Sunday, December 07, 2008

Newsweek On Gay Marriage   [Mark Hemingway]

Here's the lede from Newsweek's cover story this week on "The Religious Case for Gay Marriage":

Let's try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile? Or to Jacob, who fathered children with four different women (two sisters and their servants)? Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists. The New Testament model of marriage is hardly better. Jesus himself was single and preached an indifference to earthly attachments—especially family. The apostle Paul (also single) regarded marriage as an act of last resort for those unable to contain their animal lust. "It is better to marry than to burn with passion," says the apostle, in one of the most lukewarm endorsements of a treasured institution ever uttered. Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple—who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love—turn to the Bible as a how-to script?

Of course not, yet the religious opponents of gay marriage would have it be so.

So should I be surprised that Lisa Miller, Newsweek's religion reporter natch, can't even get through the first paragraph of her story without evincing an understanding of Christianity and its basic texts that is grossly oversimplified and distorted, filtered through an almost exclusively liberal political lens, not to mention catty and downright insulting?

I love that "let's try for a minute to take religious conservatives at their word..." intro, right before she plows ahead, proving she has no clue what they do in fact believe. Now I could pick apart every sentence above and expose it as a sloppy bit of prestidigitation designed to unfairly caricature "religious conservatives," whoever they are. But what really galled me was that Miller actually writes "Jesus himself was single and preached an indifference to earthly attachments—especially family." Let's just quote Matthew 19:4-6 for her benefit: 'And He answered and said to them, "Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate."'

Yup, sounds like Jesus was really indifferent on marriage and family question — but hey, thanks for trying to take his followers "at their word." Marriage is one of the central metaphors of the New Testament, for crying out loud. It's generally a Christian precept to put the best construction on what a speaker is saying. However, the best I can do here is vacillate between whether or not it's possible for a religion reporter to be this ignorant or wonder to what extent Miller's personal politics have made her so willfully uncharitable in describing what a large majority of American Christians believe regarding marriage.

12/07 11:36 PMShare