Homosexuality, Christianity, and gender discrimination in religion

Kathy Baldock Transcript

Sabrina Merage Naim
Hi, Kathy.

Kathy Baldock
Hello!

Sabrina Merage Naim
How are you?

Kathy Baldock
Good.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Where are you joining me from today?

Kathy Baldock
I'm in Reno, Nevada, I live outside of the city. I live in the foothills of the Sierra. So when I look at my window, I can see a ski resort. And right on the other side of that ski resort is Lake Tahoe.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Beautiful.

Kathy Baldock
I just got back from hiking, so I live near hiking trails. And where I live is part of what keeps me balanced.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Sane?

Kathy Baldock
And calm in my head. Because what I do is controversial, and invite- Well, I don't invite disagreement, but I sure do get it.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. It's certainly a sensitive topic for many. And I can't wait to dive in because this is actually something that's been on my radar for quite a long time, which is generally, across categories, how religion and specifically religious text has shaped our, you know, current lives, how we, how we live amongst each other, how we feel about certain things, and certain people and lifestyles and etc. For the purposes of this podcast very specifically as it relates to how we treat women, right? And that's something that's also on your radar, obviously, but this conversation is going to have more of an LGBTQ and woman kind of narrative to it, which I'm super interested in delving into with you. But we have to kind of go back in time for a moment because you were you were raised Roman Catholic, you were quite religious growing up, and ultimately took a 15 year hiatus from organized religion. Why?

Kathy Baldock
Because of how my mother was treated, actually. When I was two years old, my father walked out on my mother, I have two older brothers, two, four, and six. And my father walked out, he was already having an affair. And I lived in an Irish Catholic community in upper Manhattan in Inwood. And it was always known as an Irish, well, now it's a different mixture, but at the time, it was very Irish Catholic. About 40% of the kids I went to school with still spoke with brogues because their parents spoke with very heavy brogues. So here's my mother being left, I was the only kid in my girls Catholic grammar school without a father. So I was born in '56, I'm 66, and so it was incredibly stigmatized at the time. And so I grew up trying to hide this very shaming thing about me, I would constantly lie that I had a father. And this was by no fault of my mother's, right. He was adulterous, he left her, I think she did a darn good job in raising three responsible adults. But I saw the way she was treated, and she was excommunicated. So although she could go to church, she would not be allowed to receive Communion. And she was very much shunned. And when it came time for me and my middle brother, to go to school, in the parish school, I mean, we're very much about you go to the parish school, you don't go to another parish to school. Well, my parents school had no room. There was no room at the end for Kathy and John, because Roberta had since been divorced. And her children were somehow less than.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yeah, it's such an interesting direct path there, although the the road for you was not such a direct path, and we will talk about it. But the connection between how you were treated growing up, and your mom and family, and then the people who you work with today. Certainly there's a parallel there. But I just think, you know, to paint the picture, what we're talking about is a community that completely is immersed in this parish and in your church, in your customs in the community. You go to your church, presumably, every Sunday, yes?

Kathy Baldock
Yes, absolutely.

Sabrina Merage Naim
You go to the school that is associated with that church, your friends and your community are all associated with that church, right?

Kathy Baldock
Yes.

Sabrina Merage Naim
And so it was really your entire life was blown apart because of this and your mother, like you said, no fault of her own, she was left by your father and that stigma and that shame was 100% placed on her and she was punished for it and then you were punished for it and your siblings.

Kathy Baldock
And the interesting thing is that because my mother was a young woman at the time, she was probably 26 when that happened, that's, that's young. And because the community didn't give her support or even language to express how she was feeling, my mother would take -- she told me stories -- like she would take me when I was small, because I was two, she would take me to the park for the day and sit in the park by the by the Hudson River, and just hang out with me so she didn't have to be walking around the neighborhood with a carriage because she was that stigmatized. So she didn't have language to give to us because she was not settled, right? So she couldn't give us the language to explain why we were carrying these burdens. So I don't blame her at all for these things. She was doing the best she could with the tool belt she had. But it ended up being a mess, it really was a mess.

