A friend from Academy days, Tami Zane Kizziar, sent me the following video of Keith Olbermann's response to Prop 8's passing, and I feel it is so compelling that I want to share it with those I love. I hope it speaks to your heart as it did to mine.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
A Question of Love
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4 comments:
Just my thought... If we allow gay marriage then we need to allow:
underage marriage, marriage between a minor and an adult without parental consent,
marriage between father's and daughter's, son's and mother's,
then we need to allow women/man to have more than one spouse.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I believe that marriage between two consenting adults of the same sex is a very different thing from underage marriage (which is allowed in some cases), incest or polygamy. Why is this even an issue for heterosexual couples? How can encouraging a monogamous lifestyle in a population frequently critized for its promiscuity be a bad thing? And how does allowing gays to marry negatively affect heterosexual marriages in any way? I fail to understand why it matters so much - unless it's because you have judged them immoral and are condemning them. In which case, you might want to remove that large plank in your eye.
It depends on where you derive your concept of marriage. Is marriage a biblically ordained institution that the government recognizes or is it a governmental institution that the church recognizes? Contrary to popular belief and opinion, just because one may not agree with gay marriage (and even vote against it) doesn't automatically make that person a closed-minded bigot who's hell-bent on destroying the happiness of a particular subset of the population.
For the Christian, this issue isn't as black and white as Olbermann paints it to be and is impacted by one's faithfulness to a simple reading of Scripture that goes beyond the over-used "God is Love" hermeneutic which is so often deployed as the nuclear option when arguing God's acceptance of certain behavioral patterns or His forgiveness of sin in general.
Taken further, Scripture uses marriage as a way of describing Christ's relationship to His Church. The implications of this as it applies to homosexual marriage are too numerous, yet impactful, to go into here but I hope you can see the problems with this.
I respect your passion for equality, as you see it impacted regarding this issue, but I respectfully disagree based on the the grounds mentioned above.
I wouldn't expect Olbermann to give any of these considerations much weight which leaves you relying on your own sense of fairness, reason, and morality.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment (wish you'd left your name!). I understand and respect your point of view - and I certainly don't believe that just because someone is opposed to gay marriage that that makes them a closed-minded bigot.
I believe that most (if not all) homosexuals are not homosexual by choice, but because they're born that way - I have many friends who fought (some for the better part of their lives) against their homosexual nature and tried desperately to live a "normal" heterosexual lifestyle. Eventually they all realized that they could never be fully themselves and/or live a fulfilling life as a heterosexual (or celibate) and not only gave up trying to be "normal", but because of the church's lack of acceptance (and a perception of God's disapproval/judgment), many gave up on a relationship with God as well.
I have a very difficult time believing that a loving God could expect someone born with a natural attraction to the same sex to either enter into an unfulfilling (and almost certainly doomed) marriage with someone of the opposite sex or to remain celibate for their entire lifetime. God created us as sexual beings, and it's not natural for us to completely deny that aspect of our humanity.
I also question the Biblical basis for this bias against homosexuality. Many restrictions outlined in the Old Testament are ignored by most Christian faiths today - dietary laws (clean vs. unclean meats), hygienic laws (such as a woman and everything she touches being unclean while she's menstruating), laws forbidding the planting of a field with two kinds of seed, wearing clothen woven of two kinds of material, or forbidding the cutting of the hair on the sides of the head or the clipping of one's beard, to name but a few. It seems arbitrary and hypocritical to accept some of these laws as still valid and others as non-issues.
I also fail to understand how two people of the same sex who have pledged to be faithful to one another for the rest of their lives in any way cheapens the meaning of the allegory of Christ being married to the Church.
That said, I'm always interested in learning more on nearly any subject, and enjoy a good debate. Please feel free to enlighten me further as to why you believe as you do - I'd like to better understand where you're coming from.
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