Christian Voice and the Christian Institute (neither of which I've heard of before) have decried Elton John's assertion in a recent magazine interview that Jesus was a gay man. Christian Voice had the balls to say that John was simply attention grabbing--hardly a surprise, given the fact that the singer/songwriter is an entertainer, duh, and blithely blind to the irony that Christian Voice (did I say I'd never heard of it before?) seems overly anxious to pin its name on a controversy involving an internationally recognized pop star.
It seems to me like there are many groups (Christian and gay and whatever) whose sole purpose in the universe is to take offense and fly to the media to show off their chagrin to the blinding flashbulbs.
Groups similar to these two were red in the face, spitting polka-dotted piss, when Martin Scorsese in 1988 released The Last Temptation of Christ, which suggested that Christ might have taken a wife--in a flashback, alternative-reality fantasy--though when the book upon which the film was based came out almost 30 years earlier, apparently not an eyebrow had been raised.
It is not so much assertions about Christ's sexuality as it is the opportunity to grab some face time on TV that fires up this type of Christian.
And, oh, by the way Elton John is hardly the first to suggest that Jesus had homosexual tendencies--in the twelfth century, St Aelred of Rievaulx suggested that Jesus and John the beloved disciple were not only an item, but actually married to each other. (So also believed James I of England, the King James of King James Bible fame.)
Which brings me to my point.
If Jesus came to save the world, the whole wide world, why is it that such a small group of crackpots owns the copyright on him?
Surely, John and St Aelred have as much right to surmise that Jesus was a fisher of menfolk as Christian Voice does to imagine him as some sort of Caucasian NFL hunk with right-wing politics and a five-step program for personal financial success.
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