Sabrina Merage Naim
And subsequently, you were excommunicated from the church. And then when did you come back to organized religion?

Kathy Baldock
I got married when I was almost 30. And I married a man that was married before. And I had always had this kind of tugging at a spiritual tugging at me. I remember very specific times in college it happening. And I always thought there were two things I just wanted to do that I was not doing. I wanted to very odd extremes. I wanted to find somebody that would go to dance lessons with me and church. Now that's odd, right? That's very odd. But that's what I wanted. And so when I got married, I knew -- and I did take dance lessons with him -- but I knew that this was a direction I wanted to go in, especially because I knew I wanted to be a mother. So, you know, you hear, you think, you believe that children should be raised in a home with some kind of spiritual bent to it, and I wanted that. I wanted that sense of spirituality and community that I thought church might offer. So less than a year into the marriage, we were already having problems. We're having problems with communication, we're having problems with leadership, evangelical Christianity is big on this one, the male gets to lead. And so I thought, maybe if we take this direction, maybe there's some answers there that will keep us together, because the other part that's operating in my head is I don't want to be divorced. I mean, I know what that looks like, I've seen that happen to my mother, I'm going to do whatever it takes, use whatever avenues I need to go down to have a successful marriage. And we had some very close friends at the time that told us that Christianity could be one of those roads. And so we tried it out.

Sabrina Merage Naim
In what way? In terms of therapy through your church or community, what is it? What is it? Just that you'd show up and then God will bring you together? Like, what...

Kathy Baldock
It's that magical? No, it would be more about that we had to get settled in who we were and how could I- It sounds crazy now, but how could I possibly know who I am, without a greater being telling me who I am, right? So I'm just constantly going down this path that I want to go down, where I should be going down this path of who I was created to be. So I mean, there's some validity in this, and there's a lot of validity and, you know, healing and obviously, coming from my youth, I needed some of that. But I was willing to do whatever I needed to do to have a successful marriage. So we started going to church, and within a couple of months, we each had a religious experience, and it put our marriage on a different track. And it actually did bring it back together to a more peaceful spot for some period of time.

Sabrina Merage Naim
What was that religious experience for you?

Kathy Baldock
For me, to be able to say, maybe I don't know everything, and that there's something bigger than me that maybe I should lean into, and I'm willing to give that a chance, and leaning into it, rather than striving all the time, to listen to a higher power. And it really did change my life. And I'm still a Christian, and even all I know about how poorly Christians behave especially in in these last few decades, really since the late 80s Christians have been behaving horribly. But I am sticking to what the core of the Bible messages not the political, non scientific add ons. And being a Christian is important for me for the work that I do, because I'm trying to speak to the church. And if I were not a practicing Christian, I would lose my voice, where I'm trying to have a voice.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yeah, that's a really important point that I'll ask you more about later on in this conversation, but essentially, that you being very spiritually and religiously connected, that you being part of the church gives you a platform that maybe others would not have the benefit of, right, people maybe listen to you differently.

Kathy Baldock
Christians are so, especially the most conservative of Christians, are so they stay in such a one lane place that evangelical Christians may not listen to Methodists, or United Church of Christ people or Episcopalians, or Lutherans, because they're not real Christians. They're not as Christian as we are. So for me to have voice, I have to stay where I am.

Sabrina Merage Naim
So going back to that religious experience, it put you and your husband on a path for some period of time, but inevitably, you parted ways. And then when did you first take interest in issues of discrimination as it relates to religion?

