[Note: I’ve renamed this post from the original title, “Is Dan Savage a Bully.”]
Ever read one of those comments and you’re agreeing with it, agreeing with it, and then the writer yanks the rug out from under you?
So I was reading this comment from Jessica, on a NOMblog entry about Dan Savage’s speech that some Christian teenagers walked out of (more on that in a moment). A teacher implied that Savage’s comments were bullying, and Jessica wrote:
Bullying, bullying, bullying,
He bullies she and she bullies he and everyone bullies and get bullied.
Bullying has become politicized. That is, everyone is accusing everyone else of bullying. It is the latest tin word, thoughtlessly shot across to the other side’s ranks.
And I am so in agreement. (Perhaps because I had just read this post, by a Catholic blogger who is furious at Savage for “bullying” but sees no problem with his charming habit of calling gay and lesbian folks “brownshirts.”)
Jessica continues:
Well, I’ll tell you something, I was really bullied, at school, many years ago…
Again, I’m totally with you, Jessica. I lived your pain. I know where you’re coming from.
…and there only way yo cure it is not to have lectures and diversity meetings and talk, the only way to cure bullying is to hang the bullies from lampposts with a sign around their neck, I am a rotten bully and deserve worse.
Any survivor of bullying can tell you this, if you are willing to listen.
Eeeeek!
Jessica, please get off my side thanks so much.
Anyhow, about that Dan Savage speech.
[spoiler intro=”Transcript” title=”Dan Savage video”]“People often point out that they can’t help it. They can’t help with the anti-gay bullyings because it says right there in Leviticus, it says right there in Timothy, it says right there in Romans that being gay is wrong. We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people the same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation. We ignore bullshit in the Bible about all sorts of things.
The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads during the Civil War and justified it. The shortest book in the New Testament is a letter from Paul to a Christian slave owner about owning his Christian slave. And Paul doesn’t say Christians don’t own people. Paul talks about how Christians own people. We ignore what the Bible said about slavery because the Bible got slavery wrong. Sam Harris in Letter to a Christian Nation points out that the Bible got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong: slavery.
What are the odds that the Bible got something as complicated as human sexuality wrong? 100%. The Bible says that if your daughter’s not a virgin on her wedding night – that a woman isn’t a virgin on her wedding night, that she shall be dragged to her father’s doorstep and stoned to death. Callista Gingrich lives. And there is no effort to amend state constitutions to make it legal to stone women to death on their wedding night if they’re not virgins. At least not yet. We don’t know where the GOP is going these days. People are dying because people can’t clear this one last hurdle. They can’t get past this one last thing in the Bible about homosexuality.
One thing I want to talk about is – ha, so you can tell the Bible guys in the hall that they can come back in because I’m done beating up the Bible. It’s funny that someone who’s on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible, how pansy-assed some people react to being pushed back. I apologize if I hurt anyone’s feelings but I have the right to defend myself, and to point out the hypocrisy of people who justify anti-gay bigotry by pointing to the Bible and insisting that we must live by the code of Leviticus on this one issue and no other.”
(Transcript via Blag Hag.)[/spoiler]
1) Credit to the videographer: That is a gorgeously framed shot.
2) The thing I found most objectionable, on first listen, was Savage’s use of the term “pansy-assed” — an attack Savage has since apologized for, while standing by the rest of his speech (although admitting that his use of the word “bullshit” may not have been wise).
3) Is there really a case for calling what Savage did “bullying?” I guess it was rude to use the word “bullshit” when referring to someone’s religion. But the actual content of Savage’s statement is an argument. And I have trouble accepting that disagreeing with (some) Christians is tantamount to bullying Christians.
Although there are many Christians with other, sometimes more sophisticated, anti-gay arguments, you don’t have to talk to opponents of lgbt rights much to see that the “I believe it because it’s what’s in the Bible” comes up a lot. It’s legitimate of Savage to respond to that argument.
4) I can see an argument that Savage was wrong — rude, uncivil, and insensitive — to use the word “bullshit” three times. Savage isn’t an average man on the street; he’s a professional and seasoned speaker, who was invited to speak to an audience of minors. Under those circumstances, it’s reasonable to hold Savage to higher standards than we’d hold folks to in an average political disagreement in a bar.
5) On the other hand, this wasn’t a school assembly with a captive audience. It was a journalism conference that student journalists chose to attend; and as far as I know, all of the students had the option of simply not attending Savage’s speech. That Savage uses swear words while speaking and writing is hardly a surprise to anyone; and future journalists shouldn’t spontaneously blanch and flee because someone uses the word “bullshit” three times while making an argument they disagree with.
6) I have some doubt that this was a spontaneous walkout; the walkout starts before Savage ever swears, the students in the video are often smirking, and the video is so very nicely framed. If this was, in fact, a planned protest, that wouldn’t delegitimize the protest, so it’s not an important point.
7) When I was a teenager, I swore constantly, except when I was around grownups. Hearing the word “bullshit” was not a shocker. Are teenagers now different? Are right-wing Christian teenagers different?
8 ) Although I don’t think Savage’s words were bullying, I can see an argument that they were insensitive. The truth is, Christians in the US are used to having their beliefs treated with a great deal of deference and respect; saying that some of the Bible is “bullshit” probably isn’t the smartest way to get the point across. Savage’s argument — which I think was legitimate — has been lost, because either out of sincerity or out of opportunism, right-wingers are now shocked (or, perhaps, “shocked! shocked!”) that Savage used cuss words while discussing the Bible. Or that he criticized the Bible at all – it’s hard to tell if people are objecting to his tone or to the argument itself.
9) Although I realize the title of this post could be seen as an invitation for a discussion of Dan Savage generally, I’d rather not go there. Let’s restrict discussion to this one particular incident, please.
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Heh. nice cartoon.
One more number:
5b) It’s relevant that these weren’t “just” students. these were journalism students, and putatively some of the more motivated ones. And journalism itself implies that you need to be able to listen to, and report on, points of view. Even when you disagree. Even when you’re offended.
In this situation Savage was most certainly in the right. I don’t have a problem with him using the word bullshit period. It’s ridiculous to pretend that this isn’t a common word. He wasn’t speaking to a group of pre schoolers so I see the complaints as nitpickings.
I am not a fan of Savage to be clear but I do agree with his assertions here.
The use of “bullshit” and other tone-policing is a total red herring, relevant only in that it may have helped the incident gain more publicity. Had he refrained from “profanity” and simply said the Bible is wrong, the response would have been exactly the same.
Their objection isn’t even the content of his argument, but rather that someone dares to openly question and reject the central document of their faith. The fact that these students can’t even tolerate being aware of an alternative viewpoint says all that is necessary about both them and their views.
I thought Dan Savage made a logically reasoned argument about a real issue and correctly pointed out the Christianist hypocrisy of judging but not wanting to be judged (see also, Mormon funding of the campaign for Prop * in California and subsequent whining about bullying and “free speech” when the gays they smeared spoke back/protested/pulled back the curtain). Yes, he used some colorful language, but nothing that students wouldn’t have heard or said in their daily lives. Furthermore, he spoke as “Dan Savage”, in his own professional “voice”, which anyone who has read and/or listened to his work would recognize. The walkout was weak.
Amp, #9 is really unfair. I understand that this isn’t the place for “and Dan Savage is biphobic!”, but you can’t really take his actions out of the context of his public persona.
He could have been more effective at changing minds, or at least inducing thought, had he pitched his statements differently and used a different tone. But he’s Dan Savage, this is his shtick. (And if he was the type to go around making moderately-phrased “let’s examine what the Bible says and conduct some exegesis among ourselves on this topic, shall we” speeches, he wouldn’t be famous and he wouldn’t have been invited to speak to the kids anyhoo.)
I also don’t think he particularly deserves any substantive criticism for what he did or said. He was asked to come speak about bullying for the conference, he did that, nobody told him “and be sure not to offend the Christians”. Arguably, the people organizing the conference could be dinged a bit for inviting a relatively notorious guy like Dan, who – while an interesting fellow and probably a good guy at heart – is not exactly a pillar of journalistic ethics. (Yes, I’m thinking of the doorknob incident.)
But that could have been handled with a simple “this guy likes to be controversial so if your fee-fees are specially delicate today, go to a different talk” notice.
Isn’t this a classic “tu quoque” fallacy?
https://s3.amazonaws.com/yourlogicalfallacyis/pdf/LogicalFallaciesInfographic_A1.pdf
I had teachers in HS who said “bullshit.”
I don’t think its a “tu quoque” fallacy?
The fallacious argument is something like
The bible says that homosexuality is unethical.
The bible also says that slavery is ethical.
Slavery is unethical.
Therefore homosexuality is ethical.
Whereas I think Dan’s argument is either
The bible says that homosexuality is unethical.
The bible also says that slavery is ethical
Slavery is unethical.
Therefore we cannot base ethical judgments solely on the bible.
or perhaps
Any interpretation of the bible that condemns homosexuality
must also condone slavery.
