Disrespect for the bible: believers and same sex marriage
Heaven, we have a problem.

No. Not that problem (though it be bad enough).
This problem:


Which is to say, as Australia heads towards a postal vote on whether Australian voters are agreeable to Marriage Equality aka Same-Sex Marriage, first the Roman Catholic Church and now mainlining “bible-believing” outfits are vociferously speaking out against a YES vote.
It’s a strange business
It’s a strange business all round. First because despite an election promise the Turnbull Government has effectively reneged on that undertaking to hold a plebiscite, substituting this postal vote as if the Australian public won’t notice. The organisation running the postal vote is the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), instead of the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC).
Maybe that doesn’t matter or make any difference. Whoever prints the forms and collects the data, it’s still not what we imagined we’d be getting when Turnbull’s battered Liberal-National Party coalition crawled over a line that’s becoming harder to see with each new scandal and revelation.
None of this is especially heaven’s concern – unless the Living God, as seems likely, continues to weep at human folly and our continually absurd machinations.
The Roman Catholics have again hit the headlines on the subject both of support for and same-sex marriage itself. Earlier this month The Weekend Australian reprised Margaret Court’s views against marriage equality. Among the non-Catholic churches the views are broadly similar to Mrs Court’s.

Behind all of this lies the backing of what I tend to call holy scripture but which the Church, both the Catholic species and the conservative/evangelical/pentecostal kind designate The Word of God, God’s Word, The Bible or simply The Word.
The belief is that the Hebrew and Christian scriptures constitute an exact, infallible, uncontradictory written account of God’s own thinking and decrees on every subject, including those which did not exist when inspired men wrote these ancient texts. However, in the event that something in the latter category arises, such as same-sex marriage, people known as “Bible-believing Christians” can prevail upon the Holy Spirit to provide a definitive answer.
Or something close to it. Until someone provides the next definitive answer.
But we know all this. And equally we know that it is hard not to view the human recourse to seeking proof of a particular viewpoint by quoting verses from The Bible as a game which depends on someone’s ability to source a text, discover its meaning and use their interpretation to rationalise their tribe’s viewpoint.
The case against same-sex marriage … is not personal opinion but the authority of The Word
What this ultimately means is the game produces an inarguable proposition, doctrine or dogma. Such is the case against same-sex marriage, a viewpoint whose basis, the claim goes, is not personal opinion but the authority of The Word.
But this is problematic. It’s a position that allows little “wriggle room”. No one can disagree without producing their own portfolio of bigger and better proof texts. And the holder of the anti-same-sex-marriage high ground makes the rules – which, not surprisingly, The Bible tends to support – so that to argue against that position is to earn a condemnation worthy of a Reformation Protestant decrying the excesses of the Church of Rome.
So how does this business exhibit a disrespect for the very book Bible-Believers worship? Several matters come to mind.
First is the very question of scripture’s standing as inspired, infallible, inarguable. But that’s an encyclopaedia in itself. Just know that it’s really the heart of the problem, with erudite arguments spanning the abyss from both sides.
Second, the voices raised against same-sex marriage proceed with the assumption that homosexuality is a sin. Strangely, those who are preaching so loudly against this particular sin remain almost entirely silent on other sins, like domestic violence, to give only one pressing example.
The sinfulness of homosexuality is clear, the claim goes, from God’s Word, even though it’s possible to demonstrate that the objections derive from highly-selective and dubiously-interpreted choices of scripture. And let’s not even begin on the homophobia that these vocalisations cloak.
What’s never discussed is how or why homosexuality-as-sin achieves a preeminence that eclipses the teaching of both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures on the subject and ignores what ought to be the embarrassing fact that Jesus himself says nothing about it.
Of all the sins, in all the bibles, in all the world … Christians ignore those sins about which Jesus spoke the most …
Third, of all the sins, in all the bibles, in all the world, Catholics and conservative-minded, Bible-believing Christians ignore those sins about which Jesus spoke the most and for which he reserved his harshest critique, even judgement. Sins like hypocrisy, religious pride, lack of trust in God (but not “The Bible”), privileging wealth over caring for the poor and people on the margins of polite society.
Wait what? Isn’t that where homosexual folk find themselves in today’s world? On the margins, where they wrestle with their sexuality and agonise over “coming out”? It’s hard to reconcile the harshness of the Church in all its flavours with the Jesus who goes on record as not condemning sinners but rather, recognising that everyone of us sins (John 8:7), offers pardon and love (John 3:17).
Yes, the offer of love (above all) and pardon does not in any way condone sinful behaviours, but it comes nowhere close to the savage condemnation we hear from those who pretend to be Jesus’ disciples.
The vituperative condemnation of sinners calling out other sinners is resoundingly shocking. It seems to speak of religious pride, which in turn devolves simply into almighty hypocrisy.
Fourth, the homophobia that these excursions into battle against homosexuality masks becomes smothered in pious, unyielding and harshly-selective definitions of “Biblical marriage”, so that gay-haters can rationalise their fear by claiming to uphold what they call “traditional marriage”.
Conveniently, it seems, the proponents of “traditional marriage” ignore the fact that holy scripture does not propose a single, uniform notion of marriage.

Holy scripture provides several different models of marriage. It’s simply dishonest to claim that the only one involves one man and one woman.
What can be rightly stated is scripture doesn’t offer a place for same-sex marriage. However, to move from that absence to sociological (not religious) claims that same-sex marriages will “inevitably” harm children such couples raise or create a “stolen generation” of offspring who have no father or mother role-models is to take aim pointblank at the truth.
Pressing scripture into the service of viewpoints that disguise the phobias behind them is where disrespect enters and stays like a cancerous worm eating away from the inside. It’s so nicely put as concern for “traditional marriage”, which means the exercise of patriarchal power, and not-so-nicely voiced as a threat to religious freedom.
But as Professor Greg Carey, who was then teaching New Testament at Lancaster Theological Seminary, wrote six years ago:
Unfortunately, many Christians use the Bible to support their own prejudices and bigotry. They talk about “biblical family values” as if the Bible had a clear message on marriage and sexuality. Let’s be clear: There’s no such thing as “biblical family values” because the Bible does not speak to the topic clearly and consistently.
Nothing has changed. The insistence (also six years ago) that anyone wishing to use scripture respectfully should take the time to find out “what the Bible actually says” is as true now as it was then.
To do less than this is to be thoroughly disrespectful of holy scripture, to turn it from a book of profound inspiration and insight into a massive legal tome whose base use is to exert power and control.
The Church has been doing so since Christianity became normalised as a State religion. It is surely time to cease the disrespect that comes from using scripture legalistically and to recover God’s yearning, not for punishing sinners, but for forming relationships of loving intimacy with those whom God has created.
