We've seen how Green tried to prosecute the BBC for showing Jerry Springer: The Opera. We've also seen how he asked for his court costs to be waived once he'd lost the case (see more on that here and here and on the National Secular Society's website here, where we learn that Green has made an offer the BBC can refuse). Ironically, his pursuit of Springer may well have helped to put an end to the UK blasphemy laws, which were duly dumped earlier in the summer.
Now, my fellow blogger Barry Duke over at the Freethinker blog has drawn my attention to Green's naïve attempt to explain to us why homosexuality is wrong, in a press release entitled "Two homosexuals can't be 'one flesh' ".
He begins with a generalisation: "The injunctions against homosexual activity in scripture are not to do with promiscuity, although that it an inevitable part of both male and female homosexuality."
He doesn't explain why it is inevitable. Yes, there's promiscuity among all sexually aware beings, and that goes for a lot of heterosexuals, too. But why is it inevitable, Mr Green – for either cohort?
He goes on:
No, "thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind" is as clear as "thou shalt not lie carnally with thy neighbour's wife," and "neither shalt thou lie with any beast" which are the neighbouring verses in Leviticus 18. It is as crazy to say that faithful homosexuality is allowed as faithful adultery or faithful bestiality.
Again, when the Apostle Paul describes homosexual desires as "vile affections" in Romans 1, he makes no exceptions for those who really sincerely think that is "how they were born".
It is impossible for anyone with a scrap of common sense to equate the sexual dead-end of homosexuality with the life-giving God-given institution of marriage.
Civil Partnerships, or any homosexual pairings, are a grotesque parody of marriage. The Lord Jesus repeated the words of Genesis when He said "a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the twain shall be one flesh." Becoming one flesh is something a pair of homosexuals can never do. They are simply not physically and emotionally complementary like a man and a woman are.
Even the parts of the body argue against any view that homosexuality is on a par. Frustrated by their inability to enjoy sexual intercourse, homosexuals either press into perverted use a part of the anatomy perfectly designed for the extraction of water from solid bodily waste, or they engage in mutual masturbation. Neither is in any way endorsed or sanctioned by Almighty God or commons sense.
Homosexuals need our pity and the saving and healing power of Jesus Christ; they don't need well-meaning but error-strewn attempts to make them feel that something which God describes as an abomination is in any way acceptable. The loving way to deal with their problem is tough, but then the path to life was ever narrow.
Well, in a sense, he's right – if you accept (a) the existence of God and (b) that he said what we're told he said (there have been many interpretations of all that Leviticus stuff, remember). Given those things, he's right within the context of his own belief system.
Where he's utterly wrong, however, is that there's any proof of a god (or of God), let alone that primitive people writing what we now call the scriptures got it right. They've been spoken, written down, transliterated, tranlated, interpreted, reinterpreted, updated. But, of course, that is irrelevant if there was never any god to dole out the laws.
So we're left with a misguided man who never fails to entertain. We watch his antics as we would some poor sucker on a sitcom who is the butt of everyone's humour, who always slips on the banana skin, who always draws the short straw, who always gets things wrong, who always walks into the lamppost. It's almost – I say almost – possible to feel as sorry for him as we might for that sitcom character and his or her pratfalls.
It's worth adding a bit from an email the Freethinker editor, Barry Duke, sent me today. I'm sure he won't mind. "I should point out", he said, "that whenever I have come face to face with Green and his cronies, I always ask them why their perfect god, who created the perfectly designed human being, located the male G-spot up the arse. I have so far elicited many a blush, but not a single explanation."
Well, they don't explain: they just believe. And that's not a human thing to do. But, then, since when did fundamentalists understand what it means to be human?
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