How Equating Homosexuality as a Sin Just Like Child Sexual Abuse Harms Survivors

It’s standard fare for people arguing against homosexuality to pull out the “but it’s a sin just like murder and child molestation! I’m not a bigot, I’m just condoning this sin the same way you would condone these other actions.”

There are plenty of arguments out there that bring up how gross and offensive that is against lgbtq people. But I haven’t seen much that talks about just how gross this is to survivors. So as one, I’d like to start this post by addressing that argument: fuck you.

Fuck you, because the second I see that argument, I know this is a person who doesn’t take what I went through seriously. This is a person who doesn’t even bother to consider that sexual abuse is real, who isn’t even thinking that there are survivors reading their words.

Survivors don’t matter in this argument. This isn’t about really acknowledging the horrific nature of abuse, this is about hoping to repulse people with something they find disgusting and distasteful. Comparing homosexuality to pedophiles is about the shock value.

Every time I ever heard sexual abuse addressed from the pulpit, it was only about putting boundaries on the sermon. Sermon on forgiveness? “You have to forgive…even if you were sexually abused.” It was never about actually addressing the sexual abuse, it was about picking something Christians find really really bad and then saying, “that’s as far as you can go.” Sermon about hell? “Don’t you want pedophiles in hell? Then you should want hell, which means if you’re not saved, you’re going too!”

And this is just that same reasoning, repackaged. Bigoted Christianity doesn’t address sexual abuse, it uses it for its own means. Sexual abuse is just a nice, neat way to make a point. And that is disgusting.

All the comparisons of homosexuality to sexual abusers do is give bigoted Christians a way of ignoring survivors to make the point that they really care about: they find homosexuality distasteful. Sexual abuse is just convenient fodder, a clean way to not actually do anything about sexual abusers while feeling good about “calling out sin.”

When people make this argument, they’re telling me that my relationship with my girlfriend is just like what my father and brother did to me. And yeah, that makes me feel angry that they’re calling my consensual relationship with my girlfriend something as fucked up as the sexual abuse I went through. But I also am angry because they’re calling my sexual abuse nothing more than something they find “icky.”

And I know this is true because I got an email from my mother the day before my birthday that did just that: my mother sent me a prayer in which she asked God that I still be grateful for my life despite “the icky.” Because what was bad about the sexual was the gross factor, it was the sin of it.

So when people make this argument, they aren’t supporting me. They aren’t doing anything about the prevalence of sexual abuse, and more often than not, they’re doing the exact opposite. They’re rejecting gay/bi/pan people while providing a safe space for abuse to thrive.

When people make this argument, they tip their hand: they don’t have a good, solid morality. They don’t care one whit about sexual abuse or rape. They care about making an argument, about relying on an emotional argument that says gay people are just as “icky” as sexual predators.

And what ends up happening is that they demonize gay people and turn sexual abuse into “just another sin,” just another thing that happens in our fallen world they can shrug their shoulders about.