Right here your agument fails. Christianity didn’t simply ‘inherit’ it. Perhaps you could explain why the even older Code of Hammurabai also contains a very similar sexual moral code? And why is it that a very similar moral code was transmitted into Islam?
Quite possibly Judaism adopted and adapted the Babylonian laws - it’s been suggested by some Biblical historians that much of the Torah was actually written during the period of Babylonian captivity. And, well, Islam simply adopted and adapted Jewish and Christian texts for its own purposes as well.
Could it be that this sexual morality actually transcends religious institutions?
Sure it could be - it could be a product of economic institutions, which predate the established religions with which we are familiar today. Even the Code of Hammurabi is based largely on contractual dealings.
methinks you have been reading way too much radical women’s philosophy, in which the rewriting and reconstruction of history has played a huge role.
You seem very quick to deride interpretations that don’t sit well with yours. There is no doubt that sexual and other social mores in Western and Middle Eastern societies have generally been more onerous and restrictive to women than to men.
And doesn’t that work both ways?
I think you’ll find that there’s rarely any dispute over a woman’s maternal status in relation to the child to which she has given birth. By contrast, the only way a man can have assurance of his paternal status (absent DNA testing, which wasn’t available to ancient civilisations, obviously) is to somehow ensure his exclusive sexual access to the woman in question.
The practice has been admonished in every single civilisation that has sprung up on planet earth. That should tell you something.
That you are quick to find historical correspondence to justify your homophobia, perhaps. Slavery, torture, human sacrifice and infanticide were accepted by most of these societies as well. Does that tell you anything?
Are you saying that an agrarian society is at odds with our human nature? If you are, that’s just way too far left. One of the most basic aspects of human nature is that we get hungry and have to fed ourselves. Agrarian societies are a first requirement.
Of course there’s nothing wrong or against nature in the practice of cultivating food - even some species of ants do this. But an agrarian society is a totally different beast. For most of its existence, the human species has survived as hunter-gatherers. In some parts of the world, such foraging societies still thrive and show no sign of moving towards ‘civilisation’, nor any real desire to do so. Cultivating food is one thing - the notions of ownership, private property and an economy based on scarcity that came with the move to settled agrarian life are quite another thing. These ideas infected human relationships as well as the management of resources - as a consequence, we have moral systems based primarily on economic transactions, over which a thin veneer of ‘natural law’ and ‘spiritual significance’ has been painted.
To get back to the OP’s topic, it’s quite easy to see how homosexual relations have a place in societies geared towards a collective - they help bind the members together in a web of intimate relationships; if the family is seen primarily as an isolated economic unit geared towards facilitating the transmission of private property, homosexuality is merely an inconvenient complication, one that might threaten the ordering of society into discrete, easily-managed little parcels.
Call me a Marxist all you like, but this is as valid an interpretation of the progress of human civilisation as any I’ve come across. The quiet expansion in our time of movements towards collective farming, for example, on the one hand, and polyamorous family arrangements on the other, despite the current blustering about the triumphs of capitalism and the ‘naturalness’ of the nuclear family, would seem to suggest that human nature is not as cut and dried as many moralisers and social commentators would like us to think.
