{"id":521,"date":"2008-11-23T15:49:14","date_gmt":"2008-11-23T15:49:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/stevenwaldman\/2008\/11\/gay-marriage-a-debate-within-c.html"},"modified":"2008-11-23T15:49:14","modified_gmt":"2008-11-23T15:49:14","slug":"gay-marriage-a-debate-within-c","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2008\/11\/gay-marriage-a-debate-within-c.html","title":{"rendered":"Gay Marriage — A Debate WITHIN Christianity"},"content":{"rendered":"

A reader at Andrew Sullivan’s blog makes this point:<\/a><\/p>\n

I am another gay man who has no problem with a church refusing to conduct a same-gender marriage rite. What I don’t understand is why the conservatives\/fundamentalists can’t get it through their collective skull that their insistence upon enforcing in civil law their particular interpretation of theology is also an excercise in religious discrimination.<\/p>\n


\nThe Unitarians have been marrying same-sex couples for some thirty years, and likewise some congregations of the United Church of Christ, the Metropolitan Community Church, and I’m sure a number of other religious groups I don’t even know. Why do the fundamentalists get to discriminate with the force of civil law against the U\/U, the UCC, and the rest? When did they get the right to have their religious interpretation enshrined in civil law at the unavoidably explicit expense of the others ‘ interpretation? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Speaking of which, we have a fascinating conversation between two devout Christians who disagree on gay marriage: Tony Jones and Rod Dreher.
\nWrites Tony:<\/a><\/p>\n

I now believe that GLBTQ can live lives in accord with biblical Christianity (at least as much as any of us can!) and that their monogamy can and should be sanctioned and blessed by church and state.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An excerpt from Rod’s reply:<\/a>
\nI believe in traditional Christianity. I believe in traditional wisdom. I believe that we, in our modern times, have dangerously, dangerously separated ourselves from the source of truth and wisdom, and are in mortal danger as a civilization. I really do believe that. This is a philosphical and metaphysical issue for me more than anything else. Emotionally, I’d just as soon say, “Let everybody marry, it’s nothing to me.” I want my gay friends to be happy.
\nBut truth is not determined by emotion, as I see it, and certainly I find it epistemologically arrogant to assume that an early 21st-century white American bourgeois male can stand in judgment of Scripture and the Church, and the long, long experience of humankind on marriage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A reader at Andrew Sullivan’s blog makes this point: I am another gay man who has no problem with a church refusing to conduct a same-gender marriage rite. 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