THE CURIOUS CASE OF GOD AND GAYS
The previous post on this Blog ended as follows:
"But also, this seal of approval is based on the value rising out of celebrating the differing roles. There is no greater threat to human value than forgetting, ignoring, or deliberately blurring the differences…."
In fact, I recommend you go to that post, "THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE GUY WITH GALS," and read it before you read this. You will find it by scrolling down or following a link in the column to the right. But doing so is not essential. This post will make sense either way; but that post adds flavor.
At this writing tomorrow—Thursday March 5, 2009, to be exact—the California Supreme Court will hear oral arguments for and against California‘s Prop 8—the ban on gay marriage.
The issue is inflammatory enough to have sparked demonstrations, debates, and open hostility. GOD HATES GAYS, shouted one sign at a recent fracas on a local college campus, even as a professor of law decried Prop 8 as an affront to the fundamentals of human justice. It is only fair, he argued, that gays be allowed to marry—and he meant each other: same sex marriage equals justice in his world.
But not in God’s world.
Of course, neither in God’s world does anyone wave signs selling hatred as a virtue.
One error on both sides of the issue is to elevate raw human will to the level of supposed noble causes: to blame one‘s own hatred of gays on God, for example; or to exalt one‘s own sentiment about gays to the level of justice, on the other. Both are arrogant expressions of rebellion against God, replacing God’s will with human opinion. Neither have anything to do with what God really thinks of gays.
To discover that you have to follow the curious case of God and gays in the Bible…
Now, it will do no good to say, "Yes! The Bible says God hates gays," on the one hand; or "Baloney! The Bible is irrelevant," on the other. Both responses are fruit of a common seed: ignorance of the Bible.
The Bible "has the ring of truth," said J.B. Phillips upon close enough examination of it to produce his widely-used paraphrased Bible.
The Bible is true because "it is true to what is," said Dr. Francis Schaeffer upon examining the major world philosophies in light of the Bible.
The Bible claims that God is speaking from its pages. If he is, the Bible makes perfect sense while making sense of the world; if he is not, then nothing makes sense....
The curious case of God and gays really is this simple. Has God spoken? Then let us hear what he says. Has God not spoken? Then there is no such thing as justice because you lack a yardstick to tell what justice is.
It follows that the very pursuit of a definitive decision on gay marriage assumes a morality, an inherent justice written into the cosmos that we can discover; problem is you cannot call such inherent justice something like "human rights" and think you have dispensed with the Bible, for you have merely made a circle around the wagons and are back to human opinion. What are human rights? Either there is some clear mark of morality and justice apart from human opinion or there is not; and if there is, you will look high and low to find it apart from the Bible; so start turning pages as you read carefully and listen to what God says.
This does not mean to find proof texts about God and gays; you might find those aplenty but will not grasp one of them truly apart from grasping first the high value God places upon his good creation. God made things a certain way on purpose—because he is good and chooses goodness for the crown of his creation, man as male and female (see Genesis 1:27).
Here is the curious thing: God clearly calls man male and female—the basic unit of humanity is a pair, man and woman in union most clearly expressed in sexual union where they literally become one flesh. Male and male cannot express this union; female and female cannot express this union. The effort to do so is clearly against nature, a violation of the natural order and it doesn’t take rocket science to explain why. Sodomy is no more two becoming one flesh than stuffing a potato into a Volkswagon’s tail pipe makes the union German potato salad; that you can do both does not make either other than what they are in fact—a clear departure from the recipe.
But the case gets more curious: why call sodomy marriage? If it seems clear enough to so many that God‘s intent in nature of man as male and female in sexual union is that they be one flesh, and that this is what humans have for millenniums called marriage, why the drive to upend this and make what is clearly not one flesh one flesh? And why call this justice, as if sodomy were the equivalent of marriage? Why is it unjust to call sodomy, sodomy and marriage, marriage?
Because the ultimate goal is neither same-sex marriage or justice but an overwhelming, obliterating, blatant denial of God‘s goodness. Sodomy is a denial of man as male and female. It thus denies the most basic aspect of God’s goodness in creation, God‘s making of man in his own image as a community of distinct persons with essential differences joined as one in a union of love.
By the same token, as a God of loving goodness God cannot hate gays; but for their own good and that of his creation neither can he allow gays, straights, or in-betweens to slander his goodness.
The ideal of man as male and female in union as one flesh means the basic unit of creation is a community of love purposefully incorporating essential physical, emotional, and psychological differences; the differences are essential to the union of two and foundational to God’s purpose in creation, which is not just survival of the fittest—which denies the validity of sodomy— but a joyful celebration of the differences in a union of love in the presence of God. God calls this good, those who share in it know it is good, and nature concurs.
Whether the California Supreme Court will concur is another story. But in any case, the Court cannot pass judgment on God‘s goodness, and thus can have nothing to say about true marriage whatever it may say about sodomy as the equivalent. Such is the curious case of God and gays. "Let God be true and every man a liar," is how the Apostle Paul put it; and did so bluntly, I may say.(Romans 3:4).
