The Confusing Right, Part 2

There has been a lot of recent buzz in the state of Washington. On the November ballot this year is the hot topic of gay rights. Here is the wording for Referendum 71, so there will be no confusion about what I am about to discuss.


This bill would expand the rights, responsibilities, and obligations accorded state-registered same-sex and senior domestic partners to be equivalent to those of married spouses, except that a domestic partnership is not a marriage.

Okay, I think that is quite clear! All same-sex partners are asking for is the equal rights of married couples. Call it a Civil Union, call it a Contract Agreement, call it the end of civilization as we know it...whatever! But I think the wording at the very end of the last sentence says it all: a domestic partnership is NOT a marriage. Have the people against gay marriage even read what Referendum 71 says??

You would think that opponents of gay marriage rights who have for years now been trying to "protect the sanctity of marriage" would be okay with this. Right? I mean we're not trying to pervert the highly successful marriage rate that is never ruined by the concept of divorce, cheating spouses or reality shows (I'm talking about you, John and Kate - because there is a perfect example of a happily sanctified marriage!).

Today as I was driving my bus route, I saw a sign in the back window of a car. It looked like it had been printed off a website, but the gist of it was to reject Referendum 71 to protect marriage and the following website was conveniently displayed in large bold letters so I could look it up when I got home.

http://www.protectmarriagewa.com/

Wow. Seriously? This is still an issue for people? One would think that people who are trying to protect the definition of a word would back off considering that the referendum CLEARLY states that domestic partnerships are NOT defined as a marriage. Exactly what leg do these people have left to stand on?

Seeing this defense still being used makes me wonder if this really is about their precious marriage definition. Perhaps this is really about fear. Lord knows the far right loves to spread hate through scare tactics. They fear what they do not understand so they rush to judgment and preach thinly veiled defenses for their agenda.

What other conclusion can I draw? It's right there on the front of their website:

Are the homosexuals finally going to take control of our culture and push their depraved lifestyle on our children and families?

Senator Val Stevens leads off her article on the front page of their website with that question. Well, Val - may I call you Val? -- the answer to your question is "NO!". Homosexuals, by asking for the same rights of married couples, are not trying to push our "depraved lifestyle" on your children and families. In fact, we promise we won't even invite you to the commitment ceremony, though we all know you'll be there anyway with pickets and cries of injustice. That's just your way.

If you want our tax money, then the least you can do is give us the same rights of married couples - a right we deserve no matter what your errant, fallible Bible says.

Senator Val Stevens continues: Amidst harassment and even death threats by the homosexual radicals pushing this into our faces, just enough signatures were gathered to give you the final say on the upcoming ballot.

I love when the far right takes their argument here. I jump up and down, giddy and clapping my hands. Is she seriously going to make this statement? Okay, clearly she is and has. I have yet to hear any of these claims proven in news reports. One would think that such claims, were they true, would be newsworthy. Last Spring police raided a gay bar and severely beat a gay man. We all know the story of Matthew Shepherd. Those stories were ALL over the news. Why have I not seen news reports backing up the claims of Senator Val?

There have been claims that people who signed the petition to get the issue of gay domestic partner rights on the 2009 November ballot are too scared to make themselves known because they worry about death threats and harassment. Well, there's that fear again! But seriously, are they that afraid that their own tactics will be used against them? I guess they are. I once heard someone say that people who stoop to criminal activity are often wary of having it done against them.

I had a conversation about this issue with a co-worker last week. I have been hearing an anti-referendum-71 commercial on local radio station Star 101.5 the past several weeks. The gist of the commercial is that Washington's politicians are "out of touch with the issues" and should be focusing on more important things like our wounded economy and the current war and the housing crisis. Frankly, this sounds like a recycled commercial script from past right-wing propaganda. It appears as though someone copied and pasted the script from previous editions and didn't really think to proofread his work. The commercial has no direction or purpose - well other than to promote fear and get people to reject Referendum 71. Oh, and by the way, it wasn't Washington state politicians who pushed to get this on the November ballot. It was, in fact, the right-wing conservatives. Senator Val herself admitted that.

Anyway, I was mentioning this commercial to my co-worker - a right-wing conservative Christian. He immediately shared with me something he heard on the radio -- a conservative DJ (I'm guessing Rush Limbaugh or that other idiot Glenn Beck) who said that the problem with Democrats is that they want everyone to not be concerned with the bedroom, but want to control every other room in the house. They want to suggest which light bulb we should use and which car we should drive.

I laughed and said to my coworker, "But can you see the difference between how Democrats face an issue and how Republicans do? If a Democrat doesn't like the light bulb you use, they aren't going to beat you within an inch of your life and leave you to die in the middle of nowhere tied to a fence. If a Democrat doesn't like that you drive an SUV or a Hummer, they're not going to declare for you eternal damnation because the Bible says so."

His response was to share with me reports of vandalism to SUV's and Hummers in the downtown area. Apparently, environmentalists have launched a campaign to inflict damage to vehicles parked in the Seattle area in the way of broken windshields, slashed tired and broken head and tail lights. My mouth must have dropped open because my co-worker stared at me and said, "What?"