Kathy Baldock
So we were known, we were known in our church, we were known in our community, we were known as successful business people. And my husband decided he didn't want to be married anymore. He had an affair with one of the employees, which was not wonderful. He had started another affair with another mother of (our son was playing hockey) and other hockey mom and man, it was just, it was a little too much for me to handle. And so he came to the conclusion, I was still willing to keep trying, but he came to the conclusion that he didn't want to get married anymore. So the way I coped with it, because I just, I hate hearing myself say these things, but this is who I was 20 years ago, he told me not to speak to anybody about this divorce because of the impact would have on the business. You know, we were entering into some really successful high money seasons, and he wanted the money. So I kept my mouth shut and the way I coped with the pain. And so I wanted to cope with the pain and I also wanted to stay out of getting into adultery myself, I didn't want to compound it. So I thought, if I keep my body busy, and I keep my brain busy, then I won't get distracted. And so I started hiking every day, and it's a habit I have every day. Doesn't matter what the weather is, I've just came back. And on the hiking trail within weeks, or months, really, I ran into a woman that I saw all the time. And there weren't many people hiking that trail, but I saw that she was pretty consistently there on the weekends, and she hiked the same pace I did, and she kind of took the same little off roads I did. And so I said to her one day, it had been an awful day, it was Saturday. And my ex husband, a term I prefer is "was-band", my was-band was being particularly unkind and yelling at me and I just didn't want to go home. So after I finished my hike, I saw her and I asked her if I could hike with her because I wanted to stay out longer. And so in hiking with her that's how I met Neto, my buddy Neto, and right away I suspected because of some of the language she was using and not using and a rainbow thing in her car I thought, "Gosh, I wonder if she's a lesbian." And also the very first night of my Italian class I was paired up with a speaking partner for the semester and he was the only gay man in class. And so all of a sudden I've got these two gay people in my social circle. And not that I knew of, there were no gay people in my social circles, certainly at church.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yeah. So I was gonna ask you what your exposure had been to this point to the LGBTQ community?

Kathy Baldock
Well, we had heard that there was a girl, a woman at church that was living with another woman. And it wasn't, you know, we whispered about it. But certainly no one ever came to me and said they were gay. I mean, this is pretty early on. Well, that was in 2000. But still that's early.

Sabrina Merage Naim
And you largely credit Neto for opening your eyes and your heart and mind to issues of discrimination, particularly for the LGBTQ community, that hadn't been really on your radar before. How do you go from a hike with a new friend, to giving your life to this work? When did you start to question the verses that you were raised with, and how they were being interpreted as anti gay? How did that flip happen in your life?

Kathy Baldock
Because it became humanized in Neto. Until you know gay people, it's just othering, you know, and lots of cultures, lots of groups have done it to people for centuries. And evangelicals have othered LGBTQ people, amongst others, but here I got to know somebody, and she started bringing me into her social circles. So I'd be I'd go to parties, and I'd be, first of all, the only straight person there, I'd be the only Christian there. There may have been other Christians, but the only church going Christian. And the two things that I had to unlearn and relearn, evangelicalism had taught me that gay people made a choice to be gay, and that their love was not love, it was lust. Those are ridiculous statements. But I had to be in amongst people to hear their stories and know who they are to realize that these people knew they were gay when they were young. So that came across, that was countered to what I had been taught and actually believed. And then to know, to watch couples together and to see the love and respect. it became very real to me, which caused me to wonder why I had been taught through religion, what I've been taught. Like, what is the truth, because I'm seeing something completely different in front of me that counters what everybody at church is telling me, so something is wrong here. And then really, it was in relationship with Neto, she made it real. We were talking one day, and it's in the documentary, and it still upsets me, when we were walking and hiking, and she was talking to me about going on a camping trip. And I didn't understand why she had to go with all women. Now, I was still pretty ignorant. And when she said that was the only place she felt safe, I just didn't understand that. Because I felt safe everywhere. It didn't matter if men were around or women were around. That's when she said to me, "Kathy," she said, "You don't understand." She said, "I'm a woman of color." She's very dark skinned Native American, she's Cochiti Native American from New Mexico. Native American mother, Hispanic father, Hispanic last name. She said, "I'm an atheist, I'm a lesbian." And then she said, "Not even God loves me." And that, those very few words, are all it took. For me to connect it, to say, this is a problem.

Sabrina Merage Naim
I want to pivot now to the work that you dove headfirst into after these life events. You began digging into the passages of the Bible that condemn homosexuality. And this led you to trace translations and versions of the Bible until you found the first time that the word homosexual ever appeared in the Bible.

Kathy Baldock
Yes.

