“The Gay Dilemma,” by J. Lee Grady, Charisma, October 2003.
“The Marriage Amendment,” by The Editors, First Things, October 2003.
“Sowing Confusion,” by Charles Colson, Christianity Today, October 2003.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
“If the scriptures do not justify slavery, I know not what they do justify. If we err in maintaining this relation, I know not when we are right – truth then has parted her usual moorings and floated off into an ocean of uncertainty.” So said a preacher of the Old South. Historian Martin Marty (Christian Century, October 4, 2003) cites this rationalization cited by another historian and comments: “Some generations from now a historian … will have to tell the story of current controversies in church and nation – for example, the conflict over homosexuality. If the churches in our century find what [evangelical historian Mark] Noll calls ‘hermeneutical’ ways to relate literalism and legalism to this new situation, as the northern clergy did in the case of slavery, no doubt [some will] insist that the old orthodoxy was wholly right.”
Today’s “orthodoxy” calls all homosexuality sinful and any “northern” counter arguments rooted, for example, in what the anti-slavery John Wesley called a “quadrilateral” of Bible, tradition, reason and experience, are, in the dismissive rebuke of Pentecostal editor Grady, merely “buzzwords such as ‘grace,’ ‘mercy’ and ‘love.’” He laments that Wesley’s [Anglican] church now puts “God’s blessing on sexual perversion” by ordaining an openly gay bishop. He forgets that that church got started on the divorce of its founder. (Incidentally, in 14 Journal entries on his efforts to get a man released from prison for sodomy, Wesley said nothing negative about homosexuality. Nor did he read “homosexuality” into Bible verses used today against gays. On a controversy of his day, Wesley endorsed a tract on “Marriage Between Near Relations” and wrote: “Many marriages, commonly supposed to be unlawful, are neither contrary to the law of nature nor the revealed law of God.”). Grady laments that “the founder of the nation’s first gay denomination was raised in a Pentecostal church” without noting that the founder of the 20th century Pentecostal movement was a homosexual. Charisma reports on Christians suing Christians yet it doesn’t note Paul’s outrage against these suits. But two unclear words in a list within Paul’s argument against these suits are used today to attack gays.
First Things endorses an Amendment to the Constitution to restrict marriage to heterosexual couples. The editors say that marriage for gay couples would “advance a social revolution unsought and unwanted by the American people.” Wasn’t this also once said against “agitation” for civil rights for black folk and the judicial dismantling of laws against interracial marriage? They refuse to see that homosexuals, as do heterosexuals, know their sexual orientation as a given, discovered, subjective experience of who they are. The editors call for federal action to beat back the “threat” to the institution of marriage from what they deem to be a pool of only “about two percent of the combined teenage and adult male population, and considerably less of the female.” And, they assert, “it is by no means evident that most, or even many, gays are interested in entering into a legally recognized union.” So how do these few gay couples pose a greater threat to heterosexual marriage than do the millions upon millions of heterosexuals who regularly engage in sex outside of marriage, have extra-marital affairs, and divorce each other? Where is the call for a Constitutional Amendment to protect the institution of marriage from their lifestyles? The editorial is full of cruel false witness-bearing, e.g., the notions that “to be gay is a decision” and that a faithful gay union is merely “pretending to be something like the relationship between husband and wife.” They warn that gay “affirmative action” sex education will turn children gay. We’ve heard it all before. And the editors admit as much when they predict that, “as in the case of race,” if gay people are allowed to marry, “a vast array of laws and regulations associated with the antidiscrimination” will be triggered.
Colson claims that the Supreme Court decision overturning laws against consensual homosexuality is “the prelude … to legally sanctioned polygamy, incest, pedophilia and bestiality.” Maybe it’s the postlude to the polygamous Patriarchs and Mary’s being “underage” (in our terms). He endorses Justice Scalia’s saying the ruling “effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation.” But as the Golden Rule well sums up Jesus’ moral law, how can heterosexual Christians insist that extending to gay people the sanctioning of intimacy heterosexuals reserve for themselves is the end of all morals law? Though Genesis sites companionship as what occasioned the primal sexual pair bond, Colson sites conservative political philosopher Jay Budziszewski’s saying that “procreation [is] the purpose of marriage.” Ironically, Budziszewski, at a recent evangelical meeting on ethics and public policy, objected to evangelicals forcing their political agenda into a Bible that, he noted, is no handbook for political policy.
Millions of practicing heterosexuals are practicing sexual promiscuity, cheating on their wives and husbands, conceiving and then killing their pre-born babies, beating their wives and abusing and abandoning their kids, sexually harassing employees and co-workers, spending billions on porn and prostitutes, and spending billions on what they can’t afford because “sex sells.” And neo-conservatives and the Religious Right can’t think of a better way to respond to these heterosexual travesties and “save” the institution of marriage than by prohibiting a few gay couples from the rights and responsibilities of the institution?! Millions of Africans are dying from heterosexually-contracted AIDS – from rape, enforced prostitution, extra-marital affairs – (nearly 40 will die while you read this) and Anglican bishops in Africa are up in arms over one openly gay bishop in America. Several Episcopal bishops and 35 percent of Episcopal priests deny Jesus’ resurrection and conservative Episcopalians threaten schism over one openly gay bishop. What’s going on? It’s called psychopathological denial, scapegoating, hypocrisy, self-righteousness, self-serving arrogance, “straining at a gnat,” “the leaven of the Pharisees.”