I said, "Are you seriously comparing the beating of a human homosexual to the distruction of an SUV or a Hummer?" He tried to backpeddle, but still insisted that the distruction of private property is clearly wrong.

How about the distruction of the human spirit? How about the distruction of human rights? How about the distruction of souls? Well, I guess if they belong to perverted homosexuals, then they don't count.

Why not gay marriage?

Oh, great; another blog about being gay. What is this guy? Some kind of queer? As long as questions keep coming up in my mind about the confusing anti-gay defenses, the more I'm going to need to blog about it to help me better understand how and why these anti-gay activists think the way they do.

Today, the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of Proposition 8, continuing the ban on gay marriage in that state. A friend of mine said he wasn't surprised by the ruling. Back in November the people voted for it and it passed. It wouldn't make sense for the court to overturn a voter-approved proposition, wrong though it may be, because to do so would make people think that democracy doesn't work. I can see what he's saying, but at the same time, I'm saddened; not because of today's ruling, but because this issue went to the voters in the first place.

I have really tried to understand the anti-gay marriage defense. I have tried to find logic in their protests, their Bible verses, their actions. The more I look, the less logic I see. Instead, I see hypocrisy and double talk.

When I heard the news about Prop 8 in California, I started thinking, yet again, about this whole idea of the Bible's definition of marriage. Is it so clearly defined as people argue? I got out my NIV study Bible that I had in college and started looking up verses pertaining to marriage. One thing did become clear as I looked up the verses. Every single one of them were NOT official definitions. Not one! Instead, what I found were examples of marriage.

For one thing, all of the verses tended to start with one word: IF. "If a man marries a woman...", "If a man has recently married..." One verse actually said "For example..." (Romans 7:2-3). Are examples clear definitions as argued by the anti-gay marriage campaign? If I were to look up marriage in the Webster's Dictionary, would it say "For example, a man and a woman joining in union?" Actually, here's a fun fact! I did look up the word marriage on the Webster's online dictionary. Take a look at what I found.

As I looked at the "official" definition of marriage, I noticed that those were examples. So maybe an official definition is an example? Maybe those references in the Bible are "official definitions". If that is the case, then how do the people of today, who hold up these definitions of marriage in the Bible get around passages like

Romans 7:2-3 – For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage. So then, if she marries another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adultress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adultress even though she marries another man.

Woah! Does this mean that a woman who gets a divorce is a slut if she marries another man and her ex-husband is still alive?

Here's another verse I found interesting:

Hebrews 13:4 – Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.


Nowhere in that verse does it say "Marriage between a man and a woman." It just says the word marriage with no "clear definition" of what that word means. Now it does say "sexually immoral" and I know that many would jump on that phrase and say "Right there! That's the case against homosexuality right there because the Bible clearly defines homosexuality as 'immoral'!" Okay, fine, even if you adopt that narrow view, I would still have to argue that it doesn't specifically say that a marriage is between a man and a woman. All it says is that "marriage should be honored by all." Interesting. Honored by ALL. Should ALL marriage also be honored? Just wondering.


I went to Google and typed in the words "gay marriage Bible". I was hoping to find websites that would tell me exactly how and where the Bible speaks against gay marriage. Here is the first website that popped up.


I thought this essay was very interesting. Not surprisingly, the author turns to the story of Sodom found in Genesis. Two angels of the Lord went to Sodom to find Lot and the men of the city followed them. They knocked on Lot's door and demanded that the two angels be sent out to them so they could have sex with them. Instead, Lot opted to send out his two virgin daughters and the men of Sodom had sex with them instead.


Okay, so here are my issues with this story and the defenses of the author of that website. First, how shitty is it that Lot sent his poor daughters out as replacements? This was the most holy man in all the city? This was the man that God sent His angels there to save? YIKES! Second, the men had sex with the woman. Well, if that's the case....they are they gay? I can tell you as a gay man, I have never had a desire to sleep with a woman. It just doesn't appeal to me. If I find a guy attractive and he sends out a woman and says, "Here, give this a try..." I'm going to walk away saying, "No thanks." So if those men of Sodom were such evil homosexual men, why were their sexual lusts satisfied by a couple of virgin chicks? They sound like creepy straight guys to me. Come to think of it, have you ever seen any pictures of angels? They look kind of....feminine, don't they? Could it be that these two pretty boys walked into the city and were mistaken as women? Just a thought.


So given all of that, is this as valid an example AGAINST gay marriage as the author of the website claims? In the summary, the author of the website lists this story under examples of the Bible "clearly" teaching that same sex marriage is wrong. But is this as "clear" an example as the author would like to believe? I find that hard to believe, myself.


To further discredit the list of Bible verses, under that same heading of the Bible clearly teaching against gay marriage, the author lists Judges 19:14. In my Bible, this is what the verse says: "So they went on, and the sun set as they neared Gibeah in Benjamin." Wow! That is very damning evidence against gay marriage there. I mean how can one argue against that? Clearly, that verse from the Bible is teaching that gay marriage is wrong! Right?


The author lists verses from Leviticus where, in another blog, I also pointed out other "sins and abominations" that Leviticus that today aren't considered sins.