Slavery is unethical.
Therefore interpretations of the bible that condemn homosexuality
are incorrect.
I watched the video and I didn’t witness any shaming of individuals. Dan’s language and tone were provocative, but not mean. He wasn’t trying to make anyone feel like shit about the bullshit the bible tells us to believe, if you follow my logic. I mean, he wasn’t demeaning anyone’s belief, per se. He was questioning the integrity of the framework those beliefs were based on. Which could be interpreted as an attack, but if they knew anything at all about Dan Savage surely the students had some hint it wasn’t going to be all sweetness and light? I’m not sure how much of a fan I am of Dan Savage, either, but if it were me that spoke I wouldn’t have taken back anything I’d said on that video.
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Just thought it would be nice to add the voice of a religious, gay activist: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/03/is-dan-savage-the-gay-santorum.html
“Savage’s remarks (eerily familiar to a decade-old speech by President Jed Bartlet on The West Wing) were as damaging to LGBT people as the Christian Right’s inevitable and hostile reactions to them. Worse, in fact, because they represented a notable gay leader affirming that one must choose between sexuality and religion, between God and gay.”
I don’t know that that’s at all fair — I suspect it’s about how it’s so much more personal it is when someone closer to you hurts you — but then, I’m neither gay nor religious. But Michaelson is right that there are many people who are both gay and religious who do not want to choose between the two.
Certainly, these right-wing, religious arguments come up often when talking about gay rights, but there are left-wing, religious responses to them. (Michaelson, in particular, argues that the word “abomination,” which also comes up often because it is such an extreme condemnation, is a mistranslation introduced by the King James Bible.) While I think I can understand an anti-religious impulse, it could only help for gay-rights activists to learn about these arguments, unless they really do want to be anti-religious bigots.
Ampersand:
Okay, but Mythago is right, and you made the point yourself: the question you seem to want to ask is whether this act was an act of bullying, rather than whether Dan Savage is a bully. As you’re aware, for many reasons it’s almost always better to critique an action than a person. I think you’ve done a bait-and-switch by choosing that headline and then limiting argument as you did in point 9.
That said, I agree with you that the walk-out seems planned, and that the walkers don’t seem to be acting spontaneously. The first walker crosses the camera at, 00:23 “…that being gay is wrong.” At that point, Savage has said that he’s going to talk about the bible, and then spoken two sentences about what anti-gay people often say. He has not sworn. He has not raised his voice. He has not even said anything contrary (though his tone is clear). She clearly had to make a decision and to get up and get moving, all of which takes a few seconds. So, she made her decision to leave somewhere around “We’ll just talk about the bible for a second.”
That’s setting the bar for disengaging pretty damned low. I would have a hard time believing that announcing the topic is triggering, so this is not an act of self-protection, it is an act of speech, and what it is saying is, “La la la la, we will not listen to you talk about this topic.” These are journalism students who are there voluntarily, and they’re walking out a speech at the introduction of a topic? Please. I can see where “pansy-assed” is offensive (though arguably less offensive coming from a gay man than from a straight man), so perhaps we can all agree on “lily-livered”.
Robert argues that Savage could have been more persuasive if his tone had been different, but that’s a tone argument, which are sometimes (rarely) valid but always suspect: “Your argument is wrong because you did not phrase it in accord with my standards.” That might fly all right in discussion between equal powers, but Savage is not in the middle of such an argument. He’s arguing from the low end of a tilted playing field, to privileged people at the high end.
Savage was absolutely not out of line. He made a reasoned argument, using mildly salty language, against an argument which is used routinely to deprive him and people like him of basic rights. His argument points out inconsistencies in the other argument. That’s all fair game.
And these journalism students started to walk when he had done nothing more than name the topic and frame the argument which he was about to critique.
Lily-livered.
Grace
Grace wrote:
Point well taken; you’re completely right. My intention wasn’t to create a bait-and-switch, but I did, because I was thoughtless when I wrote the headline. I’ve changed the headline to better match the actual subject of this post.
And I should mention, anyone who wants to bring up Savage’s past statements as a means of contextualizing their discussion of this event is welcome to. I just don’t want the discussion to end up being one about Savage in general, rather than this particular issue.
As for the rest, I agree with you, and (typically) don’t have any response. :-p
Edited to add: And of course, Mythago was right when she made the same point, earlier this thread. Thanks to you both.
The economist has some trenchant commentary on Savage’s remarks and the reaction to them.
Here’s an excerpt, but it does not contain the useful links which you will find in the original.
Weak tea, indeed.
Grace
Ampersand:
You’re a class act, Mr. Deutsch.
Since you have declared it within-bounds to bring in relevant portions of Savage’s past statements, he recently read a piece in which he explored his complex relationship with religion, and acknowledged that within that complexity he is, himself, hypocritical:
It is in the final 21 minutes of this episode of This American Life. It is very touching, and well worth hearing.
Grace
He never says Christianity is bullshit or even that the Bible is bullshit. He says we can ignore the bullshit in the Bible. This is something that religious people do every day. I find the reading that Savage said you have to choose between religion and sexuality totally disingenuous.
He shouldn’t have called the kids “pansy-assed.” He did apologize for that.
All other pearl-clutching is, as far as I’m concerned, just that.
And thanks for linking the TAL piece. I heard it for the first time a few weekends ago and was very moved by it.
Colophon: the tu quoque is
Dan Savage called out Christianity for being anti-gay while hypocritically ignoring other Biblical mandates
Dan Savage said “bullshit”
Therefore Dan Savage is a bully and we should talk about what an anti-Christian bully he is.
Dan Savage is a bully. Some people don’t want to say that, because the bully is bullying the other bullies, or people they feel like deserve it, but its true.
Now the Christian Children will survive there is a good support network among conservative Christians that makes whatever Dan Savage’s cause has going on look like a joke, but what about when Dan Savage says thing to groups that don’t have that.
He has already insulted rape victims, obese people, other gays, and transexuals. The man is like a walking disaster. If his own side doesn’t get control of him the conservative right will. Eventually he is gonna bully someone who can push back or that has connections and then his little crusade is gonna end.
Oh, no, I would certainly not advise hanging of bullies.
OTOH, the classic response to a physical bully is to a) bring your boxing skills up to speed and then b) punch him or her in the nose. Of course, this only works and is socially acceptable when the bully and the bullied are of not wildly disparate sizes and are of the same sex.
Just fyi, if it wasn’t clear from my other comments, my tone argument re: Savage was not to say he was wrong. Just to say that, for certain populations, there are approaches to biblical critique that will find receptive ears, and approaches which will not, even if the substantive content of each critique is identical. It is not Savage’s job to tailor his message nor should he be condemned for not kowtowing to a particular group of students.
That’s more or less what I thought at first. But on listening, I changed my mind. “Sam Harris in Letter to a Christian Nation points out that the Bible got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong…” That’s not a precise critique; it’s a broadside that doesn’t leave any room for viewing the Bible as any kind of moral guide. It’s not bullying (as I understand bullying, where even a good deal of rank bigotry isn’t bullying), but it doesn’t seem remotely helpful either.
Btw, Michaelson responds here to Marcotte’s response in Slate: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/03/dan-savage-was-wrong-and-so-was-amanda-marcotte-at-slate.html
So, for 40% of Americans, picking and choosing isn’t an option. For 40% of Americans, the claim that you can is totally at odds with how they understand their religion. And if they’re gay and part of that 40%, it’s totally unhelpful to talk about it that way.
Christians (and it’s a bit odd that some of the discussion seems to assume that religious people are all Christians) who take the Bible literally don’t, for example, simply ignore the bit about shellfish. They distinguish between old and new covenants. The old is between G-d and the Jews; the new, brought by Christ for gentiles, is different in myriad ways. They interpret (though some refuse to accept that they interpret) and reconcile. For them, it surely must be ignorance to insist that they already ignore parts of the Bible while citing an example where they specifically don’t. To say, based on that ignorance, that Savage had done nothing more than “accurately recounted what is in the Bible,” as Marcotte (not a scholar of religion, btw) wrote, must be pretty offensive.
I can see how they would view Savage’s words as offensive in the same way, but more importantly I can see how a different approach more appreciative of religion would work better. Unless, of course, one wants to be anti-religion.
I actually have a more complex critique of the Sam Harris quote. He calls slavery the easiest moral question. And yet, for thousands and thousands of years, just about nobody thought slavery was wrong. Maybe slaves. But everyone else thought it was fine. So humanity as a whole got the “easiest” moral question wrong for most of human history. Maybe this morality thing is a little trickier than we thought.
