Gay Marriage Arguments

Ask them to explain why polygamy is bad.

Ask them if their marriage was so bad that if 2 gay person got married, him and his wife would have enough reason to end a marriage.

Tell them they should really read their bibles, the city of sodom was destroy for it's many wicked deeds (without any major specification of gays). The only proof of homosexuality was also a problem was that the men in sodom turned away two virgins. Ask them if Jesus who turned away Mary (not his mother) was gay, especially since traveled the lands with 12 other guys and bathe each other make it a little suspicious. (God forgive me, just trying to make a point, not saying anything bad about Jesus)

 

I don't know...but the letter with the various Leviticus "rules" that bible-thumpin' right-wingers love so much is HILARIOUS!!! My mom gave it to me last year--I love the question about smiting their neighbor!!

 

The only reason my two sisters and my Dad couldn't uphold the scantity of marriage in their first ones was because of those lousy gays and their demand for equal rights.

We should all feel sorry for Elizabeth Taylor, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and the millions of other mulitple divorcees whose marriages would have worked had it not been for homosexuals.

 

In regards to polygamy, gays are seeking the same legal rights that a heterosexual has in this country; the right to marry the one person that they love.

 

Who's your audience? Are you trying to convince Christians? If so, the Leviticus stuff will fall short. Christians don't look at Leviticus as a guide for life...it's part of the story..part of the setup to understanding how woefully short we fall...and how Christ bridges that gap. It's unpersuasive to me, personally. I don't know of many Christians who point to Leviticus for their spiritual guidance in following Christ.

What I do find persuasive is my own speculation about what Christ would say. Again...I think the Bible is pretty clear, even after Christ in the New Testament...about homosexuality being something that God isn't cool with. But THERE ARE LOTS OF THINGS GOD ISN'T COOL WITH THAT WE ALL DO EVERYDAY! No one of us is better than another, that way.

Having said all that, and I know I've said this before...but I think Christ, if confronted by church leaders on this would say, "yeah...we have, what, a 50% divorce rate in this country...and in my church...yeah...you guys tell them all what marriage is about." I can't cite you to scripture on that. I just think of other instances where Christ confronted those who were persecuting sinners...and he met those persecuted people with great compassion, and asked the persecutors to consider their own wayward ways. Important to note that he finished those encounters by telling the persecuted to go and "sin no more." But nevertheless..met people with love and compassion. I wish more in the church would actually follow the example of the one upon whom the church is based.

 

the whole Sodom & Gom. story is so stupid.

2 angels come down to see what's with all the sinning

Lot protects them from the horny townspeople
he offers to let them rape his 2 "virgin" daughters (who happened to have husbands) instead of raping the angels (if the whole town was gay why would he offer his daughters to them?)

the angels are so touched by that (sickening) display they consider Lot to be a righteous man and they offer to save his life and that of his family while they blow up the whole town

while leaving Sodom, Lot's wife looks back at the destruction of her home and is turned into salt by god?

then his 2 daughters and Lot live in a cave. They get him drunk (twice!) and have sex with him and they get pregnant!
and this is supposed to be a bible hero?

if god really destroyed these cities because of rampant homosexuality then why is San Fransisco, Provincetown, Fire Island, etc still standing? Toronto and Vancouver have had gay marriage for over a year now and they haven't been reduced to ashes from up above.

 

Unless he's had a change of heart, yes he does oppose it.

 

i oppose it, personally. i don't agree with it.

but i'm not supporting the amendment to ban it. personally, i don't care. and ultimately, i'm not sure there is a way to deny it under the constitution. and i disagree with the movement to try to stop it. i don't view it as a threat to my marriage!!!

so i'm not for it...but i'm not against it. so i would really confuse the hell out of president bush! you won't me out rallying for gay marriage...but you won't find me out rallying for a constitutional amendment to fight it, either.

 

I kind of agree with Max on this one.

