What the Bible Says About Gay Marriage

Now, I've not read the "groundbreaking" coverage in Newsweek a few weeks entitled Our Mutual Joy, which talks about what the Bible says about gay marriage. Mainly because I wasn't interested. I know the religious stuff, and I know the arguments, and I'm not religious.

My argument remains thus: what does religion have to do with civil rights, especially in a secular culture and government?

But no one listens to me on things like this.

Anyways, the article was pointed to on blogs both left and right and people loved it and hated it.

I repeat: I didn't read it.

Anyways, I did figure (rightly) that one of the central arguments is the "Bible as a living document" argument, that social mores change and the world looks a lot different than it did when the book was written. This, of course, assumes that the book was written by humans (which it was) who were prone to biases of their time (which they were), and that one need merely look at the definitions found in the Old and New Testaments of marriage to see how things have changed (polygamy, close cousin marriage, etc.), or that a lot of the laws of kosher (also called the Levitical Code which is one of the key religious arguments against homosexuality) are really just laws of cleanliness in an age where it wasn't wise to eat certain things for fear of infection.

But, whatever.

I was right. One of the central argument in the Newsweek piece is that the Bible is a living document and subject to understanding based on the context of the reader and the writer.

So I found this fun little argument by the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary which actually seems to agree that the Bible is a living document, and that it can be interpreted in someways as a book of its time and amorphous in new cultural conditions. . .

. . . except in the case of gay marriage.

Apparently, that's the last straw. We can change no more. Everything else has been great, and boy are we glad things have changed, and we've done a great job so far, but this is the final straw.

Really? Really?

Over it.