Bearman Cartoon

I have been getting some wonderful links from readers this week!!! :-) I'm really enjoying people sending me interesting stuff to read and post!

This one comes from a blog that I linked (kind of half-heartedly, I'll admit) during the Blogger's Freestore Foodbank challenge at Thanksgiving. Mr. Bearman had agreed to donate $20 for any blogger who adds his site to their blogroll -- so I did, of course -- but I've come to enjoy his cartoons quite a bit. And, yea, he is a bit of a hack cartoonist (his words, not mine), but I enjoy his take.

He emailed me with this post:

The post references a decent Newsweek article that discuss the Joint Chief of Staff's (Admiral Mike Mullen) difficulty in overcoming the institution of the military while following his Obama's promise to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell:

In the next year, Mullen might have to ask troops to do something many will find even more uncomfortable: welcome openly gay men and women into their ranks. Such was the promise made by President-elect Obama in the 2008 campaign—gay-rights groups will hold him to it. To many civilians, the shift might seem natural. American attitudes toward homosexuality have evolved since 1993, the year Congress mandated that gays could serve so long as they hid their sexual orientation. The law, known as Don't Ask, Don't Tell, predates "Will & Grace," and for most Americans, even the Internet. A 2008 Washington Post–ABC News poll put public support for gays serving openly at 75 percent.

But the military has its own culture, more insular and more conservative than the broader population's. In a survey of active-duty service members released last week, 58 percent said they oppose any change in the military's policy toward gays. Up to 23 percent of troops might not re-enlist if the law is repealed, according to a Military Times poll. Mullen will have to act as kind of cultural mediator between his new boss and the old institution he has managed for more than a year. That will mean advising Obama on what changes the military can (and cannot) withstand and then obliging troops to accept them.

...While his predecessor, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, let out more than once his opinion that homosexuality is immoral, Mullen won't discuss his personal views. Democratic Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher has held long talks on gays and the military with Mullen and other members of the joint staff. She says they understand how times have changed. "They don't want to find themselves crosswise with the new commander in chief."

It's additionally amusing, seeing as how the military is also lightening the physical requirements to join the military.

You know what's funny about all this? In no way shape or form do I want to join the armed forced ... unless it has some remote similarity to the Village People's In the Navy. And I really doubt it's like that.

Kind of like when I joined the YMCA. It was a disappointment, really.

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.