I just taped a segment for “Make It Plain” with Mark Thompson tonight, a Sirius XM show. Mark is an ordained African-American minister, and said there was no theological justification for same-sex marriage, but that we have separation of church and state, and what the state decides is none of his concern.
I took mild exception to that. I talked about how comments from Leviticus are used selectively, and that the “Bible-based” people who did so refused to acknowledge the evolution of belief. They are far too selective about what they quote, I said. “Leviticus says you can’t touch pigskin, so there goes football. No shrimp or lobster, so there go Friday nights at Red Lobster. And you can’t have two different materials in a garment, so there go polyester blends!
If you want to be really Bible-based, I told him, marriage isn’t between a man and a woman – “it’s between a man, a woman and his concubines!” And if Christians really care about “protecting marriage,” why aren’t they trying to make divorce illegal? Because they’re hypocrites, I said. They know their political careers would be over. So they pretend to be Bible-based, but it’s Bible-based lite.
It all comes back to the same thing: Some Christians think Jesus just wasn’t mean enough. Mark agreed. “The greatest of these (commandments) is love,” he said. Amen.
