Added Sunday 26th August 2012
Setting aside for the moment my outright opposition to conflating religion and morals, it might be helpful to look at the 'gay marriage' issue from the perspective of marriage.
You only have to look at the sum total of Western Christian literature from Saint Paul to Pope Paul VI to realise that Christianity is, in spite of all its Incarnational rhetoric, fundamentally against marriage, so its current outrage is based on a false claim. Look at how few wedding hymns there are in your hymn book; marvel that Saint Bernard of Clairvaux thought that the Song of Songs had nothing to do with love or sex; and mark the superiority of celibacy over marriage. One clue is the de-sexualisation by Catholics of Mary, the Mother of God, who conceived and bore Jesus' siblings in the usual way.
The only time that the Christian Church showed any real interest in marriage before the 18th Century was to settle monarchical and aristocratic claims. So in historical terms the idea of universally practised, sacramental marriage is novel and many Evangelicals opposed to 'gay marriage' don't even think that heterosexual marriage is a sacrament at all.
So what is it? A mutually agreed contract publicly witnessed and blessed by a clergyman. There's no Scriptural ground for monogamic conformity nor for marital procreation. Marriage is simply the Church's way of controlling the sex drive as much as it can, which is symptomatic of its obsession with exercising (primarily male) power over the lives of the (primarily female) 'faithful'.
Return to All News