"Opponents of gay marriage often cite Scripture."

[Cecilie1200]

Hmmm, I wonder what people think of ms. Miller's column?

Our Mutual Joy

Opponents of gay marriage often cite Scripture. But what the Bible teaches about love argues for the other side.

By Lisa Miller | NEWSWEEK
Published Dec 6, 2008
From the magazine issue dated Dec 15, 2008

Let's try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile? Or to Jacob, who fathered children with four different women (two sisters and their servants)? Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists. The New Testament model of marriage is hardly better. Jesus himself was single and preached an indifference to earthly attachments—especially family. The apostle Paul (also single) regarded marriage as an act of last resort for those unable to contain their animal lust. "It is better to marry than to burn with passion," says the apostle, in one of the most lukewarm endorsements of a treasured institution ever uttered. Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple—who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love—turn to the Bible as a how-to script?

Of course not, yet the religious opponents of gay marriage would have it be so.

The battle over gay marriage has been waged for more than a decade, but within the last six months—since California legalized gay marriage and then, with a ballot initiative in November, amended its Constitution to prohibit it—the debate has grown into a full-scale war, with religious-rhetoric slinging to match. Not since 1860, when the country's pulpits were full of preachers pronouncing on slavery, pro and con, has one of our basic social (and economic) institutions been so subject to biblical scrutiny. But whereas in the Civil War the traditionalists had their James Henley Thornwell—and the advocates for change, their Henry Ward Beecher—this time the sides are unevenly matched. All the religious rhetoric, it seems, has been on the side of the gay-marriage opponents, who use Scripture as the foundation for their objections.

The argument goes something like this statement, which the Rev. Richard A. Hunter, a United Methodist minister, gave to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in June: "The Bible and Jesus define marriage as between one man and one woman. The church cannot condone or bless same-sex marriages because this stands in opposition to Scripture and our tradition."

To which there are two obvious responses: First, while the Bible and Jesus say many important things about love and family, neither explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman. And second, as the examples above illustrate, no sensible modern person wants marriage—theirs or anyone else's —to look in its particulars anything like what the Bible describes. "Marriage" in America refers to two separate things, a religious institution and a civil one, though it is most often enacted as a messy conflation of the two. As a civil institution, marriage offers practical benefits to both partners: contractual rights having to do with taxes; insurance; the care and custody of children; visitation rights; and inheritance. As a religious institution, marriage offers something else: a commitment of both partners before God to love, honor and cherish each other—in sickness and in health, for richer and poorer—in accordance with God's will. In a religious marriage, two people promise to take care of each other, profoundly, the way they believe God cares for them. Biblical literalists will disagree, but the Bible is a living document, powerful for more than 2,000 years because its truths speak to us even as we change through history. In that light, Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married—and a number of excellent reasons why they should.

In the Old Testament, the concept of family is fundamental, but examples of what social conservatives would call "the traditional family" are scarcely to be found. Marriage was critical to the passing along of tradition and history, as well as to maintaining the Jews' precious and fragile monotheism. But as the Barnard University Bible scholar Alan Segal puts it, the arrangement was between "one man and as many women as he could pay for." Social conservatives point to Adam and Eve as evidence for their one man, one woman argument—in particular, this verse from Genesis: "Therefore shall a man leave his mother and father, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh." But as Segal says, if you believe that the Bible was written by men and not handed down in its leather bindings by God, then that verse was written by people for whom polygamy was the way of the world. (The fact that homosexual couples cannot procreate has also been raised as a biblical objection, for didn't God say, "Be fruitful and multiply"? But the Bible authors could never have imagined the brave new world of international adoption and assisted reproductive technology—and besides, heterosexuals who are infertile or past the age of reproducing get married all the time.)

Ozzie and Harriet are nowhere in the New Testament either. The biblical Jesus was—in spite of recent efforts of novelists to paint him otherwise—emphatically unmarried. He preached a radical kind of family, a caring community of believers, whose bond in God superseded all blood ties. Leave your families and follow me, Jesus says in the gospels. There will be no marriage in heaven, he says in Matthew. Jesus never mentions homosexuality, but he roundly condemns divorce (leaving a loophole in some cases for the husbands of unfaithful women).

The apostle Paul echoed the Christian Lord's lack of interest in matters of the flesh. For him, celibacy was the Christian ideal, but family stability was the best alternative. Marry if you must, he told his audiences, but do not get divorced. "To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): a wife must not separate from her husband." It probably goes without saying that the phrase "gay marriage" does not appear in the Bible at all.

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I think that Ms. Miller and Newsweek are demonstrating the hubris so common of the left: We are so damned smart, we can teach people how to exercise beliefs we don't share. And like all of her pompous, arrogant kind, she deserves to be sneered at and then dismissed.

 

[Cecilie1200]

Whatever. I'd seen that article on HuffPo -- the liberal atheist clearinghouse that it is -- and I couldn't read it then, either.

The article starts off with this same kind of "well, see, people who believe in traditional marriage are wrong because look at the other archaic traditions that are in the tradition of marriage." It trips on its own two feet, because all the examples it gives are between who? Men and women.

I think it's a gross oversimplification of what the Bible says, and does so with a fair amount of self-righteous pandering to the Left. At this stage in the game, I think there's a legitimate legal secular argument against gay marriage that doesn't even rely on Biblical tenets. I just think a lot of people love complaining about religious doctrine, whatever it is, rather than maintain this dishonest altruistic need to separate church and state. I hear more people complain about the homosexual persecution by religious people than I've ever actually seen it play out.

It's funny how using the Bible is all cool and respectable when it's used to justify gay marriage, but when it's used to deny it, oh, separation of church and state!

Pick a side, and stay there, is all I ask.

so two people of the same gender getting married will affect you how?

I tell my GLBT friends this all the time, and now I'll tell you: as long as you don't ask me for my opinion, I don't have one. If you ask me for one, don't bitch and moan and tell me to "mind my own business" when you don't like it.

When you quietly live your life, having relationships with whomever you want in your life, your home, your whatever, you're not asking me to have an opinion, so I don't. When you scamper into the public arena and start trying to write your lifestyle into the legal code, you ARE asking me to have an opinion, as well as everyone else in the electorate. And you forfeit the right to say, "None of your business. Doesn't affect you", because you just MADE it affect me by asking me to form an opinion.

 

[Cecilie1200]

Here is a fun fact:

So many of the politicians against Gay Marriage while calling it "enter slander here" commit a act that is considered worse in the bible...Adultery!

In fact, Adultery was such a horrible act back in those days that it was one of the ten commandments.

Commandment #7: "You shall not commit adultery"

One does not see anything about Gay Marriage in the commandments or even in the bible. Hells bells, one does not even see anything about Abortion in the bible either.

Point of the story? Politicians will use parts of the bible like the church does whenever it suits their needs however the second it doesn't they turn the other cheek as if it does not exist.

Point of the story? Leftists always attack the messenger to divert attention from messages they can't answer.