Blue Funk Productions

 Sam Smith, Editor of the Progressive Review, has some fun with the debate over gay marriage, and opponents’ selective reliance on the Bible to justify their views.

SENATORIAL INQUIRY

Sam Smith

1. The Ten Commandments outlaw killing and adultery but that doesn’t
seem to bother your colleagues as much as gay marriage. Why do you think
the Ten Commandments are less important to them than gay marriage?

2. Would you accept a compromise in which we outlawed not only gay
marriages but support of deadly wars or cheating on your wife? If not,
why not?

3. The Ten Commandants say “You can work during the six weekdays and do
all your tasks. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to God your Lord. Do
not do anything that constitutes work. [This includes] you, your son,
your daughter, your slave, your maid, your animal, and the foreigner in
your gates.” You have not yet formalized this into a constitutional
amendment and so your maids, slaves, animals and proximate foreigners
are running around hog wild on Sundays. Isn’t this more dangerous than a
few gays getting married and shouldn’t you tackle it first?
(more…)

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 Averel Wilson

    In this day of religious exclusionism, couldn’t you just hug the Most Reverend Katherine Jefferts Schori, the new presiding bishop of the U.S. Episcopal Church?  Yesterday, in response to a demand by Episcopal church leaders to roll back support for same-sex unions, she said unequivocally that the U.S. church would do no such thing. 

Conservative bishops such as the Right Rev. Robert Duncan, bishop of Pittsburgh, believe that Anglican leaders in Africa have a truer understanding of Christ’s teachings, and that the church in the West “has lost its way”.  So, is that “truer inderstanding” one of exclusionism, of marginalizing those whose life’s path is a little outside the mainstream?  I don’t know the Bible intimately (or, truthfuly, very well at all), but I’m quite sure that the spirit of what I learned in Sunday school was about reaching out, bridging differences, and making life easier for those on the margins.  We didn’t parse the Bible in order to exclude people from the big umbrella of the church.  And I don’t remember Jesus looking for ways to throw people out either…except for those money lenders, and they did require some reeducating..

At the end of the day, this very narrow reading of the Bible, or, for that matter, the Torah, or the Koran, accomplishes nothing that couldn’t be accomplished with a broader, more inclusive interpretation.  It simply foments conflict.  And those who insist on a focus of exclusionism within their religion, who feel that they alone have a corner on religious truth, have an awful lot to answer for.  Behaving in a “Christian” manner used to mean something positive, and could be applied to anyone of any faith (or of no faith whatsoever); taken as the Anglican communion would like us to, it’s not an adjective I’d want affixed to me. 

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