The Bible and Gay Marriage

I was surprised and saddened to open my Newsweek today and read the article about Pakistan. "URGENT PLEA: Send More Gear". What Moreau and Barry do not tell is the fact that the ISII (the Pakistani intelligence Service) and the military are constantly at odds with the democratically elected government of Pakistan. In the past both groups have exhorted pressure on the government to do what they wanted and have repeatedly funded islamic militants and jihadists over the period of years. So, why should the government hurry to send them technologically superior weapons to use when odds are they could wind up being used against our own troops. I thought objectivity was a must in journalism. It seems these days to lean left or right is preferable to stating an honest truth with both sides and letting the American people decide. It's insulting to my intelligence and that of other Americans to only give enough information so that we only are capable of seeing one side. Shame on Newsweek for allowing this. David butler Harrisonville, MO

I want to commend Newsweek for sharing with a large audience an informed and tolerant perspective on gay marriage. I believe that ultimately Christianity is about love and compassion and fellowship and not about preoccupations over who may "legitimately" love whom.

The bible is the doctrine checked up in the millenia! To alter it in the purposes - blasphemy! A mortal sin are acts which death of the person or all mankind lead! Paederasty propagation - death to all mankind (children will undertake whence - or clone lambs of Dolli)? Sin propagation, a temptation a sin this employment of a Satan! If it to be pleasant to whom - it is not necessary to shout about it at every turn. Democracy is will of the people, instead of drugs, a paederasty and another. Then it is necessary to recognise right zoophilists, necrophilists, pedophiles - them too limit in the rights.

Lisa Miller is far from the mark in terms of accuracy in her assessment of the Bible. She terms the sinful/broken choices of the people of the Bible as the Bible's teachings. This is as inane an assessment as someone suggesting that accounts of American history that record the poor choices of Americans are what history teachers want their students to model and apply to their own lives. The accounts of the lives of men and women in the Bible and the Bible's teachings are not one in the same. The former reflects the real choices of real people, the latter reveals God's intent and purpose for the people he's created. If Miller looked more thoroughly at the context of the passages she cites, she'd find that the men and women who chose to live outside the bounds of marriage (being the union of one man and one woman) often experienced brokenness and pain (cf. Abraham and Hagar). I would suggest that Miller refrain from commenting on the Bible with such ignorant assessments. It is a Holy Book and she has trampled on it in quite an unholy manner.

Regarding "Mrs. Kramer vs. Mrs. Kramer" - even among the laughable 8 yrs of President George W. Bush, can I even imagine what court would want to grant Lisa Miller sole custody because she "feels a gay lifestyle is fundementally wrong." The child in question only exists because of a gay lifestyle that for a period of her life she deemed fundementally right - right enough to spend time and effort and money on producing the child in question. Had she been a man who took up with a woman his junior by 20 yrs and three dress sizes and he demanded custody because he thought his lifestyle was "fundmentally better," this would not be an issue. Sadly, Lisa Miller remains as as confused as the day she walked into her first AA meeting. The courts in this country have to remember that Americans are still responsible for themselves and straight people every day second guess who they decided to have children and share the children with after the failed relationship ends. The custodial parent has to prove it harmful and unsafe for the child to visit with noncustodial parent. How safe does Lisa Miller feel her flip flopping of ideals is positive for her daughter?

Dear Newsweek editorial staff:

Thank you for reminding the American public that our Country is built on the ideals of "All men (human kind) are created equal"
I live in Utah and every day I see examples of people forcing their way on everyone else! Just last week, a state legislator was pushing for a law to force business to say Merry Christmas, instead of happy holidays. He states that the United States is a Christian Country. I thought we were founded on the idea of freedom of religion (along with many other freedoms).
I celebrate Christmas, but my wife's family is Jewish, so we celebrate chanukkah as well.
I thought that Jesus???' message was to love they neighbor and judge ye not. God is the only judge we should have. The right wing states that we must have family values. What about gay family members? They are part of the family and therefore they must be part of the family value system.
Most all of the experts agree that a person is born gay. Julian Huxley, biologist, humanist, internationalist, English evolutionary biologist, humanist and internationalist, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century evolutionary synthesis states that all animals (including humans) sexuality can be plotted on a bell curve, with a small percentage totally straight or gay and the majority of the specie falls somewhere in between, similar to the grading curve in school. He said if you take away the religious influence, man???s sexuality plots the same as all the other animals.
This being said, how can we punish someone who was born that way? Contrary to the religious rights belief, gays do not choose to be gay.
Again, thank you for your great article.

