Those of you who are using Leviticus to explain or justify your opposition to gay marriage aren't fooling anyone. You read your hate (or love) INTO verses, not the other way around.
I'm a religious person. In fact, I'd argue that I'm just as religious as Zweibel and Huckabee and Santorum and all the other professional scolds who are ripping out their eyebrows over Obergfell. I fear God. I know my Bible. I attempt to conduct myself in a saintly way (in real life, at least. Not on this blog.) Yet, I don't feel obligated by Leviticus to harass, humiliate or otherwise inconvenience men and women who don't share my sexual orientation. What explains this?
The scolds say that my lax attitude on gay marriage is a symptom of my spiritual corruption. If I realty cared about God, they argue, I'd walk in their footsteps and fight to glorify His name by marginalizing other people. What they don't seem to realize is that they are subject to being hoisted on the same petard. According to Leviticus and Deuteronomy God hates lots of things, including shellfish-eaters, women who wear pants, charmers, necromancers, insect-eaters, Asian and African religious art, and divorced women who return to their husbands. All of these things are described as abominations which is the same word Leviticus uses to describe sodomy. Yet do our professional scolds fight any of these horrors with anything approaching the level of energy and funding that they bring to the battle against gay marriage? No, they do not. If they really cared about God wouldn't they be battling to shut down Red Lobster? Wouldn't they be demanding legislation to prevent wives from remarrying their first husbands following a post-divorce wedding to a second man?
Moreover, they've largely conceded the battle against sodomy. No one, not even Zweibel, advocates for the government to go barging into bedrooms. Which makes their heated opposition to gay marriage a complete waste of time. Gay sex is the real problem (if they are being honest, as opposed to angry) and gay sex is legal and will remain legal, whether or not states license gay marriage.
In short we choose, as we have always chosen, how to understand, apply and enforce biblical verses. Leviticus merely says don't sodomize. It doesn't say raise a lot of money, and make a lot of noise and do everything in your power to make gay people as unhappy as possible. Someone who chooses to do that is motivated by hate, not Leviticus.
While its not in our power to abrogate the anti-gay verse in Leviticus, it is in our power to put it aside, like we have already put aside so many other verses, and wait for Elijah to tell us what to do with it.
While its not in our power to abrogate the anti-gay verse in Leviticus, it is in our power to put it aside, like we have already put aside so many other verses, and wait for Elijah to tell us what to do with it.
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