Another verse listed under that same section as defense against gay marriage is Deuteronomy 23:17 - "No Israelite man or woman is to become a shrine prostitute." And the hard evidence against gay marriage is.....?


Another listed verse, 1 Kings 14:24 - "There were even male shrine prostitutes in the land; the people engaged in all the detestable practices of the nations of the Lord had driven out before the Israelites."


No Same Sex Marriage Biblical References in the Old Testament
The Bible clearly teaches no same sex marriage.
Genesis 19; Judges 19:14
Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 20:13
Deuteronomy 23:17; 1 Kings 14:24, 15:12, 22:46; 2 Kings 23:7

These are the verses from that section. I took that directly from the website. NOT ONE of them specifically talks about gay marriage! Some of them, don't even talk about homosexuality! Do you get the feeling that maybe at some point the author got bored and wanted to pad the arguement a little by throwing in arbitrary verses?


There are other verses listed on the website, but as I look at them, they do not specifically address same sex marriage or the Bible "clearly" speaking out against it, as these people love to claim. I just don't see the validity of their argument. I can't find a single passage in the Bible that specifically forbids a man being able to marry a man or a woman being able to marry a woman.

There are, however, plenty of verses talking specifically about divorce and what an abomination that is. Yet there is a practice that is readily accepted in today's society. Gays getting married doesn't protect the sanctity of marriage, but it's okay for two people to get a divorce? Well, the Bible clearly states otherwise. Why is it that one is okay but not the other, especially when the other (gay marriage) is NOT clearly stated in the Bible as claimed?

The idea of Civil Unions has started coming up. In Washington State, gays have finally been given what we are calling "Everything but..." Gays in this state now have all the rights of heterosexual couples in marriage, we just can't call it marriage. While many see this as a victory for gay people in our state, I still can't help but see that they still want to see us as second class citizens. Fine! Go ahead and have your union, but you still can't call it marriage! Oh, but you will have to pay your taxes and your civil service just like every other citizen.

I am thankful to the people in our government who pushed for the recent legislation granting rights to gay people here. They have worked hard to get us that. It may not be exactly the same as marriage, but it is darn close. It's "everything but..."

Is it important that gays get the word "marriage?" I honestly don't think that it does. Sure, I just ranted in this blog about the semantics of the word. I guess in the end, what really matters is how the two men or the two women feel about each other. If their love is genuine, that's all that matters, isn't it? Do they have to call it marriage? I don't think it really matters.

My point in all this was to question the "logic" of anti-gay people. They throw out these verses from the Bible as damnable proof for their cause, but when you go and look at them, you find holes in the theory. More questions are raised than outright proof. Yet time and time again these verses are thrown into the argument as law. Those verses are held up as testament to the validity of the Bible while those other verses, the ones that speak against other things in practice today are ignored. That's selectiveness. They're just taking the verses that they think support their cause and "forgetting" about the other ones.

There is a word for that. It's called hypocrisy.

The Confusing Right

Today I received an email from an aunt describing a campaign going around that seeks to ban the reading of the Gospel on radio airwaves. The email calls for every Christian to step up and be heard, and of course please sign the petition on the email as they are praying for at least 1 million signatures.

Okay, first of all, I am not against the Gospel being heard on the radio. I'm all for the Gospel of Jesus being shared. I think it's a good message and one that shouldn't be banned from anything. According the the email, they also want to take Christmas carols out of public schools. Again, I'm against stuff like that.

To prove this, I'll quickly recount a story that happened in my own school district. Several students at a school in the richer part of town put up a Christmas tree in the school office with ornaments containing the names of kids from a school in the poorer part of town. The idea was that the rich kids would by a gift for poorer kids. Someone complained that the "tree" was a Christian symbol, so the "Giving Tree" was reduced to the "Giving Counter". As I did then, I still believe that this was a terrible thing that happened. An Incredible idea, launched by some amazing children, was ruined by closed-minded thinking.

So, let's be clear: I am NOT against the Gospel of Jesus being shared of the radio waves. I would never sign such a petition or participate in any events with that as the mission.

Here, though, is what came to my mind as I read the email. These are the same people who fought to get Howard Stern fined countless times for his radio show. These are the same people who lobby and fight hard to keep gays from getting married. These are the same people who demand that film makers censor themselves. These are the same people who supported Sarah Palin's groundless attacks on Barack Obama.

Am I missing something here? Is it okay for these people to do all those things I mentioned above, but not for people who may not believe in the Bible to question that? Is this not a double standard?

It's this kind of thinking that really bothers me. "I'm sorry, we just can't allow you express yourselves the way you feel you should, but please don't trample on our rights to it." I think this falls under the category of "We're right and you're wrong!"

This tends to be the unfortunate MO of the Christian right. They, having the moral high ground, have the right to do and say whatever they want and question the opinions and views of everyone who disagrees with them. Yet when their opinions and views are questioned, an all out war is launched with "That's not fair!" as the battle cry.

How can they not see the similarities? Well, I guess it's because they are so closed minded to the truth.

I hope one day there will be an understand in all of this. Until then, I guess I'll just continue to be confused by the Christian Right.