Jim Craghead
Park City, Utah

Dear Newsweek editorial staff:

Thank you for reminding the American public that our Country is built on the ideals of "All men (human kind) are created equal"
I live in Utah and every day I see examples of people forcing their way on everyone else! Just last week, a state legislator was pushing for a law to force business to say Merry Christmas, instead of happy holidays. He states that the United States is a Christian Country. I thought we were founded on the idea of freedom of religion (along with many other freedoms).
I celebrate Christmas, but my wife's family is Jewish, so we celebrate chanukkah as well.
I thought that Jesus???' message was to love they neighbor and judge ye not. God is the only judge we should have. The right wing states that we must have family values. What about gay family members? They are part of the family and therefore they must be part of the family value system.
Most all of the experts agree that a person is born gay. Julian Huxley, biologist, humanist, internationalist, English evolutionary biologist, humanist and internationalist, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century evolutionary synthesis states that all animals (including humans) sexuality can be plotted on a bell curve, with a small percentage totally straight or gay and the majority of the specie falls somewhere in between, similar to the grading curve in school. He said if you take away the religious influence, man???s sexuality plots the same as all the other animals.
This being said, how can we punish someone who was born that way? Contrary to the religious rights belief, gays do not choose to be gay.
Again, thank you for your great article.

Jim Craghead
Park City, Utah

I was so pleased to see in print the well researched, unbiased, commends concerning Gay Marriage. You echoed my beliefs and worded them so expertly that you have provided food for my soul and a source of peace for my mind Thank you Cheryl Ober, Fairlawn, Ohio

Lisa Miller made a profound observation in her Dec. 15 article "Our Mutual Joy" when she wrote; "Marriage in America refers to two separate things, a religious institution and a civil one, though it is most often enacted as a messy conflation of the two. ??? I wish she had developed that has her main theme, and consequently her conclusion may have been different.
She poses the question; ???Should gay people be married in the same, sacramental sense that straight people are???? No, not if we separate the religious issues from the civil ones. The Bible says to give unto Caesar what is Caesar???s and to God the things that are God???s. Keep marriage under the auspices of the Church and allow gay people to petition the government for civil rights. That should make all parties happy in a politically correct, all inclusive way.

to tiffanyt71 and anyone else like her. If you want to be gay, be gay. If you support gays rights, support gay rights, but if you want us to keep the church out of the state, keep the state out of the church. Marriage was originally a religious institution and will always be such. If you don't want the religion, what's the point of receiving the religious rites. IF you want the religion, you need to accept the whole thing. It's not about being high and mighty. I have flaws too, but I don't go trying to change laws to make me feel better about them.

Miller isn't the only one trying to warp the meaning of Paul's words. Walter Brueggemann, a "Bible scholar" and former professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, quotes Paul's letter to the churches of Galatia. "There neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." (Gal 3:28, italics added) I suppose he takes this to mean that Paul believes that Jesus does not distinguish between male or female. This would be an absurd assumption, since Paul writes extensively on different rules and suggestions for men and women in the first letter to Timothy and elsewhere. Jesus also specifies differences between men and women. Texts from the Bible had been open to interpretation for so long, it was only a matter of time before people started finding fragments of verses from which they could infer an acceptance of gay marriage. The fact is that the support just isn't there.
Miller argues that "the Bible was written for a world so unlike our own, it's impossible to apply its rules, at face value, to ours." (Miller, 30) This is not true enough for this argument to give her any ground. Is today's world vastly different? It is. Today, we have the internet, we have airplanes, we have satellites, and there are televisions in the homes of even the poorest American families. This world is different. It's advanced. It is a time when homosexuality is more open, but it has obviously been around since long before the times of Jesus. The cities of Sodom and Gomorra were , in the Bible account, destroyed by fire from heaven for their continued practice of homosexuality after repeated warnings from God through the only righteous man in the city, Lot. It appears that Miller, Brueggemann, and others have tried to bring the Bible into their lives. But it appears that they want the Bible to change for them because they don't want to change for the Bible. These people would have us all believing that it is a huge stretch to think that the Bible opposes gay marriage, but it is an exponentially bigger stretch to think that the Bible gives evidence to support gay marriage. It is difficult to understand why people who want to disregard the teachings of the Bible still want to continue to believe that its teachings are true. No one forces them to believe it. If they want to say that the Bible is false so that they can feel better about their lifestyle, let them. But to take something that so many people believe in, and to try and twist it against their firmly held beliefs in such a way is fruitless - unless the intent is to dissuade people from believing in the Bible at all. The scriptures, when read plainly, offer immense support for proponents of traditional marriage. If I'm wrong about that, the evidence for support of gay marriage is apparently missing from all of my copies.

