Documentaries...

I have just watched two documentaries on homosexuality (30 Days episode "Straight Man in a Gay World") and intersexuality (Discovery Channel documentary "Is it a boy or a girl?"). The second was better than the first: it gave primary authority to the intersexual voices who had lived their truth and only secondary authority to the doctors, concluding that probably the best practice was to wait until the intersexual child was old enough to decide for or against surgery. The one on homosexuality gave only very limited authority to the homosexual voice. Penny Nixon, whom I've met and like very much, raised vital questions about the Bible, such as why conservatives ignore "Thou shalt not kill" but uphold "a man shall not lie with a man"; but the conservative young man never dealt with that issue, nor did he admit to its being raised when he described his visit with Penny to his homosexual apartment-mate. Penny was pointing out the sloppy, selective way homophobes read the Bible; but then the narrator referred to conservative churches as having a more strict interpretation of the Bible. There's a hell of a difference between sloppy interpretation and strict interpretation; and my 44 years of teaching literature shows me that readings which honor creation's diversity are far more careful and strictly faithful to the biblical text than those that merely select what they want and leave the rest undiscussed. So the narrator slanted the documentary in a very unfair way.