While the Koran must be handled with reverence, on pain of death, you can do all kinds of things to the Bible. God won't mind, because He is not mocked. You can read the Bible, study it, swear on it, swear at it, bash it, burn it and smuggle it. One thing that you should not be allowed to do - and transgressors should be almightily smote - is "queer" it. My objection is linguistic, rather than theological. "Queer" is not a verb, except as a synonym for "thwart". You can queer a pitch, but you shouldn't go queering anything else, not if you know what's good for you.
Anita Fast would disagree. She gave a presentation at a meeting of "Lutheran's Concerned", which describes itself as "a Christian ministry affirming God's love for people of all sexual orientations and gender identities since 1974." Presumably any sexual orientations and gender identities from before that date don't get a look in.
The title of Ms Fast's presentation is an abomination unto the Lord: Queering the Bible with a Hermeneutic of Foolishness. (It may be his-story, but it's her-meneutic.) Here's a taster:
In the next 10 minutes, I hope to lead you through some of the ways I believe that the Bible itself calls all of us to be queer – how, by queering the Bible, the Bible in turn queers us.
To do so I will begin by looking at some key New Testament scripture which supports what I call a "hermeneutics of foolishness" – an interpretive lens which looks to the places of scandal and degradation as sites of God's revelation and presence, and questions the ways human discourse define reality.
Having a hermeneutics of foolishness as the lens with which we view the world challenges us to live in the knowledge that the powers that govern the world are not definitive. Institutions such as marriage; liberal doctrines of the true/inner self; discourses about what a true woman, a true man, or a good citizen is; cultural definitions of what it means to be successful, free, or powerful, all fall under the critical eye of a hermeneutics of foolishness which is necessarily critical of all human knowledge claims (including and perhaps especially those made about God).
In the very conceptual apparatus of a point of view there are implicit power dynamics at work. Regardless of what our human perspective is, our categories of male and female are non-categories in God's eyes. 'Hetero-sexuality' is revealed as yet another power relation of the old creation from which we are freed – not to become 'homosexuals', but to live lives for God regardless of what sort of human relational configurations are 'in power' or 'acceptable' at the time.
If I end up in Hell, it will be full of people in black turtleneck sweaters, most of them French, twittering on about discourse, hegemony and hermeneutics. For eternity. Any readers who get to Heaven and look down upon my torment, please have mercy and drop me a simple word. "Thwart" will do nicely.
