There’s an article in Christianity Today by senior managing editor Mark Galli called “Is the Gay Marriage Debate Over?”
It’s not too hard to pick apart much of what he says, beginning with the very first paragraph.
But he does make a very powerful statement to his fellow Christians, one that I rarely hear coming from the mouth (typing hands?) of an evangelical Christian:
We cannot very well argue for the sanctity of marriage as a crucial social institution while we blithely go about divorcing and approving of remarriage at a rate that destabilizes marriage. We cannot say that an institution, like the state, has a perfect right to insist on certain values and behavior from its citizens while we refuse to submit to denominational or local church authority. We cannot tell gay couples that marriage is about something much larger than self-fulfillment when we, like the rest of heterosexual culture, delay marriage until we can experience life, and delay having children until we can enjoy each other for a few years.
In short, we have been perfect hypocrites on this issue. Until we admit that, and take steps to amend our ways, our cries of alarm about gay marriage will echo off into oblivion.
And then, in typical conservative Christian fashion, he can’t possibly leave it at that… so he screws up the argument with the next paragraph:
This does not mean we should stop fighting initiatives that would legalize gay marriage. Gay marriage is simply a bad idea, whether one is religious or not. But it’s bad not only because of what it will do to the social fabric, but because of what it signals has already happened to our social fabric. We are a culture of radical individualists, and gay marriage does nothing but put an exclamation point on that fact. We should fight it, because it will only make a bad situation worse.
In other words, Christians and gays are both responsible for the downfall of our society… so let’s stop changing our Christian ways and continue denying gay people their right to be happy.
The article is another testament to the fact that Christians have no solid reasons to deny gay marriage other than their religiously-inspired homophobia.