But anyway, yeah, Sam Harris is very hostile to religion, and quoting Sam Harris isn’t exactly making nice. I still don’t think he’s saying you have to throw out religion. He’s saying the Bible got some really big things wrong. Lots of people are religious without believing in biblical inerrancy. If you do believe in biblical inerrancy, as lots of people bafflingly do, well …
The approach I’ve heard from religious people who want to be accepting of gay people is this: Yes, the Bible says homosexuality is wrong, and it’s a sin. It also says lying is a sin and pride is a sin, and it doesn’t create a hierarchy of sin. So, if the speaker is a Christian, they say all sins are wrong and we’re all sinners and Jesus came to save us. We don’t run somebody out of the community for being gay or even having gay sex anymore than we run them out of the community for being a little bit arrogant. Or, if the speaker is Jewish, they say that a gay couple should be treated with the same assumption that they are following Jewish law with regard to their sexual relations that is extending to straight couples. No one actually knows if any given male-female couple is observing family purity, but the assumption is granted. Do the same for gay couples and assume they aren’t having anal sex or sex at all, depending on how you interpret “lying with a man as you lie with a woman.”
But why should Dan Savage say that? Why should he say “Don’t bully gay kids. They’re not any worse than kids who lie”? That’s not his perspective. That’s not his opinion.
I guess I’ll have to go read Michaelson, cause I will fall out of my chair if that’s his solution to the predicament of being religious and being gay.
@ 19 Dan Savage can be a jerk and he has been wrong about some pretty big things, and he’s been a jerk about not admitting he’s wrong. That’s not the same thing as being a bully.
Here’s Michaelson’s solution to Leviticus:
So. Just to get this out of the way, even people who say they believe in biblical inerrancy still engage in interpretation because for a book as complex and self-contradictory as the bible, there is no such thing as just reading the words on the page and everyone agreeing what they mean. That’s why the Talmud even exists. People who were a lot closer to the source material than we are today couldn’t agree on what it meant. People who believe in biblical inerrancy are still bringing to the table what they want to see in the bible. For many of them, they simply won’t believe Michaelson. No, no, no, you see, it was only meant to prohibit male anal sex as a Canaanite religious practice! And they’ll just say, oh, okay, sure. Unlikely.
As for his actual interpretation, I think he’s correct on a and b. I can’t speak intelligently to c. As for d, that’s what I used to think, too, but after conversations with some pretty educated Christians, I think that is not correct. Certain particular laws from the Old Testament – namely, kashrut – were set aside. The law against male anal sex was not. That’s how it was explained to me, anyway, and there is plenty of evidence of other aspects of the Old Testament that are still observed by Christians. Regardless of how theologically sound that argument is, if that’s what Christians believe, that’s what they’re going to believe.
And really, this – “of no relevance to Christians who have set aside the Old Testament’s ritual law” – is just another way of saying what Dan Savage said. “We” ignore the “bullshit” about shellfish and menstruation, so ignore the thing about gay butt sex too.
First, the nitpick that’s my talking point this week: the Bible tacitly endorses slavery, but it doesn’t mandate slavery. The clerks who quit rather than issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples felt there was a conflict between the law and Scripture but it takes a willful misreading — “may” as “must” in quite a few places — to interpret laws implementing the 13th Amendment as going against Scripture. So modern Christians are not really ignoring what the Bible says about slavery. Perhaps they’ve come to a different moral understanding, but even that moral understanding doesn’t lead them to reject the text outright. I understand the same is true of SDA vegetarianism.
Rerailing slightly: I think there are some teenage budding journalists — raised, perhaps, on FOX, but I’m a liberal, so I would say that — who believe the point of journalism is to take a side and then look for sources who support that, and whoever has sources with the most aggregate credibility wins. So from that perspective, they were perfectly justified in not listening to someone with views repellent to them.
Hershele, the “may” vs “must” issue is a total red herring – by even permitting slavery, the Bible says that, at a minimum, it’s morally acceptable. The issue is that in doing so, the Bible demonstrates that it lacks even the slightest bit of credibility on moral issues. You wouldn’t trust a bridge built by an engineer who thinks 2+2=5, so why should you accept the moral reasoning of a source that makes a similarly elementary and egregious error? Modern Christians erase this inconvenient problem and pretend that the moral authority of the Bible is not irreparably compromised by it.
Taking moral guidance from a book that treats slavery as morally acceptable is like taking advice about the ethics of modern living from John Wayne Gacy.
Note that Mokele’s point addresses only those who believe that the Bible is inerrant. Essentially, Savage has offered a proof by counterexample that the Bible is NOT inerrant.
Proposition: the Bible is inerrant.
Counterexample: the Bible does not condemn slavery, one of the easiest softball moral questions there is.
Therefore: the Proposition is untrue.
Note also that it does not follow that everything in the Bible is wrong, just that you have to put on your thinking cap when you read it.
If, on the other hand, you believe that the Bible is a compilation of teachings and histories, which were selected, edited and translated by human beings, then you can still look to it for guidance and inspiration, and regard it very highly, and even as sacred. Because human beings have agendas, and beliefs and practices which work reasonably well in their particular circumstances but not in all circumstances. And we human beings who come afterward can reasonably differ, particularly after careful, heartfelt thought.
Grace
Mokele – You are making moral assumptions based on modern resource levels. There are economic situations, long since passed out of human experience for the most part, but still historically accessible to us, where slavery represents a less-immoral solution to an intractable conflict.
Michaelson is responding to Savage and Marcotte, who both specifically mentioned the law in Leviticus and didn’t mention that the same thing is said elsewhere. Michaelson gestures to the other passages, but doesn’t respond to them in these article, which makes sense given context and limited space. The rule on shellfish isn’t mentioned elsewhere, to my (admittedly, somewhat limited) knowledge. The rule on not eating dairy and meat together is mentioned in a few places, but it is mentioned specifically as separating Jews from gentiles. Apparently, some nearby group boiled calves in their mother’s milk, and the rule was “We’re not them, so we behave differently.” So it was very specific to what it means to be a Jew, and it only made sense to ignore it for people who weren’t Jews. (I suppose we could say Christians “ignore” the “inconvenient” bit about the Torah being for Jews in making it their Old Testament, but that seems more than a little ungenerous toward today’s literalists.) But my understanding is that the rule against gay butt sex isn’t put the same way. It can be ignored in Leviticus because there it describes Jewish ritual law, but it can’t be ignored in the same way elsewhere. There is, for example, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Of course, there’s the interpretation there that the sin was poor hospitality, but unlike keeping kosher it requires an additional strategy. And additional strategies for other passages, some of which are probably harder to reinterpret than others, which may seem to add up. So, from what I’ve gathered talking to Christians who claimed the Bible condemns homosexuality, it isn’t necessarily (in theory, at least) a matter of selective interpretation that easily rises to hypocrisy. But it may still be a matter of interpretation that Savage and Marcotte are really misrepresenting in a way that might really be offensive.
Now, I don’t meet all that many scriptural literalists, but I have actually gotten the impression from a few that they would welcome alternative interpretations on the matter. And, of course, in Judaism — where the Israeli Masorti movement recently approved ordination of gay rabbis, and even Orthodox rabbis are writing editorials about being tolerant toward gays — the interpretive argument is already winning converts. Like you, I’m completely and utterly unprepared to talk about Michaelson’s particular interpretation of the law being related to idolatry, but I’m willing to let religious folks be the ones to argue that out.
Gay religious folks are probably the most likely to appreciate such an approach, and that, to me, is more than enough reason to not be so.. should we say “confrontational”? toward religion if what we really care about is gay rights.
Or rape.
(Sorry to be so brief, lots of work to do today).
You make a number of valid points, and some I would take issue with, but the biggest issue, for me, is that Michaelson is basically saying that Dan Savage shouldn’t be Dan Savage. That other, different, more theologically sound approaches to dealing the now-inconvenient parts of the Bible is actually beside the point. Dan Savage isn’t a Christian or religious in any flavor. Why should he say gays are fine as long as they don’t have butt sex? He doesn’t believe that. He thinks gays are fine and butt sex is fine.
As far as I know, there’s three bits in the bible that have anything to do with homosexuality. The abomination of it in Leviticus; the mention of it in Romans; and the description of the apocalypse in Revelations.
Leviticus is the most often addressed, but I think that the other two are important as well. In Romans, the most straightforward reading of the entire text (rather than just bits and pieces), is that the people described are being punished by God for idolatry. The punishment is causing them to have “unnatural affections.” This is … not exactly pro-gay, but it strikes me as pretty different than saying “gay sex is a sin!” It’s saying “gay sex is a punishment for sin! If you sin, God will punish you by making you gay.” In the context of the time, this actually makes a fair amount of sense: a congregation which is given to idolatry would probably be in danger of adopting lots of other Roman culture, including homosexuality. In terms of the modern world, doesn’t it mean that we should see homosexuality as part of the evidence of a sinful world, but not itself a sin?
In Revelations, there is a passage which describes two men lying in the same bed, and one is taken (into heaven) and one is not. This strikes me as saying that, well, homosexuals are pretty much like straight people, in terms of options for salvation. Share a bed with a dude and you’ll get to heaven or not, according to your other details.
Given that Christianity has adjusted to wholly allow for usery, a crime which is specifically condemned many times by Jesus, it seems like gay sex should be a snap.
