The Inerrancy of Love

Andrew Sullivan has some thoughts on an ongoing conversation between Rod Dreher and Damon Linker on gay marriage. Dreher, who writes a column for BeliefNet called “Crunchy Con,” is strongly opposed to gay marriage; Damon Linker (a contributing writer at The New Republic supports it.

It’s good to read all the linked pieces to get a feeling for the history of the discussion, but Sullivan’s post is worth reading in full because it provides a good overview. Also, Sullivan is such a good writer, and writing on a subject that he has thought so much about, because it’s his life and his experience, makes his writing shine all the more.

I am going to quote one section here in which Sully addresses the argument, very much subscribed to by Dreher, that observant Christians are obligated to oppose any societal legitimization of homosexuality because the Bible says it’s a sin, and the Bible is inerrant:

Damon Linker responds to Dreher’s latest. I’ve found the debate helpful, because Rod is nothing if not honest. His resistance to civil equality for homosexuals is built on two core arguments. The first is the inerrancy of the Bible for most Christians, rendering, say, marriage equality an intolerable fusion of Godliness and evil. The logical problem here is the selectiveness of the use of the Bible. As Damon notes:

Among many other things, Christian scripture and tradition affirm the legitimacy of slavery, claim that the Jews are cursed for killing Jesus, and assert that one must give away all of one’s belongings and even learn to hate one’s own family before following Christ. These are just a few of the matters on which contemporary Christians, including orthodox Christians like Rod, feel quite comfortable breaking with, or explaining away, scripture and tradition.

And it’s a good thing, too, because it shows that they’re willing to think for themselves about important moral issues and to use their minds to separate out what is enduringly true in scripture and tradition from the unexamined prejudices that shape and distort everything touched by human hands, very much including received religious norms, practices, and beliefs. The issue, then, is to determine why so many contemporary Christians have decided that the teaching on homosexuality — but not the teachings on slavery, Jews, and the most stringent requirements of becoming a disciple of Christ — deserves to be preserved.

With Catholics, the obvious counterpoint is civil divorce. Catholics do not recognize such divorces within the church nor the second and third marriages that follow them (leaving aside the rank hypocrisy of the annulment scam). But they are prepared to live in a civil society that allows for it as a civil secular matter, just as they live easily with infertile married couples, or post-menopausal couples getting married. Until Rod explains why homosexuals as such represent a unique threat, even while they make up a tiny section of society, his singling out of gays in order to uphold his views of natural law in the civil law will look and smell like animus, not reason.

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Tags: Catholic Church, gay marriage, homophobia, homosexuality, inerrant Bible

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