Gay Marriage and the Bible
Friday “Dr. Omed’s Tent Show Revival” (http://blogs.salon.com/0002296) posted a piece on “Gay Marriages and the Old Testament” that set me to thinking.
It is true that the Bible appears to have some pretty strong prohibitions against homosexuality. For example, Leviticus 20:13 mandates the death penalty for homosexual couples. But literalizing scripture can be tricky. The same chapter (Leviticus 20:10) also mandates the death penalty for adulterers. We could have a regular blood bath here.
For if we are going to take Leviticus 20:13 literally, then consistency requires us to take Deuteronomy 21:18-21 literally, which tell us that if a youth refuses to obey his parents, said youth is to be taken before the elders who will take him to the village gate (a place, not a bar) and stone him to death. No doubt the juvenile division of any police department in the country could come up with a list of candidates.
What most fundamentalists fail to realize is that scriptural prohibitions fall into two categories—the absolute and the relative. The absolutes are simple: don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t lie and don’t exploit. They are absolutes because they are common to every society and culture. All other prohibitions are relative to a given culture in a given place at a given time in history. There may have been a time two-thousand years ago when the welfare of a community might have require the stoning of a recalcitrant youth. These days, we have a more humane way of dealing with the problem.
So what was the cultural setting for the prohibition against homosexuality? In biblical times life expectancy was about 20 years. This figure was dragged down by an extremely high rate of infant and child mortality. A woman (and remember womanhood started with puberty) had to go through five pregnancies just to keep the population level stable. Back then all endeavors were labor intensive, and the primary source of labor was children, most families being too poor to depend on slave labor. In this context, a homosexual union would endanger the community because it would deprive the village of ten potential laborers. However, in an age where the life expectancy is growing ever higher, when hommo sapiens sapiens spreads across the Earth like a vermin threatening to trash our environment homosexual unions should not only be tolerated, they should be encouraged.
A cornerstone of fundamentalist paranoia warns us that somehow, gay marriages would undermine the sacred institutions of family and marriage. What follows is a paraphrase of an article written by a wonderful writer, Michael Ventura, a columnist for the Austin Chronicle.
On any give Saturday it is likely that a man and a woman will be married at St. Catherine’s Roman Catholic Church in Belford, NJ. They may be getting married for all the right reasons—they are deeply in love and are committed to building a life together. Or they may be getting married for all the wrong reasons—sex, money, self-esteem, peer pressure. The marriage may be a thing of beauty that grows and deepens over the years; or it may develop into a hell-hole of emotional and physical abuse. (If you watch much of “American Justice” on the A&E Network, you might become convinced that a heterosexual marriage is down right dangerous since it usually ends in homicide)
My wife and I are in our 32nd year of marriage. Whatever happens with any other marriage will have no effect on ours. It will grow or falter on its own merits. Nor will our marriage be affected if a guy marries a guy, or a woman marries a woman. This paranoid fantasy is being flogged by the Bushits to divert attention from the ineptitude with which they are handling both our domestic and our foreign policy. A pseudo culture war distracts us from the floundering war that is taking place in Iraq and from our floundering economy.
If the religious right insists on flaunting their version of scripture, let them prove their faith by stoning a kid to death. Walk the walk, folks.
8:08:52 AM 
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