Sabrina Merage Naim
And this is what I found really astonishing about your research. The first time the word homosexual appeared in any translation in any language of the Bible wasn't until 1946. I think most of us would have assumed that it was much earlier so this certainly took me by surprise. Until 1946, there were two words in its place: arsenokoitai and malakoi. Let's talk about those because a lot of your work and the treatment of millions of LGBTQ people around the world really rests upon them. Tell us about the original meaning of arsenokoitai.

Kathy Baldock
This word arsenokoitai is used two times in the New Testament. First Timothy and in First Corinthians. And some people will say, it's a Greek word, some people will harken back to a Hebrew word, two Hebrew words, arsen and koitais, which means man bedder. But there's 1400 years space between those words.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Sorry, I want to clarify: man bedder.

Kathy Baldock
A man who beds.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Beds, just period, a man who beds, okay.

Kathy Baldock
When that was written, men bedded anything they wanted to. It has almost all through history, and I'm going to say until the 1950s, that's a long piece of history, where a man puts his penis is not as important as he is the one that is penetrating with his penis. So he can put his penis in an animal, a woman, a slave, his wife, a prostitute, a child, another man, a lower class man, a lower status man, as long as he's the one that's penetrating. So sex, before we started on, or understanding orientation, sex was always about the role you took in sex: were you the penetrator, were the penetrate Ted. And that has lasted through most of history. So that's a distinction that has to be made. But So 1400 years after this Hebrew combination word, Paul uses this word, to a group of people, a new church in the city of Corinth, which was a port city known to be a very sexual city. Lot going on, sailors coming in, sailors going out, people doing what they want. And people say that he coined this word, but the audience he's talking to, they understand it. So it might be a word that was coined in that part of the world. And so they say, okay, they're trying to modernize the Bible. And this behavior they know, all through much of history has been, they're talking about a non procreative sex act, you know, any kind of sex act that doesn't produce a child, they're taking some kind of difference in power, certainly the component of lust, and abuse. And so they're saying, okay, the last translation we have in English, is catamite and sodomite. A catamite it's an interesting word in itself, but it comes from a boy that's sexually used, that's kind of the root word. And a sodomite is one who penetrates. Not all through history, but during this time, one who anally penetrates. So they say, what do we have that someone's being penetrated in abusive, unequal, non procreative behavior that's in our modern culture that we can look at and see, because the point of this Bible is to make it modern language. And they look at the culture and they actually do the work, this work I know from the archives. This translation work is done between 1937 in 1940. So they look at the culture and they say, what fits all these categories, and is there a word that we can use to make this usable, easily understood? And that word at the time is homosexual. We don't understand it's an orientation, it's a criminal behavior, we think it's a mental illness. It's certainly an abusive, violent behavior, because we see men with boys. And a lot of sex panics have happened in the late 20s and early 30s in the United States, stories blown out of proportion. And so all of this is kind of on people's minds. And at the time, that translation made sense for them to take those words and use the word homosexual. It sort of made sense. So there was no malice in it. There was tons of ignorance, but it never should have stayed that way. Once we started understanding.

Sabrina Merage Naim
This is extremely complex. What you are trying to tease out is millennia of cultural societal religious context that then boils down to, you know, the use of two words that are potentially mistranslated to one word that had all kinds of stigma associated with it and has laid the framework for what current world religions believes as it relates to LGBTQ community.

Kathy Baldock
So in the new book, I build through history, I look at male female relationships, procreation, marriage, how non procreative sex was seen, how same-sex sex was seen, all the way through history, so that you say this is a challenging task? Yes, it is. But if somebody can hang with me, and understand original intentions, original context, original understandings, ancient worldviews, and watch these components change through history, by the time they're sitting in that room in the 1930s, they're going to understand the decision that was made in the context of what was understood.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yeah, I want to highlight original context. That is something that we often overlook, right? Because we have, in our modern day context, are interpretations of certain concepts. We feel like this is the way that it has been throughout history. And that is absolutely not the case. And what you're saying here is that even two words, where we don't really exactly have a direct translation for these two words, in modern day context. And even when you try and translate them as best as you can, it still doesn't quite land, because it is a complete disconnect between the context of these words and the society back then, millennia ago, versus today, right. So a lot of this is really around the misunderstanding and misinterpretations of original intent and original context, versus our modern day society.

