Not to neglect today's events, but I think the following might be of general interest, and I would have posted on it earlier but for the dramatic news of Saddam Hussein's capture.

Is homosexuality is associated with the inner workings of civilization itself?

Arthur Silber (a meticulous guy who always does his homework) links to this book review from the New York Times (and I know what a hassle it can be to fill out the damned form to read these things, so I'll quote generously):

[I]n Louis Crompton's sober, searching and somber new history, "Homosexuality and Civilization," homosexuality is associated with the inner workings of civilization itself....

....

In ancient Greece, homosexuality was philosophically praised and institutionally sanctioned, associated with virtues of courage and mentorship. In ancient Rome, it was primarily cultivated in relationships between masters and slaves, but homosexual behavior was common to Pompey, Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavius. "Of the first 15 emperors," Gibbon pointed out, "Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct."

Why did such indulgence, tolerance and even sanction disappear? Mr. Crompton offers a very different interpretation from the influential theory outlined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. In Mr. Crompton's view, the concept of homosexuality was not something created in 19th-century Europe when it was first considered a medical condition, nor was it, despite cultural variations, so drastically different in other times and places.

Mr. Crompton argues that Christianity created the most radical change in attitudes toward homosexuality. "The debt owed by civilization to Christianity is enormous," he writes; but so, he believes, have been Christianity's sins. In Japan, for example, before the mid-19th-century Western influence, homosexuality was "an honored way of life among the country's religious and military leaders so that its acceptance paralleled, and in some respects even surpassed, ancient Athens." It was common among Buddhist sages, part of samurai culture and an accepted aspect of the Kabuki theater world.

Christianity attacked such customs when it gained access, Mr. Crompton argues, but its assault began in the West as early as the 4th century (not the 12th century, he says, as the historian John Boswell believed).

Mr. Crompton traces Christian hostility to Leviticus, which may have been written around 550 B.C., at the very time that homoerotic poetry was thriving in Greece. It mandated death for homosexual acts. Mr. Crompton suggests that this law was an attempt to differentiate the Jews from Mediterranean cults in which transvestite priests, eunuchs and sexual activity played a central role in ritual and worship.

As filtered through the severity of the writings of the Apostle Paul, though, that condemnation became central to Christianity, strictly distinguishing it from Roman and pagan cultures.

Homosexuality was as unremarkable to the ancients as an interest in legs would be to heterosexuals today. To speak of America's "tolerance" for men who enjoy women's legs would strike us as totally absurd.

Similarly, to talk about the ancients' attitude towards homosexuality, by presuming that there is an attitude, runs the risk of contamination by alien observation.

Still, the question remains: why the stigma? Certainly, it makes little sense solely to blame Leviticus. Jews have not stoned homosexuals for thousands of years, and, notwithstanding St. Paul's disapproval of homosexuality, the Council of Jerusalem specifically distanced Christianity from the Leviticus prohibitions. Thus, at some point in time, Christianity "discovered" a new stigma -- or perhaps reinvented and misintepreted ancient Jewish laws even though Jews no longer applied them as written.

Were Justinian and Theodora the culprits? Maybe I should ask a genuine scholar of the Byzantine period (and one of my favorite bloggers) Michael McNeil. (His latest post -- The Byzantine Crusades is a real gem!)

I don't think there was any one cause. Different ideas spring up among different peoples, times, and places. (It has long fascinated me, for example, how homosexuality could be the essence of masculinity in some cultures, and the essence of effeminacy in others. And they didn't get the latter idea from Leviticus!)

Given enough time, such ideas become so entrenched that no one knows how they started.

Like foot binding.

(You never know; it might have started with a leg man.....)

UPDATE: I know that not everyone reads comments, so I wanted to share this link -- absolutely loaded with material on ancient Roman attitudes -- with all who are interested. . (Thank you, Dave Tepper.)