Yet again, an obviously non-religious person is taking scripture out of context. It's been happening a lot recently - by recently I mean since the Bible-as-we-know-it- today was written. During the time that Jesus was on the earth, there were people that also misinterpreted the teachings of the Old Testament, but these people, Pharisees, were basically religious fanatics. But today, the Bible is used by hundreds of different denominations as a source of guidance and learning, each one teaching something different. Evidence of scriptural confusion is clear simply by looking at the number of churches, each teaching from the Bible, each teaching something different. So it's not surprising that non-religious people find some difficulty in understanding the scriptures. In her recent article titled "Our Mutual Joy," Lisa Miller uses a few verses and examples from the Bible to try and make a case for scriptural support of gay marriage, and it's not surprising that she gets it all wrong. There is no support for gay marriage in the Bible text.
In her opening paragraph she quotes the apostle Paul, whose letters make up most of the books in the New Testament. From his letter to the people of Corinth, Miller quotes, "It is better to marry than to burn with passion," (1 Cor 7:9) stating that "Paul (also single) regarded marriage as an act of last resort for those unable to contain their animal lust." (Miller, 28) There are two problems with this. The first is that Paul specifically says that it is his opinion, not a commandment of God, that people who are married are less committed to God because they are more committed to their spouse. In verses 2 and 3 of the same chapter he relays the command, "let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband." This, then, is the commandment of God, and Paul's opinion is what was quoted by Miller. The second problem becomes apparent after reading verses 2 and 3; Paul mentions specifically a husband and a wife, not anything exactly leaving room for a gay marriage. In fact, in Paul's letter to the Romans he mentions men "filled with all unrighteousness" (Rom 1:29) "leaving the natural [relations with] women, [who] burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly."
After attempting to warp the teachings of Paul, Miller goes on to try to warp the teachings of Jesus in the book of Matthew 22:30. She summarizes, "There will be no marriage in heaven, [Jesus] says," (Miller, 30) as if the Jesus were disinterested in the matter. The scripture reads, "For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as angels of God in heaven." The more literal meaning of this scripture is that at the time of resurrection, it is too late to be married, not that marriages ar

I could say a good many things about this article and the comments left about it, but I will refrain and only say this...It must be nice to be so high and mighty as to look down on others because of whom they love. Why do so many people take only certain verses to drive home their idealism as to why Gay Marriage is wrong. Who are you to sit in judgement of anyoen else, the oh so righteous and perfect. Why am I an unbeliever simply because I am lesbian or gay? This is not a government issue this is an individual issue, person by person. Stay out of my backyard and clean your own closets before you try cramming me back into mine.

Shame on Newsweek and Lisa Miller for caving in and allowing themselves to be manipulated by Gay Rights activists! While Ms. Miller may write about religion, she clearly doesn't know what she's talking about; including the Bible. The Bible was written for believers, not unbelievers. Talk about embellishing a topic, whew, she's over the top! As a Christian, I do believe what the Bible teaches, and yes, literally. Jesus and his followers wrote so that the average person could understood what they were talking (and writing) about, even if it was in a parable. By the way, Romans 1:26-27 clearly states that women, as well as men exchanged their natural affections for abnormal relations. The Apostle Paul stated that if someone could live a life of celibacy in order to serve the Lord, that was ideal. But if not, then married people should be faithful to each other. Whether you look at the Old or the New Testament, homosexuality (as well as fornication and adultery) are all sins in the eyes of God. It's not just "fundamentalists" that believe homosexuality is wrong; the major religions all over the world recognize the authority of God's Word on this matter. I don't hate anyone (contrary to the media's portrayal of people who chose to speak out against homosexuality), but I do have a right as a citizen and a Christian to speak out my disagreement on issues affecting our culture. The tragedy is that the mainstream media instead of remaining neutral and providing a healthy environment to discuss our beliefs, has decided to allow themselves to be bullied and manipulated by gay activists. Not only that, but people like Ms Miller choose to attack and call us names; simply because we don't fall in line and take the politically correct approach. I have gay friends and I love them as they are. It's not my job to change someone, I'll leave that up to God. There are many things wrong in the world today, divorce, child abuse, spousal abuse, hunger, war, etc., this list goes on. And yes, many Christians are not practicing what they preach. Guess what, no one is perfect! But that doesn't mean we don't stop trying to follow what Jesus taught and he gave us the Bible as our guidebook. In the end, we will all stand before God and be judged individually for the choices we make. After seeing some of the comments on this subject; one just has to read them to see who the true hatemongers are....their venom is as poisonous and ill-conceived as is Ms. Miller's viewpoint. One of the tactics the Nazis employed was to attack the character of people who were non-compliant and didn't go along with their viewpoint. I've noticed in the last 10 years that the media has become very adept in using the same method..........it's really quite scarey when you think about it....

