(Ir)religiosity

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John Dominic Crossan on Same-Sex Marriage

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An interesting take:

[L]et us debate about sex and marriage rather than war and violence. Let us concentrate on the bedroom rather than the war room. Let us liberals get trapped — as always — on the right side of the wrong question. I write this in protest against that deviation from what fundamentally concerns the Bible, the biblical God, and Jesus, namely, that escalatory violence that by now threatens our world with destruction.

I think he does have a point.  But — I can see this line of thought leading us to ignore the problem altogether.  And we don’t need that.  We have enough religious people using the bible and religion in general as a weapon to deny persons their civil rights; we need more religious people actively challenging that position.  And yes, maybe even more religious people to say enough with the bible for a while.

To be fair, I don’t think that is what Crossan is suggesting.  He is simply trying to demonstrate how absurd it is that we are even having the argument over same-sex marriage and gay rights at all.  And like I said, that is a valid observation.  But I think we have to be careful that we don’t ignore those that are being marginalized in the meantime by sweeping the problem under the rug.  It should be faced head on.  Those that use religion as a wedge to separate “us” from “them” aren’t afraid to do that.  It’s time that those of us who believe in the “we,” of which all the great religions of the world bear witness, saddle up as well.

What do you think?

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Written by Blake Huggins

December 16th, 2008 at 8:00 am

Posted in Uncategorized

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  • I think Crosson is missing the fact that the gay discussion is the discussion for our time. It is our human rights problem to solve.
  • My question is, if we take JDC's line of thought, How do we promote peace (and not the crappy peace through victory stuff we've been throwing around) when we cannot even give our own citizens equal rights?

    No, we need not stop pushing for equal rights, even though there are other (perhaps larger... that depends on ones point of view) issues out there.
  • yeah, i'm with you. and i would even go so far as to say that denying entire groups of people basic rights is in itself, by definition, an act of violence. that's something that needs to be addressed. we need to broaden our definition of what violence actually means. that requires those of us that describe ourselves as being nonviolent to perhaps examine our actions a bit more critically. we may not serve in the armed forces or send the armed forces into imperialist wars, but i would argue that we are still acting violently every time we fall to speak out against injustice, in this case denying persons their civil rights.

    but i still think that crossan was trying to make the point that it is pretty ridiculous that we're even publicly debating, and putting to vote, things like marriage rights. we're not voting on my heterosexual marriage, why do we insist on voting against others? we should have to have this argument.

    but....we do. so we can't fail to do anything about it.
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