Kathy Baldock
So just as an example, this is just an easy example: so I start, I actually start in the ancient Near East in the book. And so I tried to put, I do put, the context of when the Torah was written the first five books of the Bible, because that's our creation story. So that a lot of you know, one male and one woman, you're only allowed to be male, you're only allowed to be female, this is all coming up in transitions now. And so I try to put that, I do put that, in context of what was understood at the time. But I place it firmly as written between five about 500 BCE, because in 500 BC, I can tell archaeologist, historians can tell us the worldview of people at that time. And one piece of the worldview would be procreation, like how babies are made. So until 1870, this shocks people, we didn't scientifically know that a woman was contributing a piece of this baby, we have always believed that women are just fertile planting grounds. You know, we're seeing this come up again. But the whole of a human, certainly, in the Old Testament writing times, and in the New Testament writing times, the entirety of a human was in the male semen. And so this was kind of just funny, because as long as he gets an erection and ejaculates and produces that liquid, you know, all bets are off. He's done his job. If she can't, if there's no baby, there's something wrong with her. She's not nurturing it, she's not doing the right things, because he's had an erection and he's ejaculated, so job done. So right from the beginning, it has been important where a man puts his penis. If he puts it in another man's wife, he's taking her his property. If he puts it in an animal, he's not, you know, he's not growing the nation which the small tribe of Jews need to be grown. If he's masturbating, he's spilling and wasting his seed. So procreation has always been important, but why we talk about men is because we have most of history believed that the entirety of a human was attributable to man. And some of the great church fathers, you know, have said dreadful things about women, because they believed they were just a fertile planting ground. And then, in the classical Greek times, there's this whole notion that men are stronger than women, there's very funny concepts about it. But if the strength of a man doesn't overcome the weakness of a woman, or the heat of a man doesn't overcome the coldness of a woman during procreative processes, and she wins out, then you get a girl, which is a flawed male. But if the strength of a man can overcome the weakness of a woman, the heat of a man can overcome the coldness of woman, then yay, you get a male. I mean, if the wind is blowing, if the moon is moving in a different direction, all these things dictated procreation. So the view of procreation has been intensely flawed through most of history, not giving a woman her half, her half of procreation, her due, her honor, her place, her peace of importance in this, and that is consistent. So to trace the role of a woman through history is essential in understanding how we got here, because the LGBTQ rights movement is not going to come until after the women's movement, until women say this is not how we are to be seen anymore. You know, gender roles, we cannot do these things anymore. Opening up and busting up gender roles is what allows the LGBTQ movement to start. Women's Movement had to come first.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. And I keep thinking about the evolution of thought, and science, and society that we somehow still get stuck with the text, right? That the text is the word of God and nothing has changed since then. And it's in such direct conflict with who we are and where we are today versus 1000s of years ago. And I'm curious for you to also talk a little bit- so I'm Jewish, and as you mentioned, the Old Testament is our text, the Torah is our text. And it also shows up there, right? The story of Sodom and Gomorrah has been largely translated as a story of men do not lay with other men. What can you say about that, specifically, as it relates to this conversation?

Kathy Baldock
Well, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is another story about abusing your enemies: these people come into town, and they think they're just going to come into town, and just come hang out here. The man at the city gate rape them, they rape them, and what the rest some other books in the Old Testament, the prophets Ezekiel says, don't be like your sister Sodom, they had so much. They were they were fat on what they had, they had everything. And they were supposed to be, as Middle Eastern religions are, hospitable, big characteristic. They were not hospitable. They took these men in and they raped them. And God says, this was the sin of your sister Sodom, that you had so much, and you were not willing to share it with the poor, and the hungry and the widows. So that's where it is there. So doing this work, and trying to place the text within the Hebrew Bible into the Torah, I have had to challenge my own Christianity because Christians have used the Torah to our advantage and interpreted it to our advantage to get to where we want it to go, rather than trying to understand how the Hebrews would have written this and understood this. This is their book, and we are appropriating it. And I'm feeling this more and more lately. So what I did this summer was I signed up at our local temple for every Friday morning from beginning of June to the end of September, every Friday morning, to sit with Jews to go through, it's the story of, they're going from, I think they're going from Babylon, from when they were exiled in Babylon to Rome. So it's those, it's the 500 BCE to the first century. Because I'm understanding, again, a translation problem. I'm looking at the Torah, through Christian eyes, through what I've been told those verses mean. And I've lately been also listening to get ready, to get my mind like, okay, Kathy, this is again, a translation problem, to try to listen to a Middle Eastern, ancient worldview, Hebrew, that is not the way I think, and how those verses are to be understood, how those scriptures are to be understood. And I think Christians are very guilty of not listening to how Jews interpret their own writings. How arrogant is that