Wow. This Lisa Miller article is pretty shocking. It's one thing to believe the Bible is not trustworthy or irrelevant and just ignore what scripture says, but to selectively choose and exclude scriptures in order to distort and conceal what the Bible says, effectively lying to and misleading thousands, possibly millions of readers around the country and the world is absolutely inexcusable. Rather than draw on the wisdom and experience of the overwhelming majority of scholars from colleges and seminaries available, Newsweek has chosen to present a myopic, self serving point of view which the average person could easily determine to be false by spending an hour or so with a Bible and a list of ALL the relevant scriptures. The writer however is well aware that only a tiny minority is likely to do this, and so they can easily pull wool over people eyes. This all begs the following question: If the cause is so virtuous, so valid, and so true, why does an 'A-list' publication with all the resources Newsweek has at it's disposal have to stoop to lies and deception to advance it?

Same sex couples have been getting married for as long as I've known, often by clergy, often with the support of family and neighbors, always with the support of friends. These unions, however, are not legally recognized nor are those united afforded the multitude of legal rights and privileges that heterosexual couples take for granted.

I hear the argument: "It threatens the core of civilization" or "It degrades my [heterosexual] marriage" or "Homosexuals can't procreate." How exactly does same-sex marriage threaten or degrade? Should heterosexual couples who are unable to procreate be prevented from marrying? Should couples who choose not to or who fail to procreate be dissolved?

If marriage is so sacred, why is it provided to heterosexual couples on demand, as often as they want it? Why is it easier for opposite-sex couples to enter a lifetime commitment than to enter a university or procure citizenship? Why is marriage provided for an incarcerated criminal and a letter-writer, but not two attorneys who happen to be gay?

The argument isn't marriage, it's homosexuality. There are plenty of heterosexual unions I disapprove of, very few gay marriages I object to. If we're going to have rules, let's have rules across the board for all citizens.

"Children need both a mother and father, and two men do not make a mom." Sorry Micah, (Letters) and all the others that take statements such as this for granted. This is an ethnocentric view of western culture. It is not a worldwide norm.

It is also a slap in the face to the many single heterosexual parents who raise children on their own. Or the grandparents raising children, etc.

Truly historic marriage, in Israel, in particular, was about the bringing together of families - often more a property transaction than anything else. Marriage provided heirs for the men, and social security for the women.

Even in the more recent past, marriage was not focused on childbearing. In the classic wedding vows we know (which date back about 400 years), do you ever hear any reference to sex or children? "To have and to hold, for sexual pleasure and the production of offspring, until one member is proven infertile." Um, nope, that's not what it says.

The core spiritual beliefs of Christianity can be as difficult to comprehend as they are to explain (???Our Mutual Joy,??? Dec. 15.) Because spiritual things are so hard to articulate, Christians often revert to the language of morality ??? talk that nearly everyone can understand, if not embrace. So it???s discouraging to again have Christianity described solely terms of moral behavior without a better discussion of its essence ??? which is God???s remedy for those who are willing to relinquish their own plans, desires and needs and approach Him through Jesus Christ. It???s frustrating to explain my faith to people who are led to believe that gay marriage, abortion and sex are issues of first importance in the Christian life. Christianity is first about Jesus ??? who He is, what He did, and why He did it. Find, understand and submit to the Biblical Jesus, and God will explain to you how to live morally??? if you ask Him.