efore been considered sinful.
             The rise of fundamentalism has also had a great effect on the public attitude towards homosexuals. Many evengelicals have preached long and hard against any sort of accomodation to the "homosexual agenda". In fact many have preached for outright hostility toward gays. Groups like the Moral Majority have built large political machines by creating fear of a gay threat.
             In the following pages I intend to look at all of these two areas for the reasons why Christians find homosexuality so intolerable.
             The place to start, in answering my questions, is in the Bible. Much ado has been made by modern Christians about what the Bible says about homosexuality. But what exactly does the Bible have to say about it? For starters the word homosexual(ality) did not appear in any Bible in any language until 1946.1 But there are a few passages which have been interpreted as addressing the issue.
             The firstchapters of Genesis give us the story of creation. God created Adam and Eve who became the mother and father of all people. Many Christians believe that this shows an intent on the part of God that only a relationship between a man and a woman is acceptable. God made one man and one woman leaving each of them no other choice for companionship or love. Only men and women can produce children, which is taken by some to mean that God only wanted people with a heterosexual orientation to be reproduced. In terms of the beginning, non-heterosexuals do not exist. A common way of putting all this is that God created Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve. This is why churches oppose gay relationships especially in terms of marriage. Recently the Catholics and Mormons spearheaded a campaign, including many other denominations, to pass Prop. 22 officially outlawing gay marriage in California. Many other states have done the same with the guidance of their local churches. Currently only the Unitarian Universalist Association and the...