Gay Marriage and the Bible: Beyond Tradition

by Kimberly Peeler-Ringer
Rhetoric Race and Religion Contributor

Gay marriage has become quite the hot button issue now that President Barack Obama has taken a definitive stand on the matter. You would have to have lived under a rock these past few weeks in order to have missed pundit after pundit, preacher after preacher, Facebook fight after Facebook fight on the subject of gay marriage. It would appear that this issue of gay marriage…and whether or not it should be extended to same gender loving persons…has triggered some very visceral responses in all forms of rhetoric: social media, the news industry, and communal spaces such as the barbershop and the beauty salon. This topic has crosses all elements of conversation: the formal and informal, the informed and uninformed.

But despite the overabundance of ink and keyboard strokes devoted to this topic, when push comes to shove, this is more of a conflict about marital privilege. This is a conflict over who should be extended the privilege of marriage, about who is deemed worthy of tying the knot. I cannot help but wonder; what it is about the thought of two men as a family unit or two women making a lifetime commitment to each other that causes such consternation? No doubt, both liberals and conservatives will reach to the words of the Bible to bolster their arguments. But the unfortunate reality is that the Bible contains lots of edicts that modern day believers simply do not adhere to. Any many of those edicts are referred to as “abominations.” For every text that decrees intimate contact between two men as “an abomination” (such as Leviticus 18:22; 20:13) there is also another text that identifies things we do every day as an abomination. Just a cursory list of those texts would include Proverbs 6:16-19; 11:20; 16:5; 17:15; 20:23; Deuteronomy 18:7-12, 22:5; Isaiah 1:13, Ezekiel 18:6-13, and so on.

The list above barely scratches the surface of the biblical texts that describe certain behaviors as abominations. Behaviors such as lying, scheming, using false weights, committing adultery (there goes a large percentage of our government leaders!), sowing seeds of discord (there goes the majority of reality tv shows!) cheating others, and…wait for it…oppressing others are all identified in the Bible as an abomination. That suggests that the very act of denying rights to a certain segment of the community is oppressive….and, well, you get the idea.

It is simply the height of spiritual arrogance to argue that same gender loving relationships are an abomination and everything else identified as one is optional. This is the same type of hypocrisy that Jesus and the scribes and Pharisees bumped heads over throughout the Gospels! Jesus seldom missed an opportunity to remind them that they did indeed know the letter of the law, but were bankrupt when it came to matters of compassion and empathy for the least of these.

So why are we so willing to give some behaviors a pass? I believe it is a matter of tradition. Tradition shapes our perception, and the thought of gay marriage upsets the tradition apple cart. We hold to a lot of traditions about the Bible that are technically wrong. An example of this would be the conversion of Saul; particularly the image of Saul falling from his horse in the moment when he had his dramatic conversion. You know the story: Saul was like Dog the Bounty Hunter when it came to wrangling the early believers in Jesus, and he did not discriminate…he sent men, women and children to their deaths for having the unmitigated gall to laud Jesus the renegade rabbi as the Messiah. Then on his way to Damascus he had the original “come to Jesus” moment. Jesus confronted him, and he fell off his horse…but when you read this account in the book of Acts (Acts 9:4; 22:4), there is not one mention of a horse.

We see this again, played out every Christmas in middle schools pageants across the country. The three kings or wise men that brought gifts to Jesus…but again, nowhere in the Gospel birth narratives (Matthew 2:1-11) is the number of visitors mentioned. These are traditions. People can be passionate about their traditions, and some can and will get downright ugly if they feel someone or something is threatening to take their traditions away. One would need to look no further than American history. It was once a tradition to declare occupied territories as one’s own property. It was an American tradition to turn a profit on the backs on kidnapped unpaid Africans. It was an American tradition to have one set of water fountains for whites and another for blacks. It was an American tradition to arbitrarily put people to death because of a perceived threat. No, I am not talking about the ‘Stand Your Ground’ law. I’m talking about lynching. There are a lot of things that are “tradition.” And by the tendency to ignore biblical edicts not to eat seafood or mix the fabrics of the clothes we wear, or adapt texts to include details not present, we also demonstrate that traditions can be changed and rethought.

So if we are going to use the Bible to make points about whether or not a certain segment of the community should be denied marital privilege, let’s settle the matter once and for all: it is a fair deduction to argue that ALL sin is an abomination. After all, if we want to use the Bible to argue how people should behave in the 21st century, then what do we do with texts like Lamentations 3:35-40?

Gay marriage will no doubt continue to be a derisive issue—but this is far more than just a matter of morality. This is also a matter of injustice. And we need to ask ourselves if we will have to answer for remaining silent on a matter of injustice, whether we think it is immoral or not.