Since the Hon. Vaughn Walker ruled that California's Prop. 8 was unconstitutional, the right-wing blogosphere has metastasized, convulsing with heated frothings about God's Plan for the One-Man, One-Woman Marriage. These are tired old platitudes but they deserve another serious kick in the head.
Let's proceed as if facts mattered. That will require that those whose perspectives have been decidedly shaped by professional ranters on Fox News can check out whenever they like. (I've been impressed, the last few times I've been subjected to Fox in public spaces, how readily and candidly Fox commentators have distanced themselves, categorically, from "the media." That seems appropriate: Fox and actual journalism have precious little to do with each other.)
Let's consider what I submit as readily verifiable observations:
First, it isn't gay couples who turn heterosexual husbands' heads on the street/in the office/on the beach. For example, as I took the aisle seat on a recent airline flight, the guy at the window sneered, "all we need now is a cute blonde gal between us, right?" Then his cell phone rang and he assured his wife, in a much more circumspect voice, that he'd be home soon and asked her to tuck in the kids. Picking on gays is a huge deflection of attention. Statistically, the greatest threat to heterosexual marriage is heterosexuality.
As a priest, I can't perform the Episcopal marriage ceremony any more without observing, out loud, that the liturgy begins with a bit of a cockup (to borrow the British idiom). We're told God "ordained" heterosexual marriage; also, that Jesus--as flamingly and, for most moderns, incomprehensibly celibate as they come) "blessed" marriage by actually attending a wedding in Cana (John 2). Well, he showed up, but made no comment to the bride or groom or to anyone else about their marriage. By that criterion--showing up--I suppose one could argue that he "blessed" leprosy and demon possession as lifestyles.
Look: even a cursory reading of Genesis 1--3 (something I recommend to any Fundamentalist who can lay hands on a Bible) shows, first, that God didn't "ordain marriage." At least in my Prayerbook (and in the laws of every civilized state in the world), two people have to "take" each other in marriage, with free and explicit consent. In my church, the priest who isn't careful to ensure, verify, and explicitly confirm to the congregation that these two are giving willing consent is in very deep doo-doo morally and canonically. God, on the other hand--not being bound by canon law, of course--never asks Eve's consent before whiffing her together out of the rib of Adam (Gen. 2:18ff); and Adam himself is snoring too loudly to have heard the pertinent question even if it were asked, which it wasn't. So in what sense is this a "marriage"?
As far as God's sacred ordinance goes, what the biblical author draws from the episode ("therefore," 2:24--the only "moral" drawn from the story) is that "a man" leaves his parents' home to live with "his wife." (No room here, apparently, for unmarried men in the created order, but of course--for those who care at all about the actual meaning of words--the Hebrew doesn't say "his wife," it says "with his woman," be'ishshto.) If that's an explicit statement of God's will for all time, then I conclude that John-Boy Walton grew up in a house of sin: after all, his father did NOT leave his parents behind but lived right there under the same roof with Grandpa and Grandma. (Damn the creeping secularism of the late 1970s!)
But let's move on. It's clear, furthermore, that what we know as heterosexual desire comes subsequent to God's command to the human race to reproduce. That command comes in Gen. 1:27-28--before the narration of the creation of Eve. But God's declaration to the woman that "thy desire [shall be] to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee"--a perfect description of what some Christians consider the ideal marriage--comes in Gen. 3:16, after what Christians like to call "the Fall." For those Christians who take the whole idea of "curse" and "punishment" in Genesis 3 with theological seriousness, it sure looks like God has punished the new couple by giving the woman a libido.
Put that in your literalist pipe and smoke it. That sure isn't the way those saccharine popular Christian books on "God's gift of sexuality" would have it, but it's the Bible. The earliest Christian interpreters--meaning, anyone who commented on the passage for the first three hundred years--all took seriously the apparent sense that God meant the commands to marriage and reproduction to be separate from sexual desire. That makes no sense to us, but it was common sense to them--as carefully documented by Elaine Pagels in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. (Consider reading the book before trashing the argument.)
