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Sunday Happenings
Today, the Boston Metro has devoted page 6 (labeled "news") to bigots who supported Proposition 8 in California, possibly in attempt to be Fair and Balanced and present both sides of an important issue. One side is that gays deserve equal rights. The other side is that gays getting married will destroy American society with an all-consuming flood of gayness because the Bible says so. But don't worry, they're not really bigots because they knew a guy in high school who was gay and they totally didn't really care that he was going to hell for his evil ways. Here's an example from a 24-year old writer from Sacramento whose best friend since high school is gay:
To Lewis, it’s not about quarantining gays as second-class citizens. It's about upholding a long-standing tradition that he sees as unifying American society."Not everyone who voted for Proposition 8 is an anti-gay bigot," he said. "Some of us have true, heartfelt concerns about where our society is headed."
Oh, now it's clear: gays shouldn't be able to marry because straight people's ability to get married is unifying American society. Let's be clear: heterosexual marriage isn't even unifying heterosexuals, since the divorce rate is currently 40 to 50%. Also, if you don't want gays to marry because you're worried about the negative effects it would have on society, you're either bigoted or ignorant, since gay marriage hasn't yet destroyed Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, South Africa, Norway, and Sweden. Nor has it screwed up Massachusetts, Connecticut, or Iowa. In fact, allowing gays to marry is more likely to strengthen the economy. Imagine that!
Another genius quoted by the Metro is Grant Inderbitzen of Modesto, California, with this winning argument:
"Marriage has a definition that does not include two men or two women," Inderbitzen said. "It's like, if someone found a new color, they can't call it 'blue.' Blue already exists."
Checkmate, equal rights activists! We all know that there's only one kind of "blue!" In the same way that "marriage" has always meant "one man plus one woman," never in the history of the universe has the word "blue" ever meant anything even slightly different from this exact shade of blue.
That article, headlined Prop 8 supporters: Don't call us bigots, was just the warm-up. The real winner is the sidebar opinion piece penned by Timothy Dalrymple, titled Gay marriage disturbs the natural order. It includes gems such as:
The Christian views of the sanctity of marriage and the potential harm of homosexual marriage arise from basic Christian convictions on what it means to be human.
Ah. So, married heterosexuals are human and married homosexuals are not. Singletons are presumably somewhere in between. Got it. Dalrymple goes on to say that homosexuals are unable to find fulfillment and learn to love "across the deepest divide." By which he means the divide between a penis and a vagina.
But wait! It gets better!
We can no more revise the basis of marriage than we can revise the laws governing atoms.
Read that again. Process. Okay, proceed.
Let's start by examining how Christians have revised the basis of marriage since the printing of the Bible. As Betty Bowers recently pointed out, the Bible offers some interesting ideas of what marriage should be. For instance, in the case of King David, marriage is between a man, a woman, nine other women, and scores of concubines. Also, Deuteronomy 2:28-29 mandates that a woman must marry any man who rapes her, provided the rapist pays her father 50 shekels of silver.
Meanwhile, the laws governing atoms continue to not exist. See, Dalrymple has confused the idea of a law that politicians enact to control how we behave and a law that scientists develop to explain the way the world behaves. And guess what? Atoms behave the same way now—when gays are marrying—as they did thousands of years ago, when Abram (Genesis 16) was banging his wife and his wife's slave girl Hagar, who also became his wife.
Dalrymple wraps up by mentioning that gays can't live lives that "lead to complete wholeness and healing," so that's a shame. But he's not a bigot! Some of his best friends are gay, and he's so totally sad they're incomplete, unloving, unloved, offensive, unfulfilled broken sinners who will surely rot in the bowels of hell.
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Yeah I was pretty shocked at how brazen the Metro was today devoting a whole page to that garbage. It was already a fairly vapid paper, but now its dove head-first into the gutter. I'm not going to pick up another copy again.
Hi. Where were you 6 months ago? Give it up.
I think the more pertinent question is where was the Metro 5 years ago when gay marriage became the law of Massachusetts? Or 2 years ago when the constitutional amendment that would have banned it was voted down? Or last week when society in Massachusetts hadn't collapsed because of all of our gay married people?