Sabrina Merage Naim
Frankly, a lot of what the work that you do is going around to talk about how the texts have either been mistranslated, you know, misunderstood, the original intent hasn't been thought, you know, thought through. And what I'm curious about is what do you say to individuals who challenge you that that argument is a little too convenient, right? Like even people who maybe are supporters of LGBTQ rights, and gender equality, and all of these things that today, you know, we we strive for. The most major world religions still kind of preach, based on the texts that men don't play with other men, therefore, we're anti gay. And it's not something that we, you know, what do you say to those people who are like, look, I want to believe you, but it just sounds a little too convenient that all of this is based on a mistranslation of two words.

Kathy Baldock
It's a long story, but the easiest way I can usually approach people is I say, I'm a big "Have you ever considered? Did you know? Have you ever thought about?" So here's a "have you ever considered". So biblical marriage, first Century, and before, in the Jewish Bible, well, I'm gonna stick with first century, biblical marriage in the first century would have been, you don't pick your partner, so it's not a mutual picking. Procreation is essential. All sex acts have to be procreative. So, you know, run through your list, right? There's a lot of sex acts that are not procreative. And they don't just include a condom, right? There's a lot of things you can be doing. And they also can't include, because they're living in an environment of stoicism, stoicism goes from about the third century BCE, till about the second or third century AD, it's a philosophy. But it's a Roman and Greek philosophy that says, no excess. So the new church is in that environment. So no excess, and that means no passion, no lust, okay? So biblical marriages, everything's procreative, man on top, man with a woman's gotta be procreative, and no passion or lust. You don't have sex just to have sex. That's an excess. You have sex only for the purpose of procreation. So that was heterosexual marriage, no enjoyment, nothing non procreative. So somehow, through history, we have allowed the roles, more in the later part of history, is not going to start until the scientific revolution, the 1600, where we start to understand bodies. Before the 15th century, we didn't even understand, because no dissections were allowed, we didn't even understand a woman had a different skeleton than a man. It was a human skeleton. So now they after 1600 years of not cutting bodies open, they're cutting bodies open. They're saying oh my goodness, they appear to be different. And so science is starting to move in. But it doesn't happen until really the beginning of the 19th century that we start to unhinge sex from procreation. So all through history, sex had to be procreative. And now we are allowing heterosexual couples to have non procreative sex, sex that, you know, older people can have it when they're not procreating. You can do oral, you can do anal, you can do masturbation, you can do what you want, all kinds of positions, you can do what you want. And that's okay. I mean, in the Christian church as long as you're married, so heterosexual people can do non procreative sex, and you know what else, they're allowed to enjoy it. Passion and lust are allowed in sex. So we have allowed heterosexual sex, to completely change from the biblical view. But we take homosexual sex, and we firmly plop it in the first century, as if the last 2000 years of progress and understanding and gender roles and science have not happened. So we've let heterosexual people off the biblical marriage hook, but we take homosexual people and plop them back in there. Like, do you think that's fair? You know, do you want to go back to- I don't want to be in a biblical marriage. People talk about biblical marriage all the time, well, then, you know, what, it's only procreative and sure as heck better not enjoy yourself, and never do it just for the pleasure of "Oh, honey, I love you," you know.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Right. And there's no such thing as marital rape because your husband can take you whenever he wants?

