I saw this on Facebook and thought I’d share some quick responses to it. It is a train wreck of bad reasoning made worse because they are trying to use religious arguments.
This fails on so many levels. The first about Jesus ignores that He is God and is in agreement with 100% of scripture. As noted in What Jesus didn’t say – Arguing from silence is a logical fallacy, Jesus is God and part of the Trinity that inspired all scripture, He supported the Old Testament law to the last letter, the “red letters” weren’t silent on these topics in the sense that they reiterated what marriage and murder were, He emphasized many other important issues that these liberal theologians completely ignore (Hell, his divinity, his exclusivity, etc.), He was equally “silent” on issues that these folks treat as having the utmost importance (capital punishment, war, welfare, universal health care, etc.), He didn’t specifically mention child abuse and other obvious sins though that wouldn’t justify them, and abortion and homosexual behavior simply weren’t hot topics for 1st century Jews. And Jesus never said anything about the “sin” of criticizing homosexual behavior, so it must be OK!
The NT part is wrong as well. Romans 1 could not be more clear: It references lesbian and gay relationships that were not associated with prostitution or pederasty. Being “committed” to a sinful relationship doesn’t sanitize it.
You don’t even need the Bible to refute this case. For the government to get involved in relationships there has to be an important reason. They have been involved in real marriages because by nature and design children are created by those units and they are the only relationships that can provide a mother and a father to children. Countless studies show this as the ideal, so the government has good reasons to encourage their stability.
Please note that I didn’t say that they must produce children, only that children are always produced by one man and one woman. And again, only those relationships can provide a mother and a father.
The Bible does show that God’s ideal for marriage is one man and one woman, and Jesus reiterated that.
The world is not over-populated, and even if it was that has nothing to do with the morality of homosexual behavior.
The shrimp / shellfish argument is full of holes but is appealing to many because so few bother to study the passages. I address five serious problems with it in flaws of the shellfish argument.
And gay sex is “icky.” We should not be afraid to use that argument. The rate HIV and Syphilis is over 40 times higher for gay men. If it wasn’t politically incorrect to criticize the behavior you’d hear those stats all the time. And the rectum is still not a sex organ. There is a reason people spend so much on toilet paper. Most people like to avoid getting feces on themselves.
Don’t miss the section where they tell you that if you disagree with them that you are judgmental, and judging is bad! Except when they do it! Hypocrites.
Also see:
- Responding to same-sex marriage arguments
- Problems with pro-gay theology
- Responding to Pro-Gay Theology
Eternity Matters 
For the government to get involved in relationships there has to be an important reason. They have been involved in real marriages because by nature and design children are created by those units and they are the only relationships that can provide a mother and a father to children. Countless studies show this as the ideal, so the government has good reasons to encourage their stability.
I agree, but I’m having trouble articulating this. I run across thread after thread on the Internet (facebook, people’s blogs) about gay marriage, and inevitably someone says, “The government shouldn’t be in the marriage business at all.” As if this were a neat little way to wrap up the entire controversy in a bow and dispose of it…
I couldn’t possibly dispute that any more strongly. My contention is that ceasing civil recognition of marriage altogether would throw the entire discipline of family law into a tailspin. Government has a huge investment in defining who is married and who is not – everything from child custody to inheritance issues hinges on this. Besides that, I don’t see why we have to withdraw civil marriage recognition just because a bunch of activists have decided to make a mess out of the institution by demanding sanction of homosexual relationships. Having our states recognize marriages has worked fine until now.
I also like pointing out to these people that that, in fact, IS the real issue – there’s nothing to stop homosexual couples from “loving” one another or living together or being “married” in some religious sense (if they can find a church who will perform a ceremony). The issue is precisely this – whether or not their state of residence is going to sanction it.
It’s kind of a moot point, really. The last election saw several more states legalize gay marriage, finally managing to do so at the ballot box. If anything we’re moving in the OPPOSITE direction from dispensing with all civil recognition of marriage.
As a side point, where do these people get off insisting that marriage is a civil right? It’s not recognized as such by any authority that I’m familiar with.
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Have I ever mentioned how I noticed all their arguments are lies or based on lies? They should stick with the only thing they have that is the truth: they simply wanna.
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Right. Leftists object to our definition of marriage for the same reasons they want a free hand to abort unwanted children – because they feel like it, and because they think their personal interests and convenience trump society’s or anyone else who might have a stake in the outcome.
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In addition to what you’ve said, I would take issue with the meme on the point about “how the Bible defines marriage”…
1) It says that the Bible defines marriage as one man and many women. Wrong. First, the institution of marriage is given as one man and one woman for life, and that lasted for a long time. Secondly, when one man married more than one woman, marriage was still one man and one woman — the women weren’t considered married to each other; it’s just that the man was married to many women individually at the same time. And God *allowed* that, but did not encourage it; and it was only allowed if the man was wealthy enough to keep all of his wives well taken care of.
2) It also brings up about “a rapist and his victim”. I read a fabulous article several weeks ago that blasted that idea out of the water. Basically, the verb used in that passage is different from the verb used in the previous section which certainly talked about rape, and it could be translated in many different ways, including the idea of *seduction*, not forcible sex. IOW, the Bible was saying that if a young woman who was not betrothed was seduced by a man so that she voluntarily slept with him, and then he reneged on his implied or outright promise to marry her, she could force him to marry her and he wasn’t allowed to divorce her. The article also brought up that at the time the KJV was translated, the usage of the word “rape” wasn’t restricted to the sense we almost always use today, i.e., forcible sex, but was a much broader word that encompassed a lot of things including a milder “spoiling” [as in, “raping the land”, which we still use today, though not commonly]; so, a virgin who was seduced by a blackguard who then refused to marry her would have been considered “raped” in this broader sense, since her virginity was “spoiled” or taken before marriage.
