http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/austin_candlelight_vigil_for_dr_tiller/

That’s why these people also are simultaneously perpetually pout-raged by reproductive rights.

Amanda Marcotte put it this way in a blog post several months back, and I grabbed the quote for my Facebook page, because it was SO spot-on:

“[T]hese two fights—for reproductive rights and gay rights—are the same fight. It’ about the right of people who aren’t straight men to have a sexuality without punishment or shame. We’re the ones who deserve the label ‘pro-life’, because we support the right for gays and women to survive and to thrive—to live. And make no mistake, we’re all up against a patriarchal right that is sadistic and violent.”

Exactly.

Women are still useless chattel in their world. They can only do it to a certain degree in civilized countries (sort of like how they can only take their hatred of gays to a certain level in civilized countries), because they are constricted by modernity and enlightenment, but left to their own devices? Please. These are people who fought kicking and screaming against the criminalization of marital rape.

They’re knuckle-dragging fools.

Sorry.

You can’t insert words that aren’t there. Indeed, you would also have to condemn non-Christians getting married, because they wouldn’t be a reflection of that, either.

And again, in Romans 1, he’s talking about homosexual behavior of some sort being the result of God’s punishment, and he seems to be talking about straight people, who for some reason ABANDONED heterosexual relations and started screwing everything that walks. The passage ONLY makes sense if you understand the culture he was writing to, and it makes NO sense if you try to make it fit with a modern understanding of sexuality, which Paul didn’t have.

So, in summary, FAIL and FAIL.

The problem with the sort of deductive logic people like George spin their webs with is it manipulates a false premise as easily as a true one. So they say the penis was designed for procreation and therefor that is its only proper use. But who is this designer and on what basis can you assert that every part of our bodies only has a specific function as opposed to a number of uses?

What is the function of the mouth? To eat? To speak? If the nose is for breathing and the mouth isn’t, then is the moral course of action to let yourself suffocate when your nose is stuffed up by a head cold? And let’s never mind, that nature has given every human male who ever walked this good earth a prostate gland which when massaged, which is what happens during a certain kind of male-to-male sex, will bring him to a right dandy orgasm.

In point of fact, yeah, the anus was designed for a penis. At least the human male’s is, whether or not any particular male has any use for that at all. But if you just neatly assert a priori, that the penis was designed for heterosexual reproduction, then you don’t have to notice that.

You could write it all off as hokum except that George works hard to provide an intellectual justification for making gay people legally outcasts in the eyes of the law. He argued for Colorado’s Amemendment 2 which prevented gay people from even seeking anti-discrimination laws. He wrote of the Supreme Court decision that overturned it that it was “The Supreme Court’s Assault on Popular Sovereignty”. There is a straight line from there to the Manhattan Declaration where he argues not only that same-sex couples be denied the right to marry, but that bigots should defy the laws if they Are allowed to marry.

The poet Rabindranath Tagore said that bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its hand with a grip that kills it. Robert George is a living example of this.

Honest scholars have differing opinions on that. But the strongest cases to be made are that either the Bible is silent on the idea of gay relationships as we know them, and that the best we can do is to infer using the great overarching teachings of the text (passages like the Pauline text that says that the sum of the law is love, and that whatever commandments there may be, if you are loving, you are fulfilling the law are helpful in that context), or that indeed, using said overarching themes (thousands of verses about love and justice vs. six usually mistranslated/culturally misunderstood passages used to condemn gays), a strong case can be made supporting gay people.

The weakest case, though, if you study languages, culture, and context, and it’s REALLY weak, is the idea that gay people are somehow condemned.

I’m open to the idea that the Bible is silent on the issue — i.e. it doesn’t bother me — because I’m not a Christian, or a theist of any kind, so I don’t expect the Bible to have much to say about most things, any more than I expect to find the meaning of life in Moby Dick.

But that’s just me.