Age-old arguments in full swing
Some reasoning against same-sex marriage has echoes in past defence of slavery and apartheid,
Once upon a time there were advocates for slavery, racism, sex discrimination and apartheid. These advocates trotted out hollow and intellectually bankrupt arguments to support their position.
Today we have a debate over marriage equality and we are witnessing again similar tactics and arguments being used to prop up a morally bankrupt position. Like those who supported slavery and apartheid the same sex marriage opponents dress up their moral bankruptcy with appeals to the Bible and religious freedom.
Many who oppose samesex marriage like to quote the Bible to justify their position. Here is Brian Houston of the Hillsong Church, an institution beloved of Right wing Liberal politicians. “I believe God’s word is clear that marriage is between a man and a woman. The writings of the apostle Paul in Scripture on the subject of homosexuality are also clear, as I have mentioned in previous public statements,” says Houston.
The Australian Catholic Bishops statement on marriage, “Don’t Mess with Marriage”, observes, “As the Old Testament taught and Jesus and St Paul repeated, marriage is where man and woman truly become ‘one flesh’ (Genesis 2:24; Matthew 19:5; Ephesians 5:31). It is a comprehensive union between a man and a woman grounded on heterosexual union.”
Picking out passages of a body of work written 2000 years ago in the context of ancient Jewish society is an art form for the enemies of freedom and liberty. It is insulting because it asks intelligent people to accept that you should take every word written by ancient scribes literally.
As Nicholas Holtam, a Church of England bishop, put in a 2013 letter, “Sometimes Christians have had to rethink the priorities of the Gospel in the light of experience. Before Wilberforce, Christians saw slavery as Biblical and part of the God-given ordering of creation. Similarly in South Africa the Dutch Reformed Church supported apartheid because it was Biblical and part of the God-given order of creation. No one now supports either slavery or apartheid. The Biblical texts have not changed; our interpretation has.”
Holtam is right. And as American religious scholar Obery Hendricks Jr points out, same-sex marriage opponents’ claims about the Bible declaring it wrong “only stand up to scrutiny if they wilfully ignore translational issues and the crucial considerations of historical and social context. For as we have seen, the passages used to support the widely held belief that homosexuality is inherently sinful are far too ambiguous and far too open to dispute for anyone to be able to declare with anything like certainty — or integrity — that the Bible conclusively condemns it,” Petersen wrote in a survey of Biblical texts published in the Huffington Post in October last year.
Then there is the claim that legislating for same-sex marriage is part of a push to undermine religious freedom.
The Australian Christian Lobby, a conservative political force, and other groups like the Catholic Church and their friends in the media, push a line that same-sex marriage opponents are being persecuted and silenced by an army of political thought police.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott is pushing the same rhetoric.
There is nothing new in these claims. Every day of the week moral conservatives are out their pushing their agenda. The Australian Christian Lobby’s Lyle Shelton is an inveterate user of Twitter. Columnists are free to publish their lines week in and week out. There is no censorship of the views of the opponents of marriage equality.
The same-sex marriage opponents who claim persecution remind one of the anti-racial equality push in the Deep South during the 1960s. They argued that Washington and African-Americans were out to destroy them and their views were not being heard.
To be frank, there is really no argument of any rigour against same-sex marriage in
Equality is natural to the human condition. To not believe that is to be less than human.
the same way that there is no legitimate argument to support racism or sex discrimination.
Equality is natural to the human condition. To not believe that is to be less than human.
And to be human is to allow for the fact our species is varied in its sexual orientation, some people are heterosexual, some homosexual and some are oriented in both directions.
If marriage is to be taken seriously as a social institution in society then it must reflect that diversity.
And please do not trot out the line that for children heterosexual marriage is the preferable mode. Such a claim is arrant nonsense and has as much validity as saying that blacks and whites should not be allowed to procreate.
The anti same-sex marriage lobby, like its intellectual forebears who supported other forms of inequality and injustice, relies on nothing more than sophistry, dishonesty and worst of all, resort to ancient texts.