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Sunday, July 24, 2011

Tim Pawlenty on Gay Marriage


I think it is interesting that Pawlenty steadfastly refuses to refer to gay couples and instead repeats the phrase "domestic relationships". In some ways I think this is a central point in the argument against same-sex marriage, the idea that gay couples don't really have the same kind of love and commitment that opposite sex couples do. In the eyes of people like Pawlenty two people of the same sex who have shared a home, a bed and a life together aren't really the same as opposite sex couples who share those things. They are instead just like any other "domestic relationship". You know like friends, siblings or other relatives sharing room and board together, but never intermingling their lives and their souls as married heterosexual couples.

This is, I think, the same view held by those who cite Genesis in religious arguments about homosexuality. The particular verse most often cited by traditionalists is Genesis 2:24, "That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh." Most who use Genesis will then bring up Christ's words in Mark 10:6-9,
“But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”
What the traditionalists miss, I think, is that Christ here is not talking about what types of couples are acceptable to God, but rather about the type of union experienced by the couple and how that relates to divorce. Divorce should not be taken lightly because when two people marry they becomes "as one" and such a union is not dissolved easily or without severe consequences. But if, as I and every gay person I've ever known argue, two gay men or women can experience that same love, that same one-flesh nature, then the whole argument falls apart. If in fact our souls can become one in the love of marriage and fidelity then, well as Jesus Christ himself put it, "what God has joined together, let man not separate.”

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Actually, I’m a VERY devout Christian. Let me tell you about how holy I am. You’d love my church! We call it a “judgment free zone”. Isn’t that cute? The pastor encourages us to black out all the passages of the Bible that inconvenience us or make us feel bad. So far, I’ve blacked out just about everything except that story about Jesus saving the adulteress from stoning. I repeat it (out of context, of course) time and time again whenever homophobic “Christians” tell me that butt sex is wrong. Unfortunately there’s that troublesome verse at the end of the story where Jesus tells the woman to “go forth and sin no more.” But there’s an exciting new school of thought among Biblical scholars that contends that those words were mistranslated from the original Greek. What he actually said was “go forth and celebrate sin.” And to think that we’ve had it wrong all these years!

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