Have you read the cover article for the December 15th issue of Newsweek? If not, you might like to read it before you read my critique. However, if you like you can get the gist in quotes I pull from the article. The article is presented as a religious argument for gay marriage. The article is prompted by prop. 8 in California. Since the election, the gay community has been up in arms against the religious opposition mounted against gay marriage by the christian community. They believe and probably rightly so that had it not been for the christian opposition to gay marriage, the election's results would have been very different. As Lisa Miller, the author of the article says the conflict has escalated to all out war. Newsweek has quite obviously chosen to join the battle in favor of gay marriage. The magazine could have chosen to present a news article fairly representing both sides of the dispute, but instead decided to present a cover story promoting one side of the debate without a single quote from anyone who would disagree with their conclusions. Lisa Miller is the religious editor of Newsweek. If her article were not enough, editor Jon Meacham offers his support for her conclusion.

I crique it not just to speak to the question of gay marriage, but to speak to the culture war being waged against conservative christians by liberal institutions in our society, including some voices within scholarship of christianity. Every source she quotes as supporting her conclusions are described as scholars. There is an obvious reason for this practice.

I want to proceed by addressing three questions: (1) How would she like for her readers to think about religious opponents of gay marriage? (2) How would she like for her readers to interpret the Bible? (3) How does she defend her view of the bible as actually supporting gay marriage?

HOW WOULD SHE LIKE FOR HER READERS TO THINK ABOUT RELIGIOUS OPPONENTS OF GAY MARRIAGE?

She and her editor would like for the readers of Newsweek to dismiss Bible believers as "the worst kind of fundamentalism".


Her editor, Jon Meacham, quotes the Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan who opposes the decisions of the Episcopal church to accept gay ministers and gay behavior. Duncan says that his opposition is "irrevocably rooted in the Bible" which he regards as the "final authority and unchangeable standard for christian faith and practice".
Meacham then adds his comments: "No matter what one thinks about gay rights--for, against, or somewhere in between--this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism....to argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt--it is unserious, and unworthy of the great Judeo-christian tradition."

Listen to Miller: "Would any contemporary heterosexual couple--with an optimistic view of gender equality and romantic love --turn to the Bible as a how to script? Of course not, yet the religious opponents of gay marriage would have it to be so....No sensible modern person wants marriage to look in its particulars anything like what the Bible describes." Notice the connotations of such words as "modern", "sensible", "intellectually bankrupt". The conclusion readers are expected to reach is that conservative christians are out of touch with the contemporary and modern. Christians can't be taken seriously for they are not sensible and are intellectually bankrupt.

After concluding that the Bible when properly interpreted, as she says by progressive scholars actually supports gay marriage, she writes that "Religious objections to gay marriage are rooted not in the Bible at all, then, but in custom and tradition (and, to talk turkey for a minute, a personal discomfort with gay sex that transcends theological argument). Ah, conservative christians are, as you might have guessed, homophobic and thats the real reason we oppose gay marriage.

HOW WOULD SHE LIKE FOR HER READERS TO INTERPRET THE BIBLE?

"A mature view of scriptural authority requires us, as we have in the past, to move beyond literalism... The Bible was written for a world so unlike our own, its impossible to apply its rules, at face value, to ours." She and Meacham point out that the Bible does not condemn slavery, but christians today do. The Bible is very patriarchal, but most churches are egalitarian. According to them the Bible has been used by conservative christians in history as a support for racism, but we have finally moved beyond that view. The Bible allows anti semitism and calls for the death of adulterers, but we've moved beyond that. Now its time to move beyond our taboos on homosexuality and gay marriage.

The Bible is described by Miller as a "living document". "Biblical literalists will disagree, but the Bible is a living document...In that light, Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married--and a number of excellent reasons why they should." What does she mean by a living document? She means the same thing as liberals mean when they defend judicial activism by appeal to the constitution as a living document. Judge Charles Pickering in his book SUPREME CHAOS describes the term "living constitution" as a constitution that changes meaning as culture and society change. In other words meanings can be found in activist judges that the authors of the constitution would never have imagined to be there. As the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 found the right of privacy which they then concluded should be extended to the right to choose an abortion. For 200 years Supreme Court justices had ruled many times on such questions and had never found such a right in the original intent of the framers, but interpretation must evolve to reflect the thought of contemporary society. So while the Biblical authors would never have dreamed that their writings could be interpreted to defend gay marriage, we now know that it can be so used by appeal to "the living document" hermeneutic.

The framers of the constitution specifically wanted to exclude such ideas as a "living constitution". James Madison, who more than any other of the founders explained the meaning of the consitution to those who were being asked to ratify it, wrote the following:" if the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation is not the guide to expounding it, there can be no security for a faithful exercise of its powers".

Thomas Jefferson agreed when he wrote the following: "Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make a blank paper by construction. On every question of construction [we should] carry ourselves back to the time when the constitution was adopted; recollect the spirit manifested in the debates; and instead of trying[to find], what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one, in which it was passed". The conclusion of Madison and Jefferson about the original intent of the constitution is the same conclusion that conservative scholars take with regard to the Bible. Please don't misunderstand my argument. I'm not suggesting that the Bible is like the constitution in its form. This is where Alexander Campbell went astray and this is where we in churches of Christ have followed him astray. The New Testament is not a constitution, but it is an authoritative document which must be interpreted by trying to capture the original intent of its authors. Such is not the manner of interpretation advocated by many universities today with reference to ancient documents are for that matter contemporary documents. European academicians have brought to America a relativist approach legal, historical and religious literature. They contend that origianl intent is beyond our ability to recover and is of little value if it could be recovered. A document means what an individual or a society decide it should mean at the time of interpretation rather than by recovering its original intent. That is what is meant by a "living constitution" and a "living Bible(document)".

Understanding of this matter shows why (at least in this area) conservative christians and conservative political theorists tend to have a lot in common and why advocates of pro choice abortion rights and gay marriage tend to identify with political liberals. Its a disagreement over how we interpret our founding documents.

I am going to have to discuss the third question at a later time, probably Monday. Thanks for reading thus far and feel free to respond on my blog.