It's probably necessary to insert a qualification here. I'm actually very pleased with heterosexual marriage, at least with mine. I do consider sexuality a gift from God, though I'm not sure how anyone would go about prooftexting that case biblically (except, of course, for quoting Ruth's words to Naomi, or David's to Jonathan. Oops).
We could go on: nowhere in Genesis do we see happy consensual marriages like pastoral counseling is designed to promote. We see people tricking other people into (often polygamist) marriage and using slaves sexually without scruple. If God's eternal plan for marriage was clear in Genesis 2, the holy patriarchs seem not to have got the memo.
Jesus, for his part, preaches a stricter code of marital fidelity (no divorce, period, at least in Mark) than most mega-churches today can stomach. That helps to explain how they get to be mega-churches. But let's be fair: any pastorally sensitive church has to be more responsive to divorced people than Jesus managed to be in his very brief and very un-pastoral career. Not that he was ever approached by a divorcee with the question. Neither was he asked about homosexuality, ever, nor did he ever offer an opinion on it.
Paul, of course, had clear opinions: better to be celibate. He had nothing good to say about marital sex: just a grudging recommendation of it as a prophylactic against "immoral acts" (read 1 Corinthians 7). He must have been a source of genuine agony for married coworkers like Prisca and Aquila, declaring that married people just can't be as devoted to "the Lord" as he was (and, I suspect, burning the midnight oil to dash off screeds like 1 Corinthians while they tried to cuddle on the other side of the curtain).
There are important debates about the passages where previous generations were accustomed to read Paul blasting away at homosexuals, namely Rom 1:24-27 and 1 Cor. 6:9-10. "Debates" because the Greek words simply don't fit what we call homosexual love. By "debates" I mean whole books, bibliographies of important peered-journal essays, sessions of the Society of Biblical Literature devoted to the questions--not that any of that matters to people who know "what the Bible" says without having to open it. I've been part of those debates, but this isn't the place to rehearse all the arguments.
This is where Americans tend to turn off all their brain cells at once. It's weird: we listen all the time to some men insult each other with "cocksucker" and tell each other, "bite me!" and "eat me!" without thinking, "ah, those men must be gay." We listen to PG-rated late-night comics make jokes about how you should never bend over to pick up the soap in a prison shower--jokes, that is, about homosexual rape--without thinking, "wow, there must be a lot of gay men in prison." We know perfectly well that references to homosexual aggression have nothing to do with homosexual love, in just about every other aspect of culture, until we meet two men at the dinner table who are so full of love for each other that their eyes glow. Then we're suddenly overwhelmed with a biblical assurance that all the hellfire in God's sweet heaven (?!) is reserved especially for them.
I know none of this will convince those people who have their minds made up already: for them the Bible can only say what they know it says. For them, I simply don't understand what sense it makes to pretend that they "listen" to the Bible--they don't: they can simply presume what it tells them. Scholarship, ambiguity, the semantic range of Hebrew and Greek words, the difference between cultures--none of this makes a whit of difference. They live in a warm cocoon of self-assurance, built over the years from twigs and thread.
I mean only to say to them, please realize your self-assurance is not an argument; it's not compelling, it's not persuasive, it's so fragile that it only appears to others as a delicate web of anxious self-delusion--until you try to insist that it's the only, obvious, and self-evident truth revealed from heaven. Then you simply appear bigoted.
But to others--who have escaped the dreary, burdensome weight of such self-intoxicating ignorance--I want to say: there is a world of people waiting to embrace you, to welcome you, to build another civilization with you. We stand even within churches (some more comfortable than others . . .) and we speak of God as the deep love that underlies our life together; we speak, knowing that we are speaking metaphorically and not literally, of God calling us, urgently, to build that civilization rather than descend into hatred, viciousness, and fear. For some of us, that call is the bright fire at the heart of Christianity.