I was struck by the magnitude of anger and hate spewing from this quote.

I had a little vision of Jesus, sitting around some big rocks, talking to his friends. In that vision, I was unable to conjure up an image of Jesus “going off” with such venom against the people he loved. I know he got upset in the Temple and threw some money tables around, but, that pushed the envelope for him. And rightly so.

Do Chuck Colson, Warren, Dobson, sick et al, do they all really think that Jesus is the kind of man that would mount advertising campaigns against the lesser-of-these?

At times I want to write a book and I would call it, “Go to the Master”. I would analyze all the current Christian agenda including the teachings of the crooks on TV. Then, I would do a comparative analysis strictly against the words of Jesus. After all, he is the Savior, the difinitive source, the Master.

I know the likely result: the gospels of Jesus do not support anger, hatred, bigotry, nor would Jesus ask for $25 to send me a prayer napkin that has been “blessed”. The result would be a stunning conviction of truth; or, attacked as heretical.

Today’s so called evangelicals and Christian activists cannot justify or defend their actions when held up the words of Jesus Christ himself. The church saddens me on one hand, and sickens me on the other. The churches ought to be punished by pulling their tax exempt status and banning them from advertising their hate campaigns. It saddens me deeply.

Keep up the good work,

Maurice Lacunza

I would add further that the way to make progress is to eliminate from rational argument anyone who claims to know the mind of God, however moderate. … Religious opinions, be they of Wylie Kellermann or Duke, must not inform public life; neither should they be endorsed by government.

What God supposedly thinks about same-sex marriage is irrelevant when it comes to the laws of the USA.

Were it that easy.

A number of remarks here have focused on the fact that our government is secular, and no church has any business imposing it’s beliefs on the rest of the governed. Unfortunately, the reality of the way people participate in that secular government does not exclude people of faith from raising and voting on issues, or otherwise taking positions with respect to lawmaking and public policy.

Whether or not we as gay-rights supporters want to deal with faith interests, they are a reality of the political landscape. It behooves us to become aware of the influence networks formed by groups that seek to effect public policies curtailing or enhancing the rights of LGBT people. To achieve our goals of inclusion, we will have to work within the structure of those networks to persuade sympathetic subgroups to speak up and work for LGBT causes.

It is essential that LGBT people value the principal of inclusion, not just call for inclusion, and that means reaching out to all communities whose morals dictate their acceptance of gay people.

Everyone in the LGBT camp must realize that just because we believe a particular way does not mean that others don’t believe some other way. Belief is inescapable, even for the most rational humanist. Rational dialogue and persuasion will not work with everybody, but it will work with many who in turn multiply the voices for LGBT inclusion in the whole of society.

But I disagree about the impact of the Bible; it may well be literature, but it’s impact is much greater than Shakespeare or Hemmingway.

And I think that, like it or not, we’ll have to deal with its influence on gay marriage and other issues into the foreseeable future.

I don’t think that’s the point of this debate; the debaters are hardly going to convince each other. I think the most important point to note is that they disagree.

Many Christians, when they throw themselves into the gay marriage debate, act as if God and the Bible are unequivocally on their side, and therefore if you are a Christian (remember, most Americans are) you have to oppose gay marriage. This idea is so widespread that I think there is real value in having a debate like this, in public.

I also agree with Stefano A, though, this argument is not and should not be presented as relevant to the question at hand: should gay marriages be recognised by the state. They should. The only arguments against are based in bias or religion, or both. Neither bias nor religion have any place in the state’s laws.

Religious arguments for or against SSM will always revolve around what the Bible has to say about homosexuality. No one is quite sure if the translation of the original texts even got the right word.

So the two sides in the Newsweek debate differed in their interpretation of a work that was produced in a time very different from our own. The Old Testament, which was written over a long time, appeared well before the emergence of Christianity and was motivated by a different set of societal needs and perceptions of God. All early Christians were Jewish for all intents and purposes, including Jesus. Only after several decades following the death of Jesus, did the first book (Mark) of the new testament get written in the first century. Those early Christians were still essentially Jewish. Their “Bible” at the time was the Torah, much of which makes up what we generally refer to as the “Old Testament”. Christianity may have begun to have a written tradition shortly after the death of Jesus, but most likely it was an oral tradition, not written down until the last quarter of the first century—decades after the death of Jesus.

A principal thread that runs through the aphorisms and teaching of Jesus is one of inclusion and embracing “others” that are not Jewish, including Pagans and those that were generally considered “unclean” because of their non-adherence to the “law” set down in the Torah, or the God it honored. For some Christians it is hard to accept that the universal love taught by Jesus was to be extended to everybody in the time of Jesus as well as now, which would include people that were in fact homosexual. I think this is mostly because many Christians just don’t want to believe that homosexuality is a natural state for some human beings, and that it is impossible that God could have created people that were in fact “naturally” homosexual. Clearly, medicine, psychology, and philosophy have advanced since the Torah and the four books of the New Testament were written.

Those that want to read the Bible literally, will always have a hard time accepting things in our modern world, and often will have a problem reconciling the universal love taught by Jesus with the many exclusionary tenets of the Old Testament. If you are already predisposed to believe the text of the Bible as handed down to us, and are unwilling to interpret the scriptures in light of what we know about its historical origins, the universal love of Jesus, and what we have learned about the human condition, then you think like Dr. Barrett Duke.

Readers here that want to understand the origin of Christianity in order to better understand how to participate in the debate surrounding religious acceptance of Gay Rights, should watch this PBS Frontline documentary that describes what scholars have been able to learn about the life and times of Jesus and the emergence of Christianity.

The Bible is a piece of literature and should be read as such and given no more weight than Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare or even Hemingway.

As far as this particular Newsweek debate, the entire debate really was more a digression about the sin of homosexuality in general than it was anything else, and as such should not have even been posited as a discussion about SSM.

So with that regard yeah, Timothy, I would fault Newsweek for that.

The problem (*A* problem) is that there is barely a thread of agreement between the hundreds of Protestant denominations. On ANYTHING. Some of them believe that being gay is a sin. Some believe that it’s not sinful until you have sex. Some believe that a gay person can be part of a congregation but not in a position of authority. Some see no difference between gay and straight.

It’s not just The Gays that we disagree on. I’m not sure non-Christians realize that the biggest and most vocal opponents of gay rights also think that women shouldn’t be in positions of authority (in church or elsewhere) and that they should “submit” wholly to their husbands. (Oh, and all women should have husbands.) My own Methodist denomination wouldn’t allow women to be full pastors until the 1950s, and there are still a lot of churches that say they won’t accept a woman behind the pulpit. (I’ve always said that that should be a surefire way of getting a woman behind the pulpit. But I digress…)

Then we get to the deeper question of whether the Bible is inerrant or infallible. Do people ever get worked up over that one.

It’s not as easy as convincing one group that they’re wrong. It’s a matter of convincing many smaller groups that they’re wrong AND getting them to act on that AND getting them to act on that now, rather than putting it in committee for a couple years.

To be candid, that ain’t gonna happen. It especially won’t happen as long as the James Dobsons and Rick Warrens have as much unquestioned clout and trust among the rank-and-file.

I don’t think we can win them by suggesting that they turn their backs on their leaders. If we’re going to win them it has to be by separating the notion of religious marriage from civil marriage.

Of course, I’m of the mind that the battle won’t be won until SCOTUS gets a hold of it.