” Compton’s animus toward Christian sexual morality sometimes gets in the way of his historical judgment, most egregiously in his penchant for drawing lines of influence from the church to the Nazis. Yet, the book is useful for clarifying where we stand on this central issue of public morality. Homosexuality and Civilization demonstrates that opposition to the homosexual agenda must stand on the Bible, or it will not stand at all.