3 Some Pharisees approached him, and to put him to the test they said, 'Is it against the Law for a man to divorce his wife on any pretext whatever?'There were many more just like that. It wasn't that the Creator made them man and life partner, man and goat, man and vague quadruped or man and a whole bunch of guys from that really cool float from the Gay Pride Parade, it was "male and female" explicitly.
4 He answered, 'Have you not read that the Creator from the beginning made them male and female
5 and that he said: This is why a man leaves his father and mother and becomes attached to his wife, and the two become one flesh?
6 They are no longer two, therefore, but one flesh. So then, what God has united, human beings must not divide.'
I can understand if you want to support gay marriage because you don't want to discriminate, but don't talk like there's any kind of biblical support for it. It isn't there no matter how much you wish it were.
Our President tries to sneak it in under the Sermon on the Mount, but marriage isn't discussed there while it is discussed in no uncertain terms elsewhere.
"I don't think it [a same-sex union] should be called marriage, but I think that it is a legal right that they should have that is recognized by the state," said Obama. "If people find that controversial then I would just refer them to the Sermon on the Mount, which I think is, in my mind, for my faith, more central than an obscure passage in Romans." St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans condemns homosexual acts as unnatural and sinful.Some time during Barack's coversation with Jesus Christ, where he and Jesus work out which of them is which, he might want to ask whether or not St. Paul's writings were just some obscure scribblings, too.
Well, of course there isn't any biblical support for gay marriage. Why on earth would there be?
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, there is biblical support for a lot of things that are no longer considered acceptable or necessary - our society isn't really big on stoning people to death; polygamy may have been good enough for David and Solomon but not so much for us; and while trying to follow the dietary laws restricts one's diet so much that it seems to me that it is a pretty good weight-loss plan, at least most of us no longer worry about being socially ostracized for eating a ham sandwich.
I think the only reasons the Bible even gets dragged into these discussion are that (a) most people really don't know the bible that well, but still have a lot of respect for what it says; (b) there are a lot of verses where the interpretation is kind of, shall we say, a bit "fuzzy"; and (c) if you say "X is supported by the bible!", there is a good chance that you can find something to support it, and even if you can't the majority of people will just take your word that it is in there rather than looking it up, anyway.
Of course, there are some things that the bible *is* unambiguous about (like, for example, hypocrisy. Jesus talked about this a lot, probably more than any other single topic. I gather he was against it). I don't recall him having a lot to say about homosexuals one way or another, though.
Let me wax pedantic for a moment: marriage is discussed in the Sermon on the Mount, in Mat. 5:27-31.
ReplyDeleteAs a Christian, for me, there is no such thing as "gay marriage," in spite of what any state does. Marriage as an institution does is not the property of humanity, and thus cannot be redefined. The real tragedy here is lives that will be destroyed by this illegitimate imprimatur.
Of course, St. Paul, who was specifically selected by Jesus himself, had this to say in an "obscure passage" (exegesis by St. Obama of Chicago)from Romans:
ReplyDelete"For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct. They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless."
Many of those listed faults are well illustrated here.
"Many of those listed faults are well illustrated here."
ReplyDeleteIt looks like the "here" was supposed to link to something, but the link didn't connect. Which "here" did you have in mind?
Tim, no doubt about it, books like Leviticus are filled with all kinds of rules, like not eating cheese with meat. I was just pointing out that there is no biblical rationale for gay marriage at all.
ReplyDeleteSorry, Tim. I must have fat-fingered the HTML.
ReplyDeleteHere are some gay men "receiving communion".