religious case for gay marriage

Newsweek’s provocative cover story this week explores what the Bible really says about gay people, gay marriage, even gay sex. Religion editor Lisa Miller talked to scholars who say neither Jesus or the Bible ever explicitly define marriage as between one man and one woman.

"The Bible’s view of marriage is nothing like the way we view marriage today," Miller told 365gay News. “There are all kinds of ways to interpret it because the Bible was written three or 4,000 years ago, for a world that looks completely unlike our own.”

Newsweek editor Jon Meacham predicted the predictable backlash in his column,
and Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention soon followed up.

Here’s how Newsweek laid out the religious case for gay marriage:



“There are four or so verses that are quoted over and over and over by the religious right against homosexuality,” Miller told 365gay News.

“Two of them are in Leviticus, two of them are in Paul, and there’s a verse in Genesis. I went to those verses and I talked to scholars about them, progressive scholars, and I said, is there another way to interpret this, besides just condemning homosexuality as an abomination?”

“The argument I’ve been getting the most is the Adam and Eve argument. Marriage is between a man and a woman,” Miller said.

“There’s a verse in Genesis that says when a man leaves his family he should cleave to his wife and they should become one. The problem with that verse is that it was written in a universe where men were polygamists, and as one Bible scholar I talked to said, you know he should cleave to his wife but how many wives?”

As for Leviticus, where passages refer to sex between men as “an abomination,” Miller said that’s part of a book of rules for a world very different from today.

“This was a very particular world and there are all kinds of rules in there about blood sacrifices and the best way to kill an animal. You have to say, look these rules just don’t apply themselves anymore. We don’t do weird haircuts, we don’t do blood sacrifices…. why do we have to take these two verses about human sexuality so seriously when three pages later there’s instructions on the best price to pay for a slave whether it’s a man, woman, child or old person? Let’s be real about how useful this book is to us.”

Miller pointed out that while there is no passage in the Bible that refers to sex between women, she thinks the discomfort with gay marriage is grounded in discomfort over gay sex.



“The scholars I talked to especially about the verses in Paul say that the condemnation of gay sex in Paul is really a condemnation of the worst kind of craven, licentious, debauched behavior that in fact Paul was talking about the behavior of the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero, who everybody in the first century would have known were just bad, bad people. His condemnation of it is a condemnation of a sort of general wickedness and promiscuity, and that in fact what Paul argued for, is family stability.”

“Get married, don’t get divorced. That was a big thing for Paul, stay together. It’s actually a socially conservative argument. Get married, stay married, it’s good for society, it’s good for kids, it’s good for families. Love and the experiment of trying to stay loving even through difficult times is a very Christian endeavor. Let’s try to give that to everybody.”

Miller said she was most moved by what she learned about the Bible’s true message of inclusion and love.



“The message of Jesus is to reach out to everybody. God loves everybody. A priest quoted to me Psalm 139 which is, ‘I am wonderfully and fearfully made.’ It’s a Psalm about how God sees inside you, your most secret self, even the parts of you that you don’t show to the world. And it’s a wonderful argument for gay marriage. It’s like, God loves all of us, in all of our beauty, in all of our imperfection. Why would he discern between us based on something like sexual orientation? He wouldn’t. I found that a very moving argument and it was inspiring to me.”

By Barbara Simon