What irks me about religious attitudes towards gays is that even if one accepts an starkly old-school biblical view of gay=evil, that does not translate into moral superiority. In Christian theology, everyone falls short. Everyone has to have grace and forgiveness. Everyone is fucking up big-time unless they are just super, super, super evolved – and if you think you’re in that club, it pretty much means you’re not. So gays are wicked and going to hell without redemption? Well, so are adulterers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and thieves, and people who never put the cart back into the cart corral and let it rattle across the parking lot instead.
Christianity: if you are thinking or worrying about what your neighbor is up to, you’re doing it wrong. Jesus was allowed to be preachy. You’re supposed to shut up and work on your own shit.
I hate those people. Thank god they’re gonna burn.
I, otoh, will burn for something entirely different. Possibly for hating people who never put the cart back into the cart corral and deriving joy from their assured damnation.
First, I’ll note that Michaelson thinks butt sex is fine (provided it’s not an act of idolatry, which is a different thing entirely).
I’m not sure what “being Dan Savage” means that it would be desirable at the cost of such inflammatory remarks. He’s certainly welcome to be an atheist, as far as I’m concerned. No problem with him being gay. Or arguing that there’s nothing wrong with being gay. I have no problem with him arguing that anti-gay people (religious or not) suck. But I don’t think broadside attacks on religion are important for any of that. At the very least, I think it would be just plain fair to expect a negative response. Being me, I think I’m going to take that response seriously, even if it is mostly but not entirely right-wingers who also hold some pretty vile views. Because I think it’s ok for people to be religious in a variety of ways, including (though I don’t understand it myself) scriptural literalism.
Matt @ 36,
You indicate in this post, and in your comments upthread, that you interpret Dan Savage’s comments as a broad attack on religion in general. Or at least on the religion as practiced by certain socially conservative Christians. That’s not what what he did.
His argument is not that Christians who cite anti-gay passages in scripture need learn to pick and choose. His argument is that Christians already do this. That is, even those who claim to believe that scripture is inerrant will selectively latch on to certain passages that suit them, while ignoring or disavowing others that are uncomfortable to them. He calls them hypocrites because for the 40% of Americans who supposedly believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, their literalism tends to dry up awfully fast as soon as scripture starts becoming personally inconvenient. His list of all the things in the Bible that Christians have learned to ignore – the tacit approval of slavery, the treatment of women, etc. – is there to rub it in the faces of people who like to claim you can’t pick and choose, even as they themselves turn a blind eye to the parts of the Bible that don’t suit them.
Savage engages with some critics of his position on the bible and expands on his position, with citation and further discussion.
Grace
(edited because I hit the wrong button too soon and hadn’t added the excerpt)
I am reading a lot of claims that Christians are pulling anti gay scriptures out of Leviticus even though it is the old testament. Some people on my side(my views are somewhat complicated on the matter) are citing leviticus, but for me the real arguments are coming from Timothy, Romans and Corinthians which are all in the new testament. Those scriptures list other sins as well and nowhere does it say that homosexuality is worse than any other sin listed, so I think Christians overreact to homosexuality, but that doesn’t mean that those scriptures are “bullshit” and that we should stop following them.
It is rather disingenuous of Dan Savage to compare christian views of homosexuality to eating shellfish when both of those things come from leviticus which is found in the old testament. Unless you are jewish you most likely don’t live by the old testament. The jab he made at Anne Gingrich is also disingenuous since it makes it seem like Christians follow deuteronomy which is in the old testament. Does Dan Savage know what a Christian is?
Also why are we making all of this about Christianity and why does Dan Savage only attack Christians. I realize the United States is predominantly Christian and I am Christian and that the opposition to Gay marriage is mostly Christian, but nobody is talking about Islam and Judaism. Both of those faiths strongly condemn homosexuality. Does Dan Savage feel that their beliefs are partly “bullshit” as well? Has anyone asked him?
Apparently Islam and Judaism doesn’t fund anti gay marriage legislation in this country, so he doesn’t care about them.
When someone is more inclined to support their own political cause than they are about finding the truth I am skeptical of their words(just like when someone is trying to sell me a car). Also some people are under the delusion that he is a Christian. I am told by bloggers on another site that he doesn’t self identify as a Christian. Do you really want to take spiritual advice(as a christian) from someone who openly says they aren’t a Christian.
Also I like how the comic posted above has Dan wearing a pink triangle.
The Nazi’s required that homosexuals wear those in public as they required the jews to wear the star of david.
People continually claim that Hitler was a Christian. He obviously had some Christian beliefs like his search for the holy grail in Africa, but he also believed in Nordic religion(thor, loki, freya) and the occult and Nostradamus’s quatrains. He also liked to command Jews to pray to God for food. When no food magically appeared he would give them food and say that he was stronger than their God. That seems rather atheist to me you can draw your own conclusions.
While no religion aggressively seeks to claim Hitler maybe we should all be asking ourselves who stopped him. The Christians of the United States and England (who were much more fervent in their fath than we are today), and the then Atheists of the Soviet Union(formerly and once again Russian Orthodox Christian).
I don’t like people who hold the third reich against Christianity. I am not saying the person who posted the comic does(they were probably unaware of what a pink triangle once meant), but the person who made the comic obviously does.
Yeah, No. The Pink Triangle symbol has been used by modern gays as a deliberate choice for some time now. It actually has nothing to do with identifying Hitler or Nazis with Christians at all, but rather was reclaimed by gay activists as a symbol of defiance (generally against being closted). So in fact, what is actually obvious is that the cartoonist (Dana Simpson) actually knew what symbols gay activists might use.
I find it odd that someone claiming to be a Christian doesn’t believe Christians hold the Ten Commandments, or anything else in the Old Testament, to be part of their faith.
Hey, so Cerebeth, _you_ may not claim authority from Leviticus, but a lot of your fellow Christians do. Let’s not play “no true Scotsman.”
What does Christ have the say about usury and money-lending? How about rich people and earthly possessions? Marriage? How have modern Christians adapted those positions to fit into modernity?
Why are those positions adaptable, but homosexuality (a side issue at best) not adaptable?
I’m pretty sure that most Jews in the US, as well as the plurality of synagogues in the US, favor marriage equality. Conservative Jews are split on the issue (I know many conservative Jews who favor SSM), and only Orthodox Jews seem to be strongly opposed.
As for “strongly condemning homosexuality,” you will not find that to be true of either reform or conservative Judaism. I’m not even sure that’s true of most modern othodox Jews. (Again, I’m talking about in the US.)
So in the US context, I don’t think your claims about Judaism are true.
Apparently Islam and Judaism doesn’t fund anti gay marriage legislation in this country, so he doesn’t care about them.
Strange, isn’t it, how he would be most concerned about the group that’s actively trying to take away his rights.
@Matt: There is, for example, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Of course, there’s the interpretation there that the sin was poor hospitality, but unlike keeping kosher it requires an additional strategy.
I’m not sure what you mean by “requir[ing] an additional strategy.” Would you care to elaborate? Because the dominant Jewish interpretation of the sin of Sodom is precisely that the people of Sodom were cruel to strangers and rejected a divine messenger. You can find this explicated as far back as the writings of the prophets almost 3000 years ago, and also in the much more recent Talmud .
The equation of Sodom and homosexuality (or other not-permitted sexual behavior) seems to be a later, Christian reinterpretation — certainly the use of the word “sodomy” about illicit sex doesn’t show up in European languages until the 13th century or thereabouts. So if you want to treat that story as a condemnation of homosexuality, be aware that the authority for understanding it that way is relatively recent, and also unrelated to anything Jesus or Paul would have thought about it.
Isn’t this the bullying?
It’s not an abstract argument or disagreement with a position. He singled out a group of kids, laughed at them. Insulted them directly by calling them pansy-assed. Gave a non-apology apology, and then implied they were hypocrites and bigots. He could have made his point without doing that.
Is all rudeness bullying? To me, bullying implies a certain power dynamic between the perpetrator and the victim that doesn’t seem to exist here.
james @47, I still don’t think this rises to the level of bullying. Was it insulting? Yes. Was it kind of jerk-like? Yeah. But there was no threat, no intimidation, just a single insult. And the name-calling was in response to their walking out when he even *mentioned* the Bible. It was in response to their (quite likely staged) refusal to listen to a word he had to say.
As far as implying that they’re hypocrites and bigots, well, what would you call someone who argues based on their religion that it’s okay to beat you up and deny you equal rights, when they ignore a lot of the prohibitions in that same religious book. “Hypocrites” and “bigots” seems to fit.
“Yeah, No. The Pink Triangle symbol has been used by modern gays as a deliberate choice for some time now. It actually has nothing to do with identifying Hitler or Nazis with Christians at all, but rather was reclaimed by gay activists as a symbol of defiance (generally against being closted). So in fact, what is actually obvious is that the cartoonist (Dana Simpson) actually knew what symbols gay activists might use”
Check your facts
The pink triangle is only used by gay activists as a positive symbol when it is facing upward like a pyramid or when it is surrounded by a green circle.