3) Yes, the Israelite soldiers were allowed to leave alive virgin females and to marry them; but would these scoffers find it preferable for the women to have been killed outright, or to have been left to wander the streets begging, or to have been sold as slaves, or used as concubines, or raped and sent out of the land? You could say that at least God required them to marry the young ladies, and to treat them as wives and not cattle.
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Great points, thanks!
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Er, may I also point put that a rape victim wouldn’t write a best seller, go on Oprah, and then get her masters degree, where she would meet her fabulous husband who makes the pain go away? She starved or prostituted herself. Or both.
Read or watch Les Miserables. Fantine’s plight, minus the time in the factory, was the sorry existence of rape victims in that time. (Fantine had consenual sex, but that didn’t really matter – unmarried non virgins had a rough life.)
Judged by the opportunities that modern rape victims have, that passag was irrational and cruel. By the standards of the time, it was a huge step forward for women and put responsibility on men: if you lie with a woman, you will not let her starve while you flourish.
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Secondly, when one man married more than one woman, marriage was still one man and one woman — the women weren’t considered married to each other; it’s just that the man was married to many women individually at the same time.
Seems to me like it didn’t work out all that well when it was permitted, frankly. The women usually had problems with one another (see the life of Jacob for an example). I note with great interest that God created ONE wife for Adam, not two or three or seven.
Besides that, the New Testament clearly establishes that polygamy isn’t tolerated any longer.
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Weak arguments for weak minds.
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I’m a Christian. I’m not really sure why GL want to get “married” but I am ok with it because their view on marriage and the Christian perspective of what marriage is different completely. I think we want to defend marriage and we should. I’m not condoning gay marriage but I’m saying their views on marriage, is not what we believe it is to be. I also am against gay marriage In The church. Let their marriage be a civil union like other non-believers. We have to come to terms with the fact that this is not our fight but Gods. I’m not happy about the state and place we are in because of this but it seems an inevitability.
It gives me comfort knowing that the GL view and the Christian view on marriage is completely different. I posted on this subject a few years ago as well.
I also saw holes throughout the Image above. Very flawed.
Blessings.
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I’m fascinated by the chart’s view that “There, I answered your objection with an unsupported, unsupportable, irrational response and you should settle for that … next!” is a good approach. Believing the Bible, the history of the Church, and the history of humans is bad. Discarding history and Scripture in favor of “advancing culture” makes sense. That’s the argument. I particularly love the “clearly isn’t an issue anymore” argument. “In case you haven’t heard, God changed His mind.”
I’m also amused that I just wrote on this topic just this last week.
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Exactly. Enjoyed your post when it came out. Just went back and saw the comment thread. Dan T. is still at it! Wow. Yes, I pray for false teachers like him, Currie, etc. in a generic sense from time to time, mainly that when they are busy abusing scripture that he’ll open their eyes to the truth (sort of like the surprise the Witch of Endor got when trying to reach Samuel).
But I don’t spend too much time on them. Historically speaking, those kind of false teachers tend to be like Pharaoh (they harden their hearts, they harden their hearts . . . God hardens their hearts).
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I recently decided to “fast” from Facebook. One of the main reasons is that I could no longer stand this kind of crap being pushed on me through my news feed. I know I can block it, but I found myself blocking almost everything especially by certain people who just felt compelled to persuade the rest of us how dumb and narrow minded we are. I don’t agree at all, not even a little bit with gay marriage, but I also don’t argue on facebook about it. Most people don’t want to hear it anyway, just like I don’t want to hear about how stupid I am for thinking otherwise. To me, facebook has become a breeding ground for hateful comments, angry rants, and outright rudeness (on both sides really…not just on the liberal or non-conservative side). I’ve found myself enjoying my time away from facebook. I have picked up drawing, focusing more on what God wants than what so and so says, and just being available to my kids more. I’m not saying everyone must do this, but I found myself getting really angry when I was on facebook and not being loving towards others which sort of defeats my Christian witness. I can tolerate most anyone when I’m not listening to their rantings or seeing what they do in private every single day. Maybe sometimes less really is more and if I want to continue to love people as Christ called me to love, facebook definitely has to go…at least for me. Stuff like what you posted truly gets under my skin (the meme, not your reply to it). Anyway, people will always use lies to state something as truth. It’s the one thing we can count on because no one wants to look at their sins. It’s too hard. Instead, they would rather call evil “good” and good “evil”. It’s sad, but even Christ was born into such a sinful world as the one in which we live. I can’t control what our gov’t wants to say is legal, but I know God’s laws and will hold to them with His guidance and strength.
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Good plan. I’ve fasted from FB and blogging and news in general at times. Very liberating.
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Maybe I should consider doing the same. It’s a big time-waster. Additionally, I belong to several FB groups who make it a point of promoting political conservatism / opposing Obama’s agenda…and I’ve gotten disgusted with the poor quality of the comment threads there. They’re filled with inarticulate, foul-mouthed, ill-informed people…and frankly I’m embarrassed to be associated with them. Some of these people say things that make me think, “This sort of ‘commentary’ must be why the Left thinks we’re all racists and buck-toothed inbred morons over here…”
And then there’s the need go through the comment threads, and wind up having to block six or seven liberal posters so I don’t have to hear their inane blather anymore.
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