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Published: February 27, 2008

Like eating shrimp

Loyola Marymount shows homosexual propaganda film to “stir up some important debate on campus”

“Multiple organizations” at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles came together to sponsor an event last Thursday, featuring a screening of the 2007 documentary film, For the Bible Tells Me So. The film, says the Feb. 21 Los Angeles Loyolan, the university’s student newspaper, “interviews various theologians and scholars who analyze scripture in the Bible and derive an interpretation of where the issue of homosexuality stands in this context.”

A review of the documentary in the Washington City Paper says it is a “multi-part rebuttal to Christians who insist that their abhorrence of gay people is sanctioned by the Bible.” The interviewed families are introduced “amid footage of anti-gay remarks,” says the review. (For instance, a move trailer shows clips of Fred Phelps’ “God Hates Fags” protests and scrawled obscenities about homosexuals.)

The Episcopal Church’s openly homosexual bishop, Gene Robinson, is featured in the film, as are Dick Gephardt and his lesbian daughter, Chrissy. In a CNN “Situation Room” interview, Chrissy said, “The movie is about how homosexuality is dealt with in the Bible and that there are all these myths that surround it.”

In a trailer for the film, Chrissy Gephardt notes that “growing up in the Catholic Church, it’s not that I heard it explicitly, but I definitely knew that was part of the Bible. In fact, there were two things that I remember that were an abomination: homosexuality and suicide.”

An example of the film’s exegesis is the Rev. Steven Kindle’s (of Clergy United for the Equality of Homosexuals) interpretation of the Leviticus verse that says, “if a man lies with a man as with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable… both of them have committed an abomination.” “If you read the Bible on a face value level, that reading disregards several very important things,” says Kindle. “The first one is just a few verses before that -- Moses teaches in Leviticus that it is an abomination to eat shrimp.”

In a Sundance film festival interview, director Daniel Karslake says he made the film to point out that “we are all God’s children in that we’re all here and made the way we’re made for the reason that we bring different gifts to the world, and we have to honor that.”

The Loyolan noted that, after the film's showing, attendees would be “encouraged to share their thoughts and ideas about the message of the film with an open forum led by students, faculty and members of the Jesuit community.”

The sponsor for the event was Dr. Jeffrey Schnell, a Student Psychological Services staff psychologist and founder of “The Circle” – which, in a Loyolan interview, he called a group for “LMU's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students and their heterosexual allies.”

Schnell said he “wholeheartedly” agrees with the message of For the Bible Tells Me So. “Fear can do terrible things while love and knowledge can save lives,” he told the Loyolan. “Actually, the core message of this film is quite similar to one delivered by Christ 2000 years ago, ‘Love one another…’"

Schnell said he hoped the film “speaks to people who have struggled with reconciling their faith and their sexuality, and that it stirs up some important debate on campus."

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