More than a meme

[klwilliams]

I already voted against Prop 8, and encourage anyone else who can to do so. Marriage is defined in the Bible as between one man and as many women as he can support. There are two (or maybe three) sentences in the Bible against gay sex (though not lesbian sex), mixed in amongst the many, many sentences about love and loving one another.

I also donated money to the No on 8 campaign today, as they are trying to raise enough money to run many more ads on Monday. If you can do it, I recommend you help:

https://secure.ga4.org/01/equalityforall

Comments

[catagon3.livejournal.com]

I've donated a couple of times already, may do so again.

[martianfencer.livejournal.com]

Ooh! Ooh! Do you have some Biblical citations?

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

Somewhere. The injunction against men sleeping with other men "as with women" is in Leviticus. It doesn't mention women sleeping with women, and there's some argument that this is similar to when Caesar had sex with a man while on campaign -- the complaint wasn't that he had sex with a man, but that he was the one in the "woman's position". There's a non sequitur about homosexual men being an abomination before God in one of the epistles, and a third, vaguer comment somewhere else, possibly in the Old Testament.

[martianfencer.livejournal.com]

Darn. I'd like to quote chapter & verse, but I don't have time to search it out.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

1 Corinthians 6:9
Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

Leviticus 20:13
If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.

[Read all of Leviticus 20 to put this verse into perspective.]

[martianfencer.livejournal.com]

Oh, I guess I wasn't clear. I wanted the definition of marriage as one man + however many women. Believe me, I've already had the "homosexuality is evil" verses quoted at me. I need to be able to say, "Yes, but the Bible also says..."

I have people of all persuasions telling me that Christianity is about, oh,
* Creationism
* The evil of homosexuality
* Following lots of arcane rules
* "Your" marriage must follow *my* ideas
* Other irrelevant stuff

I know how to back up my arguments about the Bible is not meant to be taken as word-for-word fact (just compare the contradictions that sets up between Gn 1 and Gn 2), and how to show that Jesus' emphasis was on love, not on a bunch of rules (about a million passages), but I would like to be able to show that Biblical marriage is not the same as Christian marriage, which can be a help in putting the anti-homosexual passages in perspective.

The old Testament ones, by the way, can easily be discarded, along with the other lists of Old Testament rules, which Jesus declared defunct. And the New Testament ones seem to be about prostitution and the keeping of slaves for using sexually. So much depends on understanding the context!

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

Just use the story of Jacob, Leah, and Rachel (and Jacob's other two wives) as an example.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

By the way, http://www.biblegateway.com/ is where I find my Bible quotes.

[martianfencer.livejournal.com]

I use http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/index.htm, because it's the New American Bible, which is Catholic and goes back to the oldest available sources. It gave me 96 hits when I searched on "marriage" and I quailed at the thought of digging through all of them.