I don't agree with what I consider the sin of homesexuality, BUT, we are all sinners...so why should I single out one group of sinners over another.

The thing that kind of bugs me is the feeling in this country that EVERYBODY has a right to do EVERYTHING.

I don't think that gay couples should have the right to marraige, per se.

I am a traditionalist who believes that "marriage" as an institution is reserved for a union between a man and a woman.

BUT

If you want to allow some kind of secular, law driven "coupling" that allows gay couples the same rights as married people...then whatever. I can't think of the term for it right now. I wouldn't care. I'm not marching for it, but I'm not marching against it either.

 

What the right wing doesn't want anyone to know...

John Kerry agrees with you. He supports civil unions but not gay marriage. Does not favor a constitutional amendment, does favor state's right to ban gay marriage, but not to ban civil unions.

 

Outlaw, all the Old Testament 'heroes' are like that; they make a point of showing the wicked side of all of them.

I think that it is essentially true. If gay marriage becomes legal, there isn't much standing in the way of polygamy. Christians will be upset with that as well, but will have less Biblical support for opposing it. The closest the Bible comes to rebuking polygamy is saying that deacons and elders should not engage in it. Plus, there is a suggestion in the nature of the Adam and Eve story that marriage is singular, but nothing explicit. The prosecutors in Utah who spend so much time cracking down will also be upset. But, I don't see it as much of a big deal if we're considering all the other allowances already allowed or proposed.

I don't understand that. I do feel like it weakens the covenant that I had entered in getting married, but it isn't 'over'. Again, if we're talking about good Christian folk worried about the meaning of their own marriages, I think this is overwrought. If you're involved in a Christian community, your marriage has a meaning and significance with the church community that is separate from its meaning to the country at large and its government. A church-recognized marriage can be a different thing with a higher significance to congregants. Traditional marriage is no less special within the church because of what the government does.

Well, that's not true. There is the Sodom story, where they were punished for sexual immorality, which definitely included homosexual sex, the way the story goes (btw, I don't think I would say the people in the town were 'homosexuals' just because they wanted to rape other men. I'd leave it at homosexual acts). I think it is a difference worth mentioning that they didn't just want homosexual sex; they were proposing rape, and on men who were foreign guests. Those elements really up the ante. Assuming all this stuff was true, if you just changed the sex of the victims, would God not think they should be destroyed? Doubtful.

Besides that is the Law (Lev 18) which has a chapter on contraband sexual activity which includes male homosexual acts, incest, incest-like sex (like having sex with a woman and her daughter), bestiality, adultery and human sacrifice (not sure why that's there). Here, homosexual sex is in a laundry list of things and I don't think it has any special status of being 'worse.'

On to Jesus. In Mat 15, Jesus describes how sin comes the heart to make a man 'unclean' and he lists a few sins including 'sexual immorality.' He doesn't name homosexuality, but I'd point out adultery is also in the list, so he'd have to mean some other sort of immorality -- could of course been thinking of incest or bestiality or something like that.

And finally on to Paul and Luke (as a possible author of Acts). I don't see how you can make a hierarchy as if what they say is somehow less true than if Jesus said it. We're trusting these guys in their quotes of Jesus. You have to extend them some credit. If you trust only Jesus, all you have is a second-hand account of what he had to say. Main point here is in arguiing with congregants of most churches that would reference the Bible as evidence: they will put equal weight in the theology of Paul as they do in quotes of Jesus. Most of these parts again talk about 'sexual immorality' without getting graphic, though one does make reference to Sodom. 1 Corinthians 6 (by Paul) does refer to 'homosexual offenders' specifically, along with many other sinners, who won't inherit the Kingdom of God (I don't think he means here that they won't unequivocally, but rather urging repentance and righteousness going forward -- but you don't get all that from taking a 3-verse snippet). Though one can still be saved, Paul does put the New Testament brand on prohobition of homosexuality (and many other practices). Did I miss any?