The author did know what that symbol meant and they weren’t using it as a positive symbol.
“I find it odd that someone claiming to be a Christian doesn’t believe Christians hold the Ten Commandments, or anything else in the Old Testament, to be part of their faith.”
Christians hold the Old testament to be true and it is, but it is not to be lived by for people who accepted Jesus as the Messiah. This is why Jews use the old testament as a guide to live by and Christians don’t.
“So in the US context, I don’t think your claims about Judaism are true.”
I will rephrase. The majority of the Jews in the world (although not the majority of Jews in the U.S.) are Orthodox Jews and they strongly condemn homosexuality.
“Hey, so Cerebeth, _you_ may not claim authority from Leviticus, but a lot of your fellow Christians do. Let’s not play “no true Scotsman.”
If one side in an argument disproves one argument when the other side has 4-6 different arguments why is their situation suddenly considered absurd. I mean certainly it has one less argument, but there are still 3-5 arguments to contend with.
Yes there are other sins in the bible which have become accepted by society. The bible acknowledges that we are imperfect beings living in a imperfect world and that there is no possible way not to sin. All we need to do is ask forgiveness for our sins. The conflict is homosexuality is still listed as a sin and we can’t retcon that. The bible isn’t a comic book. We can argue that it isn’t as bad a sin as Christians claim or even that religion should not effect our laws, but people are asking us to change our beliefs and that is something we cannot do no matter how many people yell at highschool students or how much political pressure is mounted against us.
“As far as implying that they’re hypocrites and bigots, well, what would you call someone who argues based on their religion that it’s okay to beat you up and deny you equal rights, when they ignore a lot of the prohibitions in that same religious book. “Hypocrites” and “bigots” seems to fit.”
I can’t even argue with this. You’ve made your decision on the Christian religion and its followers already.
I just went to CafePress and did a search for “LGBT pink triangle.” Pretty much all the pride merchandise that I can find that uses that symbol has the point down. Similarly, doing a Google image search on “gay pride” and filtering the color to “pink” shows tons of downward facing triangles used as pride symbols.
Wikipedia has different information on the matter. Not the best source to have, but I am more inclined to trust them than a t shirt company.
Wikipedia says the triangle is “sometimes” inverted, not “always.”
I take it you’ve never actually been to a gay rights march in your life, L.C., or if you have gone, you just didn’t pay much attention to the t-shirts and buttons.
Zillions of actual, real-life gay rights demonstrators have worn the pink triangle pointed point down (as well as point up). I know this because I’ve seen it with my own eyes countless times — heck, I’ve been one of the wearers, sometimes — and I’d bet that’s how some others on this thread know it as well.
You’re showing yourself to be the sort of person who refuses to admit that he’s wrong, no matter how obviously ignorant he’s being, or how minor the point under dispute is. Please stop that.
Lord Cerbereth:
Hm… that seems odd, even allowing for Wikipedia’s foibles and agreeing that it’s often not the best source. I’ve been seeing the pink triangle in use for decades now, and don’t recall it being used point-upward hardly at all. Let’s go check that page at Wikipedia.
In the main text, here’s the first mention of (ahem) orientation:
“Often inverted”. Different from “always inverted”.
Here’s the second mention:
“Sometimes turned upright”. Different from “always turned upright”.
Clicking some links from the “Gay Rights Symbol” section of that Wikipedia page, we find Sydney Gay and Lesbian Holocaust Memorial. The triangle points down. How odd. There’s the Pink Triangle Park in San Francisco. Those point down. Curiouser and curiouser. These memorials seem to have it all wrong.
But maybe it’s because they’re memorials. Probably the actual pride events get it right. Let’s look at “The Pink Triangle”, the website of the San Francisco Pride event.
Ha! Look at that! They got it wrong, too! Losers.
But let’s not make the mistake of appealing to authority. Let’s see how it’s being used out there in the real world, in the wild. Let’s do a Google Search on
pink triangle gay pride
and count the first hundred images. I get 59% point-downward, 35% indeterminate (either there is no triangle in the image or its orientation is unclear or neither up nor down), and … 6% upward.
A pink triangle inside of a green circle doesn’t even appear until after the first hundred … and it’s point down.
I did, however, manage to find this instance of a pink triangle with the point up.
Well, well. Interesting web site. I learned something new, today.
Grace
Lord Cerbereth:
Savage replies to these arguments in the link I provided @38.
Well, he was raised Roman Catholic by a devout Roman Catholic. (See the link @16.) So, yeah, probably.
So, the Ten Commandments, found pretty early in the Old Testament (Exodus, if memory serves) … Christians don’t use those as a guide to live by?
I’m learning SO MUCH today! I am positively giddy with excitement.
Grace
“So, the Ten Commandments, found pretty early in the Old Testament (Exodus, if memory serves) … Christians don’t use those as a guide to live by?”
No we don’t why is that so hard for everyone to accept.
“You’re showing yourself to be the sort of person who refuses to admit that he’s wrong, no matter how obviously ignorant he’s being, or how minor the point under dispute is. Please stop that.”
I could say the same thing about you. We could all say that about everyone who doesn’t agree with us. Does it really solve anything?
I have no interest in keeping the pink triangle symbol true to its original meaning, so if the gay commmunity wishes to reappropriate it to their own purposes I am not going stop them. What a symbol means and what it means to people are sometimes two very different things. Consider the point conceded.
“I’m learning SO MUCH today! I am positively giddy with excitement.”
I have also learned things from this blog. Discussion and learning are always good things especially when it concerns the Bible.
No we don’t why is that so hard for everyone to accept.
Christians reject the Ten Commandments? You need to get the word out, bro. Rather a lot of Christians in the US seem to be under the impression that those are still important.
LC:
So … I’m trying to grasp the concept here. You say that homosexuality is a sin, and nothing can change that. OK, but Christians are plenty tolerant of a bunch of other sins, including amongst themselves, which are parts of modern life.
Usury is a sin: a major one. One that Jesus talks about with some frequency. But the vast majority of Christians in this country are usurers. Over 90%. (To be fair, it’s just that over 90% of the country engages in usury: it may be that all the non-usurers are Christians, although I doubt that. I think that they’re mostly just poor.)
Divorce is a sin. Again, a big one. One that Jesus talks about personally with some frequency (unlike homosexuality, which is not mentioned by Jesus). But divorce is firmly encoded into our laws, and a huge number of American Christians have been or will be divorced. There’s no significant move amongst American Christians to outlaw divorce.
You are commanded by Christ to pay your taxes. And yet, Christian Americans disproportionately support anti-tax policies, join anti-tax movements, and so on.
Christ is quite clear that to join him you must give all your possessions to the poor, and that rich men are not amongst the saved. And yet we have things like “the prosperity gospel” and so on and so forth.
I don’t consider these failures of Christianity. Christianity is a religion, like all religions, it adapts to the circumstances and cultures in which it finds itself. Christianity is actually admirably adaptive: it absorbs holidays, deities (as saints) and customs with great enthusiasm. But I’m trying to figure out who gay people are, suddenly, where you have to draw the line? Given that homosexuality didn’t warrant a single mention from Jesus, I would think that after having made exceptions for: usury, charity, taxation, divorce and other issues that Jesus seemed to personally care about.
Now we are finally getting somewhere. Thank you Ben. This could have gone on forever. Ben is making a reasonable argument that I think the majority of the people on this site would side with, so by answering him I think I can answer everyone. Other people feel free to jump in as well.
I am gonna ask you to humor me for a bit while I get to the point, but hopefully you will indulge me.
Please tell us what your ethical code is that you follow to make decisions and where you got it from. Other people feel free to to post yours as well we can all do this together. Please include whether you are always adherent to those standards.
Don’t worry I am not gonna attack anyone’s beliefs. This activity has a different ending.
“Christians reject the Ten Commandments? You need to get the word out, bro. Rather a lot of Christians in the US seem to be under the impression that those are still important”
There is a consensus in Christianity that if you follow the ten commandments it won’t end badly for you. Now Christians do not live by the Old Testament, but that doesn’t mean the old testament isn’t useful.
All of the ten commandments are validated as correct in the New Testament to my knowledge.
The ten commandments are like a very handy list for them.
We don’t follow them, because they are in the old testament we follow them, because they are scattered throughout the new testament.
That might not seem like an important distinction but it is.
Huh.
On the one hand, I don’t see what that has to do with this particular line of argument. On the other hand, we are laying out your ethical system under the microscope here, so I get the sense of not wanting to be the only one in the room with their vulnerable parts exposed, such as it is.
It’s a long answer. There’s not really a short version.