Kathy Baldock
Absolutely.

Sabrina Merage Naim
I think what you're saying is that we, most world religions have basically, cherry picked, what gets to evolve and what has to stay back in the first century, or even earlier.

Kathy Baldock
I believe that the way I'm writing this next book will work. Because people are going to have to walk sort of slowly with me through history, and see how things have changed. And I had this idea that the entire period of the mid Middle Ages, medieval times from the 5th century, to the 15th century, where the Roman Catholic Church dictated religion in Europe, and I had the idea that this was a very monolithic period, that sex looked the same. But really digging into that, I found out there was a lot of change during that period. And a lot of it was legal changes how canon or Catholic Church law was applied. For most of that time of the Middle Ages, there was no civil law, it was canon law, the church dictated everything. And so to watch how non procreative sex was viewed during that time and how it was impacted by, you know, we like the word is the barbarians coming in, they weren't barbarians, they were German speaking people. They just didn't speak Latin. So the barbarians come in, and they've got different marriage practices. And so how they then impact the church, and then how a different Saint will come along and he'll put his own spin on what we should be doing in sexual relationships. And he'll have a big impact. Augustine, he's a big name in the church, how all these people come along, and how this core thing that was written keeps changing, changing, changing, changing.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Let's fast forward a couple 1000 years. You've done a lot of work with individual religious leaders who are starting to now investigate LGBTQ issues in their churches that they have historically stood against. What are you seeing is the point of pivot? What do you see is the arguments that are most effective at helping them, you know, people who historically, again, are very kind of set in their beliefs, to start questioning that in a way that you did?

Kathy Baldock
If your own kid comes out as gay, or someone on staff's kid comes out as gay, or some respected person in the church comes out as gay, there's relationship already established. And so people- if what drew them to the pastorate is what we hope would be in pastors' hearts, of caring for people, they will have that natural bent towards caring for someone. But unfortunately, and I've learned this from people that have been the Dean's of seminaries, the number one trait of most people that are on the pastor tract, is not compassion, etc. The number one trait that shows up in the majority of people wanting to be pastors is narcissism. Isn't that a shock? It's terrible. So the feeling of I'm always right. But if someone has been drawn to serve as a pastor, they listen to stories, they hear people. But even after they hear people, or they experienced this in their own world, or life, or family, it's very risky to start raising the conversation. Because the numbers still say that when a pastor comes out as affirming, they will probably lose about 40% of their church within three months, and at least 50% of their money, because a lot of the people that are leaving are the money givers. So for a pastor, to go down this track, a lot of risk. They have to know someone, because we're talking about leadership. So they have to know someone, that usually starts it. But there's also, in the last 10 years, there's great resources, and the resources are so readily available. And I have what I think is one of my best resources online, it's called uncovering the tangled mess, it's five hours of teaching along timelines. And I've heard that a lot of people really get a lot out of that, because I'm not touching that third rail of verses. I'm trying to teach the Bible and understanding of male female relationships, procreation, marriage, same sex behavior, in context through history. And when people see that, that changes their minds. So education, relationship, and just that willingness to risk. Because when a pastor comes out as affirming, that's what it's called, they're going to lose.

Sabrina Merage Naim
You are certainly fighting an uphill battle, it will take a long time. What you're saying is that even the affirming pastors and the individuals who are opening their hearts and minds to this will also have an uphill battle. They're risking a lot. It's a long term game here. I want to know, Kathy, you've been doing this work for a long time, your life changed because of this work. What is your ultimate hope? What is the big reward for you at the end of all of this? What is it?

Kathy Baldock
That kids learn from their early age when puberty hits and they start recognizing that, you know, I knew I liked David Thompson when I was 14, like, everything was about David Thompson. I didn't like my best friend, Diane, I like David Thompson, I was all about him. And when kids hit that age of puberty that they like, or they crush on whoever they're crushing on, it's okay. You know, there's nothing wrong with it, that they can come home and say to their mom, "dang, Matthew is so cute. I saw him in, you know, band today, and he's so cute." That would be the reward.

Kassia Binkowski
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