Seriously, I realize that Metro was syndicating this garbage, but you'd think that somebody would, you know, check to see if gay marriage was actually still an issue in all of its markets.
The line equivocating changing the laws of Marriage with changing the laws of physics would have had me rolling in the isles, it was so moronic.
Not to mention again Christians are forcing their religion down our throats. How about the Jewish definition of Marriage, or the Pagan definition of Marriage, or the Wiccan Definition of Marriage. And as long as religion gets a free pass, lets check the Pastafarians, IPU Followers, and Mormons for their versions. -- Yes the Polygamist Morons.
marriage is a useless tradition having more to do with childbearing needs and women's inferiority to men (dowries = families paying men to take away their worthless daughters!) than with love. i think it's a lot more meaningful to commit yourself to someone you adore in a different way--you know, one that's special to you, not tradition, the church, or the government. that said, as long as the government continues to confer tax benefits on the marrieds, it's totally unjust not to allow everyone to get married.
Really well-written, fierce response to the free conservative rag.
In the other free conservative rag, I read today about a Boston woman who was indicted on charges that she arranged a marriage to allow an immigrant to stay in the U.S.:
Link to Maura Carney story
So we're prosecuting people who marry out of compassion, and getting in the way of other people who want to marry out of love.
Something tells me that the socially conservative among us don't value marriage as much as they claim to.
if people are still reading this thread, i invite them to explore the world of Christian marriage with Betty Bower.
I am the author of the piece mentioned in the Metro. I was commissioned to explain the concerns of traditional Christian churches. I wasn't asked for my personal opinion, and I did not give my personal opinion. Unfortunately the title/headline (which was awful) made it appear as though it were my viewpoint -- but, as most people know, the writer does not determine the title/headline. The Metro also did some sloppy editing and "dumbing down" in order to make the pieces accessible to all its readership.
Personally, I don't see any problem with the Metro allowing both sides on the issue to make their case.
Yes, of course, the "laws" of physics are not "laws" at all, but mathematical expressions of observed regularities in nature. They are descriptive, not prescriptive. But that's precisely the point. In the traditional Christian view, the *basis* of marriage (not the form of marriage) is grounded in a reality we can only describe, not change or legislate. The view here is that marriage, though a social contract (inter alia), is not a social construct. The forms of marriage may differ over the years, but the basis of marriage (unfortunately this was edited out) is found (so traditional Christians claim) in the natural bond and creative complementarity of male and female, just as atoms are "based" (in a loose analogical sense) on the natural bond and creative complementarity of negative and positive particles. So while other changes to marriage don't touch the "basis" of marriage in the male-female relation, gay marriage would.
Finally, I never made the cliche "my friends are gay" claim, and I certainly do not believe that gays are "unloving, unloved," or destined for eternal damnation. You are ascribing these views to me out of a stereotype, and because you've failed to distinguish between someone who holds a viewpoint and someone who is explaining a viewpoint. Again, I was explaining (and I myself wrote that it's a potentially offensive claim) that in the traditional Christian view, insofar as gays go against God's will (when they do), they miss out on the fullness of the life that God intended. I could have made the claim in much more offensive language; this seemed like the most charitable way it could be expressed.
Thanks.
I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt since you seem to want to distance yourself from the bigoted points of view that Ms. Watson has attributed to you, but rereading your article makes it a bit difficult.
For most of the article, when you're describing "the Christian view" you use the first person plural. That makes it seem as though you include yourself in the group that holds those views. If this is in fact a case of confusion, I think that's the source of it.
Also, it wasn't you that used the "my friends are gay" cliche, it was the part about Robert Lewis. Unless you wrote that, too. It wasn't clear on the website.
Your analogy fails so hard it hurts. "The basis of marriage" you mention is, apparently, whatever YOU decide it is: in this case, a bond between males and females, which can apparently include kings and concubines, rapists and victims, and masters and slaves. This "basis of marriage" is wholly made up, completely unlike the basis of atoms. We can observe atoms, study them, make hypotheses about them, and conduct experiments and prove or disprove those hypotheses. Your anti-gay bigotry is not based on science -- it is based on superstition that will one day be all but forgotten.
Way to go Rebecca.
TimD, you should be ashamed of yourself.