I am culturally and by ethical inclination Jewish. I am not theologically Jewish — on one point in that my Jewish side is paternal, on a second point that I simply cannot reconcile myself to a theology that contains a single, genetically determined “chosen people.” However, I inherit from this a bunch of holidays and such that I celebrate as ancestral and spiritual remembrances. I also, and probably more importantly to understand where I’m coming from here, inherit some theological concepts:
1) That God can be held to task, morally and ethically, by His own rules.
2) That we humans are at our best when we strive with our full rational and intuitive functions and engage with our ethics and morals, rather than having them handed down.
3) That incisive textual commentary is, in fact, a form of worship.
4) The sense of sin as “falling short of the mark” rather than as a crime which merits a punishment. Judaism has an awful lot of commandments: no Jew follows all of them. It’s just impossible. The point isn’t: do this or suffer. It’s just: do this. If you fail, do it next time.
I do not have a regular religious practice. I have twice come very very close to converting to Christianity, but both times balked before being baptized. There are two causes to this I think. One was personal and situational: seeing how deeply hurt my priest was by a culture which had pressured him — a gay man — into a loveless marriage with a female parishioner. The other was a matter of survivor’s responsibility: I am descended from Holocaust survivors on my father’s side and there’s a sense in which converting to another religious would feel like a betrayal of the dead.
I lived for three years in mainland China, something which gave me very strong impulses towards Christianity as well (given family history, I tend to side with underdogs.)
Of course, like with all people, a lot of my ethical and moral intuition comes from people around me. A lot of the (living) people who’ve influenced me in this have been Christian: I really enjoy that you all have a commandment to teach about your religion, because it’s helped me in innumerable ways. When I want to find someone who will talk to me about my moral and ethical quandaries, I always know that Christian friends will be willing to engage and listen and respond in a serious way, rather than just blindly affirming me or awkwardly changing the subject. It’s a blessing.
I have read a lot of ancient thinkers, including a number of Christians, particularly early ones which I’m going to embarrassingly forget the names of. Short list (Christian and non-): Confucious, Mencious, Zhuangzi, Laozi, Augustine, Plato, Inanna, various Sufis, Paul + the Gospels, early Christians I’m embarrassingly forgetting the name of … ^_^ Sorry, it’s late. Also a ton of more modern folks from across religious spectrums including: Marx, Whitman, Lincoln, Douglass, Marx, Eliot, Stein, Lewis, a passel of early feminists I’m embarrassingly forgetting the names of, MLK, Malcolm X, Dworkin, and so on. None of these are canonical to my ethics, but all of them are highly influential to it.
So that’s the long answer.
So this is a very personal and unique system of beliefs that you created or adapted for yourself. Do you ever have any trouble living up to the moral standards you set for yourself?(if it is getting too late for you we can always pick this up in the morning)
As a side note I sympathize for you trying to choose a religion. Your beliefs seem to have more in common with Christianity than Judaism, but you don’t want to betray the memory of holocaust survivors in your family.
Constantly!
Hey, would you mind telling me what denomination of Christian you are?
I am Spanish(as in Hernando Cortes brought my ancestors to America Spanish) Catholic on my mother’s side and Methodist on my father’s side. I consider myself a Catholic, but I was raised in both ways.
Now the point I am trying to make is that you a man(your probably a great guy, but your still just a man) who created his own belief system with his personal flaws in mind has problems living up to it.
Christians are tasked with living up to the guidlines created by the living God for us. It is an impossible task and God realizes this. He doesn’t ask us to succeed all he asks is that we recognize him as the only God and that we seek forgiveness from him for our sins.
We have been called hypocrites a lot lately in conjunction to gay marriage, and yes there are some hypocritical Christians, but us failing to live up to God’s rules is not hypocritical we openly admit that we don’t live up to them and that we don’t even have the capacity to live up to them.
I don’t find that hypocritical.
What I find inexplicable — doctrinally — is that modern Christians make a bigger deal out of homosexuality than of, say, usury. You can correct me if I’m wrong on this, but my impression is that there is no Christian movement to ban banking. If you confessed in church that you had a savings account, most people would probably look at you funny, because they don’t even regard that as a sin.
If you were gay, and married to your husband in a loving relationship, many Christian churches would drive you out or pressure you to divorce your husband.
What makes the sin of a savings account lesser than the sin of a same-sex marriage?
I agree with you Christians do make a much larger issue of homosexuality than other sins which are listed along side it, but is saying homosexuality is acceptable the right direction to go in? You seem to be saying we ignore these sins, so if we ignore another one it isn’t a big deal. That is a two wrongs make a right argument.
Think of what a sin is. It is something God says is either bad for you or that will turn you away from God(not God away from you) or both.
Look at the sins that our society ignores usury, gossip, adultery, divorce, not paying your taxes(I see a difference between arguing what a good tax rate is and flat out refusing to pay your taxes but I am not gonna harp on that issue). Have any of those things ever brought someone or society happiness? We should be moving society away from sin not toward it.
I will not sit here and say that all the people on my side are obstructing gay marriage for the right reasons since some(not the majority) of them are doing it just because they hate gay people(not everyone against gay marriage is even religious).
I also don’t think we are gonna win this argument(support for gay marriage is at something like 54% pro and gaining ground), but one day people are gonna wake up and the laws of this country are going to be the inverse of what the laws of the bible are. Its inevitable and promised in the bible. All we can do is try and stop it even though we know we are gonna fail.
It is ok that we are gonna fail though, because eventually after much hardship(the rise of the antichrist) Christ will return and rule over heaven on Earth.
I hope you can see where I am coming from on this.
You’ve just made several leaps.
First of all, I’m not making a “two wrongs make a right” argument, which isn’t an argument that really has a place in a moral discussion. I’m making a “get your priorities straight” argument, which certainly does, particularly in the context of Christianity (I’m saying: think about the beam in your eye. Only cast a stone if you are without sin).
Second, you’re making a leap between civil law and religious law. They are not the same thing. You are commanded, by God, with certain tasks and obligations. These are not up for debate and they’re not up for legislation. To say: “Oh we need legislation to prevent us from sinning” is to say “oh faith is not sufficient for us.” Basically, you’re asking the civil government to replace God. As a Jew, so someone whose ancestors lived under alien laws for 1000s of years and kept their commandments straight, I have very little sympathy for the “if the civil law doesn’t match our religious law, we’ll not be able to get religious law right” argument.
Christ lived during a time when he had full understanding of civil law vs. God’s law. He did not ever speak of making those two things equivalent. Presumably, if he had wanted religious law and civil law to be coincident, he would have mentioned it. He could have advocated for civil revolution, to try to instate God’s law as civil law. Lots of Jews at that time did make those arguments, and many of them were more popular than Jesus. Jesus, very specifically, did not. He was, instead, very clear about the separation between earthly law and heavenly law.
Likewise, Jesus lived at a time when homosexuality — particularly male homosexuality — was commonplace and public. If he had felt that it was an important topic, he would have talked about it. He didn’t. Instead he talked about usury, idolatry, divesting material possessions including families, about purity of mind and spirit, about a basic respect and humility, about caring for the poor and imprisoned and suffering.
For better or for worse, gay marriage is one of the major issues that conservative Christian activist groups have decided to dedicate themselves to. This is in a society where we could really use their help — your help — in causes such as blocking financial speculation, preventing war, defending the dignity of the imprisoned, and so on. All things which Christ spoke about. Things which — in a world which was pretty much like ours — Christ decided were the most important things.
When we get mad that Christians care more about homosexuality than the myriad other biblical sins that they don’t even regard as sins anymore, we’re not mad because you’re hypocrites, or because we’re holding you up to some unfair external standards. We’re mad because you can’t seem to get the basic messages of your own religion.
I think I scared you a little you jumped away rather quickly. Come back you wrote a lot and I need your help to understand it.
Yes Christians should not throw stones when we have our sins to worry about, but again that doesn’t mean we say these sins aren’t bad. We attack practices not individuals or we should be if we aren’t.
Are you mad that we don’t get the messages of our own religion or that we deploy our forces and resources(we do have a lot) in a way you disagree with or both? Also political forces and resources aren’t necessarily religious resources.
You also said that you feel that civil and religious law should be separate(something I agree with in part), but you think that Conservative Christians are hypocritical for failing to make moves against divorce and usury laws or am I misunderstanding you?
I am not saying that passing laws would prevent sin(it clearly wouldn’t we still have murder). Faith isn’t enough to prevent sin. I have already argued that sin is inevitable. Yes civil and religious law should be separate(but how separate), but we can’t ignore our religious beliefs when we pass and create civil laws. Yes it makes perfect sense for a society financially to execute disabled orphans. Should we? No, that society would be an abomination. Christians vote and when we vote we take our religious beliefs into consideration. When a society turns its back on God bad things happen.
I hate to dwell on the antichrist again, but is he gonna be content to rule over our secular governments and leave our religious establishment alone? No, he is gonna try and take everything.
Government and religion are joined at the hip for bad or worse. The Romans made a political decision to kill Christ and they later made another political decision to convert the empire to Christianity. Henry the 8th made a political decision to found a new religion that would allow divorce. Government can’t ignore religion, and Religion can’t ignore Government. We just can’t let religion become the government(aka theocracy) just like we can’t allow the military to become the government(military dictatorship).
