Often, in the midst of the diatribes by opponents of the Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality, it is difficult to remember that the (Protestant) Bible has 31,173 verses and 807,361 words.

After all, opponents to equal marriage rights are obsessed with about six verses and a couple of hundred words whose interpretations are arguable at best.

It perpetuates an unfortunate tendency – especially in the South – by some ministers and now a few opportunistic elected officials to cherry pick verses so they can use the Bible as a club to beat up others and a crutch to rationalize their own prejudices.

It also points up the zeal in which some ministers can latch onto a few verses that they apply to gay couples while ignoring hundreds of verses that apply to themselves and heterosexuals. After all, when’s the last time you heard a sermon against divorce and usury and stoning to death of insolent teenage boys and adulterers or about death sentences for the disabled and the need for women to cover their heads?

Memories from a Certain Age

For some of us of a certain age, all of this rekindles vivid memories of ministers in many of the same pulpits in the same churches using Bible verses to assure congregations that inter-racial marriage was bad, and before that, that the Bible clearly taught the virtues of segregation.

That’s why it’s so hard for some of us to shake the opinion that many of the opponents are using Bible verses to justify opinions that they already had.  For us, it’s déjà vu all over again, not to mention hypocritical, because it’s all about using a few verses out of their cultural and historical context in order to apply absolute standards of morality to other people while ignoring hundreds of other verses.

That said, for many of us, the high-profile, overheated hate speech by some ministers and elected officials is made even more aggravating because of the tendency of opponents to say they are speaking for all Christians and of the news media to use the term, Christian, as if they are referring to a monolithic group.  Many of us Christians not only disagree with the narrow reading of Scripture by the far right, but we are members of denominations that reject it as well while welcoming the marriages of gay and lesbian couples because there is no demonstrable harm from them.

Most ironic of all of course is that gays and lesbians do not form some anti-religious sub-culture, but rather, most of them are Christians themselves.

Mantras Call For Context

We recognize that some people have sincere objections to same sex marriage and cite their faith as the reasons why, but we’d respect them more if they treated all Biblical directives equally and applied them all to their lives.  After all, if homosexuality is such an issue of contention, why is it that Jesus never speaks about it (even when he spoke about Sodom)?

Even the mantra that the Bible teaches that “marriage is about one man and one woman” is not true.  It was said that Solomon had 700 wives (not counting his concubines and sex slaves) who led him astray, and there are also verses advising a husband taking a second wife to treat her as well as his first.  In addition, slavery is not abhorred and slaves were told to submit to their masters, and this clearly included submitting sexually.  Even Abraham had a sex slave which he impregnated (she was previously his wife’s slave), and in addition, the Bible says that if at brother dies, you should marry your sister-in-law even if you’re already married.

Apparently, it is acceptable to ignore all of these culturally insensitive verses (even by people who aver to believe the Bible literally), but not two verses in Leviticus that are part of the “holiness code” and are regularly trotted out by the anti-marriage equality crowd.   Some translations of the Bible even use the word, homosexuality, although the word was not coined until the 1800s.

But more to the point, every Bible verse requires context, and the “holiness code” in Leviticus was set out by the Israelites to demonstrate how they were different from their Egyptian and Roman neighbors.  That’s why it makes just as much sense that the verses about men sleeping with men were about Roman pederasty, pagan fertility rituals, cultic male slave prostitution, and non-consensual sex.

Un-Christian Behavior

There are people who have an instinctive negative emotional reaction to homosexual sex, and that of course is their right in this country; however, while the Bible is understood through the lens of our own experiences and prejudices, that does not mean that the interpretations are historically or contextually correct.

This knowledge gap was indicated in the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, where people were asked 32 questions.  Scoring highest were atheists and agnostics who averaged 20.9 correct answers.  Jews averaged 20.5 and Mormons 20.3.  Protestants meanwhile averaged only 16.  To that point, scholars of all stripes agree that the story of Sodom had nothing to do with homosexuality, but the myth soldiers on in common thought like the birth of Jesus in a stable or the visitation there by the Magi.

Unfortunately, the zealots in the Tennessee Legislature don’t see it for what it is – using their most sacred Christian book to justify their very un-Christian-like behavior.  These far right legislators believe that a public official should be able to refuse their public duties to same sex couples and that a business like a bakery “shouldn’t be forced to participate in a ceremony they oppose to.”

Just as taxpayers pay elected officials to do their jobs, we pay businesses for products, and neither elected officials nor businesses have a Constitutional right to discriminate against others in the public sphere.  More to the point, it’s silly to conflate the selling of a cake as “participating” in a wedding.

Taken to its logical conclusion, a baker could rely on the Bible to refuse to bake a cake for a wife-to-be that can’t prove she is a virgin, pharmacists who don’t believe in abortion can refuse to fill prescriptions for the morning-after drug, a doctor can refuse to give birth control pills to a single woman, or photographers can refuse to document the wedding of a previously divorced couple.

The Real Biblical Mandate

History has a way of overtaking religious bigotry, from the Inquisition to the Crusades to slavery to the Civil Rights Movement, from bloody conversions to Christianity and Bible verses used as justifications to take people into slavery, and from anti-Semitism to Copernicus.  In other words, the Bible accepts things that we condemn today and we accept behaviors that it condemns.

But one thing is certain and it is said loud and clear in Scripture.  It is the mandate for us to help the poor.  It is also remarkable how often that directive is ignored by the very same people who are so strident about monitoring the sexual relationships of other people.

As for us, if we’re only going to keep a few verses in mind, here are two:

* He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.

* How long, ye simple ones, will ye love to be simple, and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge?