Thought crimes

I have been watching the homosexual schism with interest. By that I mean churches distancing themselves from one another and sometimes splitting up within, over the issues of gay sex and gay marriage. As a student of church schisms it is interesting to have one unfold before my eyes.

I have heard, over and over, assurances from traditionalists that having gay desires is never the sin, the sin consists only in homosexual copulation. I have a question about that. I am not sure I am able to figure out an answer. Check out the sidebar: I am not here to propose final answers but to raise questions.

If looking at a woman to lust after her is a sin, how is it not sin if one looks instead at a man?

What if for years many of us have been reading it wrong, and the problem with a man looking at a woman lustfully is not that it is in itself sin, but predisposes us to the thing that is the real sin, causing us to surrender in advance to the temptation, taking away our resistance to sinning should an opportunity arise to take her to bed? On that view the reading of "already committed adultery with her in his heart" is that a decision he has made, in viewing her that way, predisposes him toward later, sinful action.

When David looked at Bathsheba that way, did he sin at that point and then sin again, compounding the error, when he took her for his own? Or did his lustful looking, rather, open the door for his actions, and it was his actions, not his thoughts, that were the sin?

What I am looking for here is consistency between one case and another, a man lusting after a woman or a man lusting after a man (or a woman after a woman or a woman after a man).

Are the cases different? For if we are saying that lustful desires of  a man for a man are all right, but not such desires of a man toward a woman, then we have created a puzzling double standard that is more burdensome upon heterosexuals.

One way to out of this quandary is to say that the cases are equivalent, but that what we are talking about when it comes to looking and lusting is not the same thing as a generalized desire to have sex, whether the sex one wants is with the other sex, or one's own. Then we might say that the problem is really the lustful attitude that leads us into wrong sexual encounters, not the desire to have sex. Our thought life only becomes a problem when the lusting is specific to a particular person who is the object of desire, and sex with that person would be wrongful, but we have in our minds made it into a good thing not a bad one.  I see a very practical problem. Has anyone ever had generalized sexual desires without the thoughts sometimes turning specific, and for the wrong person?

To put that another way, thinking in general that women are desirable is all right, clearly, but when you narrow it down to desiring a specific person, and she is one you aren't supposed to gratify yourself with, that is where trouble lies--if you tell yourself that gratifying yourself with her would be a good thing not a bad thing. If you think along those lines you will likely sin with her given the chance. But is anyone capable of doing the one kind of thinking and not the other? It is difficult to avoid reasoning from the general to the specific.

Whether the lustful thoughts are sin or only sin's precursor they are still a problem, of course. The people a man ought not have sex with include, on the traditional view, all men whatsoever and nearly all women. The trouble for the homosexual is that there is no same-sex person with whom it would ever be right for him to gratify himself, and there we find the nub of the argument against tradition, brought by the postmodern revisionists or revolutionaries or however you wish to style them. It seems to them an unfair imposition that the gay is left with no prospects of his desire's gratification. They conclude that it should be all right for men to marry each other.

However we are to work all that out, I think we need to be even handed. There should be just one reading of the teaching about looking and lusting, whether one is gay or straight. But what reading is the right one? Is looking and lusting a sin in and of itself, or is the problem that it is a dangerous precursor of actions to follow?