I think it would be helpful to furthering the conversation if we tried this.
Lets say I gave you control of all the votes and money of the Conservative Christian movement for the issue of gay marriage and other causes of your choice. What would you do with it?
How would you have us vote and what would you have us do?
The discussion is a really good representation of the limits of the line of thinking laid out by Robert @ 34, one I’ve heard before from well-meaning liberal Christians trying to convince their brethren to stop it with the hating-on-gays already.
Gay rights activists and their allies say that they don’t need Christians to accept them. They just need their legal rights protected. This is completely true. But at the same time, opponents of gay marriage are absolutely correct that gay rights legislation, especially legalization of gay marriage, represents acceptance by society at large. Most things that people consider sins are things that they’re embarrassed about and try to do better at not doing, not things that they are proud of and love about themselves. Nobody is about to start holding marches to declare how proud they are of leaving the shopping cart rattling around in the parking lot.
So ultimately, I think the “everyone is a sinner” argument to religious people who oppose gay marriage just doesn’t get that far. It gets you somewhere if you’re talking about not beating up and harassing individual gay people, but it doesn’t get you anywhere if you want to talk about advancing political rights.
Lord Cerbereth,
Your understanding of the role of the Old Testament in Christianity is very different from that of all the Christians I know in real life. I’m not saying you’re lying about your own belief system. I can’t see any reason why you would, and I could never prove such a thing anyway. However, I am not at all convinced that what you are describing is normative for Christians as a whole – given that the Christians I know have a much more complex approach to the Old Testament and consider it binding in many ways, just not in the ways that Jews (for whom it is not the “old” testament, but just the Bible) do.
LC: The majority of the Jews in the world (although not the majority of Jews in the U.S.) are Orthodox Jews and they strongly condemn homosexuality.
I think you’re going to have to explain, then, how it is that the overwhelming majority of Jews in Israel, although nominally Orthodox, are so comfortable with gay rights. Let me refer you to an overview from Wikipedia, since you find it a handy resource. I understand that you are a Christian, and if you want to make pronouncements about Christian opinions of homosexuality that’s fine, but you really don’t get to decide that Jews mostly agree with you when, in fact, Jews mostly don’t.
According to Wikipedia, only 25 percent of Israeli Jews are Orthodox, so it’s not even close to a majority of world Jewry.
Wow, my Sunday School classes and confirmation class did it all wrong! Silly United Church of Christ.
So why do people keep hanging the ten commandments in courthouses?
Hrm. So I don’t see what I did as “jumping away.” Remember the thing I posted about, about considering textual critique a form of worship. Well, you’re getting to see that in action now. You made a couple of errors of reason, and I told you about them. To not tell you about them would be condescending and dismissive — pulling away.
You seem to be laying down a thick chaff of excuses. I understand this. It’s tough to deal with being a source of hurt and injustice in the world (I’ve had to deal with this myself.) It’s particularly tough to do it when your religion calls on you to not simply feel bad about it, but to stop doing it. Changing your habits and beliefs is really difficult, and I have sympathy for someone in that position. Jesus didn’t say “Stone this woman and then go home and feel bad about it,” after all.
You say that Church and State are inherently intertwined. Fair enough, but the laws of the this country (the US) and the ideals of Christ both claim them to be two separate things. The one who intertwines them is, according to the bits you keep quoting, the Antichrist. How do you approach those ideals, as a citizen and a Christian? How would Christ? Is someone attempting to unite state and religious authority following the example of Christ, or the example of the Antichrist?
You lay out an absolutely impossible question for me in that “if you were in control of the conservative Christians’ votes.” The answer depends on so much, and what my interests are. Most of the scenarios I see are morally abhorrent, and I’d rather not deal with them. The idea, however, that Christians must form into an organized political structure — that they are somehow commanded to is nuts. Christianity existed for a long, long time in the US without being politicized. The mass politicization of Christianity is as recent as the late 70s. Historically, it’s a political manipulation based on the second Cold War.
Instead, I’d like to present you with a few scenarios:
Jesus comes across a father who has broken his son’s wrists for being too effeminate. What does He say?
Jesus comes across a group of teenage boys beating another teenage boy to death, because they believe that he’s gay. What does He say?
Jesus is in the modern United States. What party does He vote for, if at all? Why?
Your choices have meaning here. Real meaning, in that they have the ability to visit onto other people (including me, including my friends) real harm and real pain, or real love and real dignity. You get to make them: you don’t get the abdicate choice, not to me and not to Christ. But in Christ you have a pretty good (one might even say perfect) example of how to do it.
I wish that modern Christianity had more Christ and less Roman Empire.
Jesus is in the modern United States. What party does He vote for, if at all? Why?
None. He doesn’t have a valid photo ID and is turned away when he tries to vote.
Turned away, hell. Call ICE. We got a middle easterner who doesn’t speak English wandering around in a bathrobe trying to touch sick people, with no documents of any kind, and when we finally get someone who can speak his weird gabble language, he just goes on and on about Caesar and vineyards.
To Dianne at 78 and Robert at 79, LOL.
Ben, I really would love this as a bumper sticker. I also like your comment that Christianity should not be organized into a political voting bloc.
Robert @78: Great. Now I’ve got a weird dystopian story in my mind in which the second coming of Christ happened…and Christ was immediately sent to Guantanamo, resulting in the anti-Christ being able to take over the world unopposed…
“The mass politicization of Christianity is as recent as the late 70s. Historically, it’s a political manipulation based on the second Cold War.”
I have heard that claim before and it really doesn’t hold water for me. American politics has always been combined with religion. The idea that it shouldn’t be is what is new.
When the very first political parties were formed they accused their opposition of being minions of Satan(a very puritanical view but still a religious view). When the founding father’s layed down the declaration of independence their justification was that the King was denying them the rights that they were endowed with by their creator. When blacks wanted freedom and equality they used religious arguments to get them. Look at Martin Luther King’s speech. Yes slave owners used biblical teachings to justify slavery, but the same religion that allowed those arguments also spoke out against the notion that certain men were created better than others.
Look at the temperance movement if you need proof.
“I wish that modern Christianity had more Christ and less Roman Empire.”
I am not sure what the Roman Empire did to you exactly, but whatever. Many of the political and military establishments in the United States are based on those of the Roman Empire. The roads of the Roman Empire and Constantine’s decision to make his empire Christian(and a good Roman road system) is what allowed Jesus teachings to spread across so much land in record time.
“According to Wikipedia, only 25 percent of Israeli Jews are Orthodox, so it’s not even close to a majority of world Jewry”
That number only counts regular orthodox jews you need to count the 55% of Israel’s popualtion that are traditional jews as well(and you might need to count the religious zionists and ultra orthodox as well, but I am not exactly sure what your counting with your 25%). I know its confusing I had to research for awhile to find out how many groups fall under Orthodox Judaism. In additions 13% of the Jews living in the United States are Orthodox Jews.
“The one who intertwines them is, according to the bits you keep quoting, the Antichrist.”
We have already done the entwining he is just gonna take both of them for himself and twist them into something evil.
“Instead, I’d like to present you with a few scenarios:
Jesus comes across a father who has broken his son’s wrists for being too effeminate. What does He say?
Jesus comes across a group of teenage boys beating another teenage boy to death, because they believe that he’s gay. What does He say?
Jesus is in the modern United States. What party does He vote for, if at all? Why?”
I can’t answer those scenarios, because I can’t speak for Jesus. He has left us his teachings and parables to guide us, but they are still our decisions when we act as Christians not his. He did trust us with free will after all.
“Your choices have meaning here. Real meaning, in that they have the ability to visit onto other people (including me, including my friends) real harm and real pain, or real love and real dignity. You get to make them: you don’t get the abdicate choice, not to me and not to Christ. But in Christ you have a pretty good (one might even say perfect) example of how to do it.”
My point was that people are quick to say we are doing the wrong things with our mighty religious right establishment, but we are the ones making the decisions. I asked you what you would do in our position and you declined to comment(that is perfectly fine though it is a very hard decision). It is always a difficult decision since you pointed out great good and great evil come about due to the decisions we make. Sometimes one decision does great good and great evil.
My question is why doesn’t your cause or your side have a big left wing christian establishment.
I mean everyone points to our big group like its some kind of evil empire. We are just a bunch of people who are united in our belief for certain things and causes and we get our political party to get us what we want. We agree on most things and we don’t fight amongst ourselves for the most part.
Basically why is it an empire against a colection ragtag gangs and not two empires bickering.
I am not sure what the Roman Empire did to you exactly, but whatever. Many of the political and military establishments in the United States are based on those of the Roman Empire.
The second statement is the answer to the question implicit in the first.
The roads of the Roman Empire and Constantine’s decision to make his empire Christian(and a good Roman road system) is what allowed Jesus teachings to spread across so much land in record time.
