Scriptural and Religious Cases for Gay Marriage

Let me begin "sectarianly," to show how high the scriptural bars can be. We seventy million Lutherans around the world acknowledge the Holy Scriptures as the "only source and norm" of Christian teaching, life, and service. We also acknowledge vast cultural adaptations depending upon the era or the culture in which Christians teach, live, and serve. Most of the things Chrisians do today, in politics, economics, the arts, family life, and culture, they do without depending on a scriptural case. They do take seriously teachings and practices which clearly violate scriptural sources and norms. That is why so many of them debate same-sex marriage, even though the Bible does not anticipate most features of today's debates.

Admittedly, a few lines in otherwise-never-paid-attention-to Levitical commands and fewer lines (none from Jesus) in Paul's writings in the New Testament do get cited. Not made clear is why those lines are decisive and so many others are not. For example, Jesus and Paul do unite in opposing remarriage of persons divorced (on grounds other than adultery) and in most congregations such persons are welcomed, honored, and allowed to be heard if they oppose same-sex marriage.

You can with some contrivance make a scriptural case against same-sex marriage, but not FOR most things we practice and cherish in other marriages, as Lisa Miller so well pointed out. As for the "for" case, other factors , including common-sensical and scriptural issues enter at least obliquely.

The first is empirical, in the witness of those extremely faithful and exemplary Christian same-sex couples who foster and otherwise give sustained and covenantal care to children in ways that many heterosexual couples do. The man who, when asked whether he believed in infant baptism answered, "believe in infant baptism; hell, I've seen it" can find counterparts among those who have seen genuine and generous Christian love and care being lived and practiced with legal support or simply by making enduring covenants with each other, and in prayer. Throw them out? Forbid new couples to enjoy the sacraments and respond to the word because they are in same-sex unions?

I travel to many campuses, secular, Christian and more, and carry back this report: if you want to lock in hard and fast anti-same-sex union policies, work hard and fast, legalistically and lovelessly, to nail down opposition on this front, because among young people you have lost the long-term issue already. Ask the chaplains, campus pastors, programmers, Christian faculty members, to list the top twenty issues their student groups would choose to discuss. Same-sex marriage, they will say, is, to "the kids" an old-peoples' issue, not theirs.

The Bible-quoters against gay marriage often rely on non-scriptural support to make their case. You will hear (as Ms. Miller heard) of the "nature and natural law" case, which I call the "plumbing issue." That is, "his" Major Genital fits into hers, like pipes fitting together.. I think evangelicals lost that case when their sex manuals began to counsel, within marriage, the free option of oral sex, which includes all kinds of plumbing arrangements among heterosexual couples.

Amazingly, on matters of betrothal and marriage, monogamy and polygamy, and the customs that go with them, the scriptures as a whole are remarkably relativistic and situational. The case for covenantal love and sustained child care in the Bible is, however, so clear and strong that there are not many reasons for contending that texts about such love and care do not apply among same-sex couples and their children..

By Martin Marty  |  December 15, 2008; 1:03 AM ET
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