The Arguments Don’t Hold Up
Jun 5th, 2006 at 10:18 pm by Susie
Melanie on why the religious opposition to gay marriage doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny:
If the state has an interest in stable families, how does allowing more of them threaten marriage? If marriage is under so much threat, how come we haven’t criminalized infidelity? Why is divorce legal?
Since there is nothing in statutory law or the states’ interests in prohibiting a marriage contract between consenting adults, the objections must come from someplace else.
Let’s look at the theological arguments. While the Catholic Church does make this argument, it doesn’t hold any water with a serious systematic theologian. If you look at the branch of theological studies called “theological anthropology,” is the human person divisible in to classes of persons who have different standing with regard to their relationships with God, each other and all that is? The Catholic Church speaks with a forked tongue on this issue, calling the “homosexual state” “objectively disordered.” This is the only class of persons so labeled by their very ontology, that is, who they simply are. The Church is willing to say the same about some behaviors, but only one class of persons is given this judgement by their very being. This does not hold up to objective anthropological scrutiny and condemns some persons to a secondary status by an accident of birth, genes or environment or some combination about which we still don’t know much. We see gay people who desire and acheive loving, stable and committed relationships. The idea that they somehow fall into a secondary class of “grace” doesn’t pass the smell test. If adultery, abuse, disparagement and all of the other indignities that people can visit on each other can be atoned for and forgiven and returned to a state of grace, the idea that there is a state of being which cannot be is nothing more than classism and cannot be taken theologically seriously.
Those who wish to make the Biblical argument are restricted to the Old Testament and I recommend some special study of the Book of Leviticus. Homosexuality is forbidden with the same set of prohibitions like dress codes which have fallen out of both Jewish and Christian mores. I believe we gave up the death penalty for adultery a while back. One the other hand, both traditions give pride of place to the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, in which we allow without state sanctions some behaviors which are clearly forbidden by God (and I’m speaking metaphorically here. We all agree that adultery is a categorically bad behavior, for example, but it isn’t a felony any more than envy is.)
If the civil, theological and Biblical arguments for forbidding same sex marriages don’t hold up, we are left with the last argument of scoundrels, “that’s the way we have always done it.” As the Supreme Court demonstrated in Loving, it is an argument which doesn’t hold up either as a legal argument.
The state is forbidden from privileging any one theological argument over another, so the theological and biblical arguments are not available to the legislative branch in this case.
A congressman (preferably one on their 1st marriage) should introduce an Amendment that would outlaw divorce, using the EXACT same language as is being used to attempt to outlaw gay marriage.
Why don’t so-called Christians follow the other rules from Leviticus such as not eating pork, men not shaving and not wearing cloth made of more than one kind of material?
According to standard Christianity, this is unnecessary because of what Christ said. I think it’s in Matthew, sorry I don’t have time to look it up right now.
Someone asked Jesus how to obtain eternal life, and Jesus said love God and follow the law. The man asked, which law? (he must have found Leviticus as confusing as we do). Jesus answered by listing most of the 10 commandments (I think graven images are OK now). Then he said, these can be all summed up as love God and love thy neighbor.
Therefore, according to standard theology, since Jesus didn’t say anything about eating pork, shaving, wearing garments made of blended material, etc., those things now became OK. All those rules were just intended for the pre-Messiah Jews.
Jesus also didn’t say anything about homosexuality. He did, however, forbid the stoning of the woman taken in adultery, asking who in the crowd was free of sin themselves. This would be another of those Leviticus rules, so you can see his attitude to them.
Since by any rational Biblical analysis, Leviticus can’t be used to outlaw homosexuality, I believe some rather obscure verses from Paul were used to justify it. Biblical scholars have been working away at this stuff for more than 1000 years.
One might expect Christians to pay a certain amount of attention to the words of Christ. However, this concept doesn’t appear to register with fundamentalists. They just pull out a few Biblical verses that support their prejudices and ignore the rest.
After all, the New Testament is full of dangerous liberal ideas like “The love of money is the root of all evil”, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” (separation of church and state?) and “If you would follow me, take all you have and give it to the poor”.
Logic what logic. When it comes to religion there is ( in most cases) very little logic. You can’t win an argument with a fundie, or christain rightest. Because your first mistake is thinking that they will be able to think logically and be open minded, just as you are. They are not.