So…if the empire builds enough roads, that makes up for it crucifying people? Not to mention using the roads to enslave (literally and metaphorically) multiple other groups, steal resources from far away, deploy their armies to suppress the slightest hint of rebellion, etc. Very American point of view, but not, I think, a very Christian one. At least not the Christianity that Jesus is said to have preached.
“The second statement is the answer to the question implicit in the first.”
So the United States is what the Roman Empire did to you. I guess if your unhappy with how the United States runs you could hold it against the Roman Empire. I am rather happy with the United States, so I think well of the Roman Empire.
“So…if the empire builds enough roads, that makes up for it crucifying people? Not to mention using the roads to enslave (literally and metaphorically) multiple other groups, steal resources from far away, deploy their armies to suppress the slightest hint of rebellion, etc. Very American point of view, but not, I think, a very Christian one. At least not the Christianity that Jesus is said to have preached”
I can’t think of any country that has behaved better than them while being a superpower(except maybe the United States). Its great to criticize a system, but show me something that works better or we are stuck with the original system.
Saying what they did was wrong accomplishes nothing. Show me a better system and we have something we can work with.
Also don’t say we shouldn’t have super powers, because there will always be super powers.
I guess if your unhappy with how the United States runs you could hold it against the Roman Empire.
The US’s foreign policy, which could be summarized as “kill it if it disagrees with us” can be blamed on the Roman Empire. That’s what the US is emulating, for the most part. Other aspects of the US that I’m less than pleased about such as the lack of universal health insurance, the people who vote for the “lower tax” idiot no matter how clearly against their own interest it is, the gun nuts…that probably can’t be laid at the Roman Empire’s feet.
Show me a better system and we have something we can work with.
The question is “better system” for what? For health insurance issues, there are multiple better systems available for comparison: Do you prefer the Swiss, German, or Canadian model? All produce results comparable to those in the US, for much less money. Not that any of them is perfect either and some are getting worse, but they’re definitely better than the US’s system. Fairer, cheaper, at least as good in outcomes.
As to how to run an empire…not many good examples there. Empires really just aren’t good things. Denmark did half decently, by which I mean that most of the native population of the land they conquered is still alive. Poor with lots of problems with alcoholism, but still alive. The same can not be said of the vast majority of Amerind tribes. Denmark also made a decent showing on how to resist a conqueror in WWII.
But this is all wandering a bit off topic. To bring it back to the original discussion, if you want me to show you a better system of how to organize marriage or sexual/social partnerships, I give you Spain, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, all the Scandinavian countries…in short, every country that has made its marriage laws fair and allowed adults to marry their beloved, no matter what the gender of each partner is.
If you don’t know what Jesus would do if he came across a group of people beating another person, how can you be so sure Jesus opposes gay marriage? Does your religion offer you any moral guidance? Or only as to what other people should do?
“If you don’t know what Jesus would do if he came across a group of people beating another person, how can you be so sure Jesus opposes gay marriage? Does your religion offer you any moral guidance? Or only as to what other people should do?”
You can’t speak or claim to know what Jesus thought anymore than I can. He was the lord our God made flesh and we are mere mortals. Just like a sandcastle doesn’t know the mind of its creator we cannot hope to know the mind of ours.
Lets try it this way. You seem to be confident in your position and you feel beyond a doubt that conservative Christians are wrong. Why is it that all the conservative christians are in agreement and speaking with one voice, and from the liberal christians and democratic party I hear disunion and dissent.
When the Manhattan Declaration went online 526,000 people signed it and made their voice one voice. The other side has a petition that 728 people signed.
Your side doesn’t even take this issue seriously and we are supposed to change our minds. Don’t say we are the majority because we aren’t. We are the minority opinion on this issue, but your side is so disorganized and incompetent that it is still losing.
Don’t say we have all the money, because Barrack Obama is sitting on more campaign money now than Mitt Romney will ever be able to fundraise by the time of the election.
We stand united and you stand confused and angry.
If your message is truly right it should be no problem to pass the necessary legislation. The problem isn’t us is it? It’s your side that lacks the necessary unity to pursue the issue. Your leader the great Barrack Obama only talks about how his position on the issue is “evolving.”
It’s been evolving for 3 1/2 years and I bet it will keep evolving until the day he leaves office. Your side is apparently so happy not to have to deal with a Republican president that they don’t care they elected an anti gay marriage president.
It is easier to look at the other side and blame them for your set backs, but get your own house of cards to stand together before you question what we are doing.
You profess to care for these people more than I do and you say your party cares for them more than I do. Then why can’t you help them?
The question is “better system” for what?
Show me a country that functions better than the United States in all areas and has a benevolent foreign policy.
Right now the United States is the best our imperfect world has to offer.
China is our only other rival and their foreign policy seems to involve killing everyone on Taiwan to get it back for the people of China. (their secretary of defense equivalent’s opinion on the matter he also feels that every man woman and child in china is willing to die to accomplish this )
I think now is the time to rally behind our system and pray it stands strong, because I don’t think you would like what the apparent alternative is.
I have faith in the American system, and I feel the Roman Empire did the best it could until it fell(to germanic warlord’s I wonder what their foreign policy was?).
Also stop misrepresenting Jesus as some kind of hippie or pacifist. He is going to summon a sword out of his mouth and slay the Anti Christ in personal combat.
Jesus also never said the soldier’s line of work was a bad one. He was also a strong advocate for defensive warfare. He didn’t say we should just take whatever we want, because we are the strongest, but he also said that putting your life on the line to protect others was the greatest extension of love.
Does America always live up to this? No, but we do so better than the empires preceding us, and I feel that deserves faith in it.
I don’t even know what you are talking about now. Have a nice day.
“He is going to summon a sword out of his mouth and slay the Anti Christ in personal combat.”
omg, too much awesomeness.
Just wanted to apologize: I’m not able to keep up with this conversation. I have too much work + houseguests + other social commitments. Thanks for having it with me, LC.
Actually, that might actually be in Revelations or something. If you want to read some wild imagery, read Revelations. There’s some great stuff in there.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Joe Lieberman tells homosexuals that he’s in favor of redefining marriage to include same-sex couples. So, what do we make of that? Is he simply off-message? Is he signaling that once Obama is re-elected he’ll have “more flexibility” and it’ll be pushed by the lame-duck Administration? Is he trying to bull$#!t gays so they’ll not stay home for the election? What’s all that about?
I assume Biden was just talking honestly and thoughtlessly (as he often does), and not — alas — speaking for the administration.
I doubt there’s much danger of politically engaged gay voters staying home en mass. Obama, despite his considerable flaws, has done some decent things on the lgbt rights front. And if Romney is elected and gets to replace a Supreme Court justice or two, that could set gay rights back years compared to if Obama gets to replace one or two more.
With Joe Biden, I think “off-message” is always the most likely answer.
I don’t think there is much danger of a mass gay nonvote; strongly-identified gays have (at least as of my last investigation of the topic) a very high participation rate election after election, whether their interests are being massively pandered to (not that this happens often) or totally marginalized.
What is key is not voter participation, it’s activist engagement. Frank is always going to get out and vote (usually for a Democrat, but there are some Franks who usually vote for a Republican), but Frank is not always going to spend his weekends phonebanking, fundraising, canvassing, or standing outside the mall making a nuisance of himself.
Energy is far more important than simple participation. Though that’s a universal principle that applies to Christian Scientist advocates and Save the Ground Squirrel hippies and Nuke Them For Jesus warmongers alike, the political importance of the gay lobby has always been its work and money, much more than its votes.
I don’t think many gay Americans, as compared to 2008, are going to do that kind of work this time.
Is this a parody of a blog comment?
It’s forgivable that you write of Joe Lieberman instead of Joe Biden (we all make mistakes.) But even if you’re unaware that using the term “homosexuals” to refer to gay people has fallen into disfavor, you are surely not under the impression that Biden was speaking only to a gay group when he made his remarks? It seems very odd for you to characterize Biden as “telling homosexuals” something.
And, generally, liberals and progressives don’t use the term “redefining marriage” because it is misleading. We didn’t “redefine bathrooms” or “redefine schools” when we stopped segregation. In part, because thousands of same-sex couples are already married in this country, it is offensive to refer to legal SSM as “redefining marriage.”
It absolutely is misleading. The correct term is “marriage deregulation”.
Grace
Just wanted to apologize: I’m not able to keep up with this conversation. I have too much work + houseguests + other social commitments. Thanks for having it with me, LC.
I have pretty much said everything I have to say as well, so I hope I was able to answer your questions on Christianity. Thank you for the conversation as well.
Anyway goodbye everyone.
“Show me a country that functions better than the United States in all areas and has a benevolent foreign policy.”
Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, Canada…
PS: The continuity between the Roman Empire and any modern state, much less the USA, is pretty slight. Sure, the name “Senate” is borrowed from ancient Rome, but it’d be a mistake to presume that the resemblance goes much further than that.