You're right that the Bible has some harsh things to say about divorce. The Law does allow for divorce. But, in Malachi, God says, "I hate divorce." Jesus is very harsh on divorce. He allows it only for adultery, calling those who divorce and remarry adulterers. He says that the Law allowed divorce because their hearts were hard but it should not be that way. He says marriage unites the two people. Paul treats the question of divorce between Christians and heathens. He says the Christian cannot divorce except for infidelity or if abandoned by the nonChristian partner. This is where the abandonment divorce stuff comes from. Biblically, I think it does not apply to two Christians at all, but it will often be applied with silly little spins of 'emotional abandonment' and the like.

I think this is a great argument really. Homosexual marriage can't do 1% of the damage that no-fault divorce has done. Comparatively, homsexuality is a nonissue. To their credit, however, conservative churches will handle their own fault-based divorces and don't readily recognize the spiritual validity of a legal divorce. If you divorce in my church without grounds of infidelity, they likely will not sanction or perform another marriage for you. They'll work to reunite you with your spouse.

There is instruction in the New Testament to not tolerate immorality in the church's midsts. So, there is a way in which there is Biblical grounds for reproaching others for, say, their homosexual behavior. But, that would be within the church. There's no reason to have any expectation of Christian living from people who are not Christians. There is plenty of tacit recognition of that in the Bible. In Paul's section on divorce, there is an implied understanding that the nonchristian member can divorce for whatever reason, for example. Another: be in the world but no of the world. So, I think a Christian can draw a big dividing line between the Church and the World and know that they can and must hold their brothers and sisters in Christ to a different standard than they would some random schmuck. So, you can tolerate gay marriage legally but not tolerate it in your congregation.

Other point here is that Christians go in knowing they will be wrong about lots of stuff and will sin in many different ways, inevitably. So, if it were wrong to accept gay marriage (or oppose it), that'll only make them mistaken, not condemned.

I'd point out that -- again if you're talking to Christians who hold the Bible as inerrant truth -- they likely won't accept an axiom that marriage is between two people. It's a covenant between two people and God. If you cut God from the loop, it isn't really marriage, they'd argue.

If I wanted to make this argument, I would do it like this: there are 2 forms of marriage, one in Christ and one in the courthouse. The proposal we're talking about is a homosexual marriage in the courthouse. This isn't a covenant, but merely a contract, a legal status. Here's the problem with it though: do this suggest then that all marriages -- my marriage -- is not a covenant with God but merely some vehicle by which we handle property and responsibility? This is why so many are offended, imo. Not being Christian myself, I'd say yes. Even if I were a Christian, I'd still say yes though; your marriage in the Church is a covenant with God, not the paper you sign with the Justice of the Peace. So, I'd let the heathen and idolators have their unrighteous marriages and recognize my own as special. But, not many go that way.

Even so, I'm not much enthused for gay marriage, for reasons that have nothing to do with the church. It is simply that marriage exists for procreation and removing that element makes marriage silly. The infertility objection -- what if a couple can't have kids; is their marriage pointless? -- doesn't hold water. It is a general statement. Horses have four legs, but if you chop a leg of a horse, he doesn't cease to be a horse. Some won't want to be convinced of this, and that's fine. There's other reasons for wanting marriage -- all the legal stuff. I understand that. Set up something; I'd rather it wasn't called marriage which seems like a misnomer. If they call it marriage anyway, it won't bother me too much. So, do it, don't do it, gay marriage, civil union, whatever. It's just legal stuff anyway. The government stopped being the arbiter of the worth of my marriage when they allowed no-fault divorce. When I got married, the legal registry was an afterthought. I was going to do it a month ahead of time for convenience if it weren't for the objections of my mother.

 

I thought this was gonna be a thread about some actual transcripts of arguements that have happened between gay couples.

 

yeah. what he said. exactly.

 

I wish more people would think about the issues as you have done. Well said; while I don't agree with everything, it's good to see reasons behind the thought process instead of parroting others.