[Update 5/18: apparently, Billy Graham didn't write this. Blast! Foiled again by the e-mail forward goblins.]

Yet another silly e-mail. This time, a friend of mine got one entitled ‘Prayer for our Nation.’ It started with a huge black and white picture of a seated Billy Graham, staring stoically off into space. Following that was this prayer:

Billy Graham’s Prayer For Our Nation

‘Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says, ‘Woe to those who call evil good,’ but that is exactly what we have done. We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values. We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery. We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare. We have killed our unborn and called it choice. We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable. We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self esteem. We have abused power and called it politics. We have coveted our neighbor’s possessions and called it ambition. We have polluted the earth with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression. We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment. Search us, Oh God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and Set us free. Amen!’

I don’t even know where to begin, it’s just so wrong. I guess the worst part is that it just forgoes the debate as to whether or not these things are indeed wrong, calls them a loss, and beseeches the sky fairy for forgiveness.

I think the ridiculousness of the self-flagellatory judgment is evident enough, but there is one sentence that was particularly ridic. When Graham said “We have polluted the earth…” I was on the verge of conceding that he had at least one point, but then he went on to totally ruin it by specifying “with profanity and pornography.” Damn him.

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It’s amazing how religion mutates with time. The ’sins’ it obsesses about are totally a product of the political climate of the era. Religious people ally themselves with a certain political group, and all of a sudden, the positions of their political opponents are listed among the religious transgressions, and the behaviors of their own party that are explicitly condemned in their holy-book are just swept under the rug.

Abortion? The bible says nothing about it, but it’s arguably one of the most egregious sins, according to fundies.

Usury? The bible condemns it repeatedly, but it’s a non-issue among religious conservatives, because the business world runs on interest, and Republicans love business.

Destroying the environment? I’m sure there are plenty of verses in the bible that could be used to condemn those who knowingly destroy that which god has given us. But conservatives pussyfoot around this topic, because environmental protection is the Democrats’ bit.

Slavery, subjugating women? The bible condones it throughout, but it’s not in vogue today so religious people just jump on the bandwagon.

Homosexuality? There are a few passages about it sprinkled through the bible, but there are far more about how it’s immoral to be rich. Nonetheless Christians fixate on gay marriage, and virtually ignore the socialistic implications of their holy-book.

Religion can a tool of political movements: it allows the difference between you and me to be more than a matter of opinion, but a matter of supernatural law. It’s a powerful weapon to wield against your ideological adversary, to call him/her damned. It’s even more powerful when you try to take some kind of moral high-ground — like Mr. Graham does above — by asking for forgiveness for your rival’s political positions.

Stewart takes on Huckabee

Huckabee still gripes me a bit, but I dig his borderline anarchism. Plus, this episode is nice, because it has two people really drilling down to the core of their arguments for/against gay marriage. Civilly.

However, someday, I want to see a conservative sit down with a liberal to discuss gay marriage, and say “I won’t use the word ‘definition’ if you don’t use the term ’segregation’,” and see the debate go from there. Both sides get hung up on these token arguments, and they never get anywhere.

Rich Ford makes the following argument:

…[T]raditional marriage isn’t just analogous to sex discrimination—it is sex discrimination: Only men may marry women, and only women may marry men. Same-sex marriage would transform an institution that currently defines two distinctive sex roles—husband and wife—by replacing those different halves with one sex-neutral role—spouse. Sure, we could call two married men “husbands” and two married women “wives,” but the specific role for each sex that now defines marriage would be lost. Widespread opposition to same-sex marriage might reflect a desire to hang on to these distinctive sex roles rather than vicious anti-gay bigotry.

I doubt that people reach this level of complexity and analysis in their primary reaction to gay marriage. Sure, it is a quandry they are presented with, but this is a feeble attempt at a kind of Freudian explanation which assumes too much subconscious sophistication.

But I can only speak from my experience, and as someone who used to oppose same-sex marriage in favor of civil unions, I can say with certainty that my objection arose from a feeling of being challenged. Not a challenge of having to reformulate my own sexuality as a result of the dissolution of clearly-delineated sex-roles, but a challenge to my morality.

People hate being wrong, and if someone is entitled to rights that I have previously been content to deny them, then I have done wrong.

On the whole, though, I do agree with the majority of Rich’s article, in which he says it’s tempting but erroneous to analogize same-sex marriage to racism. I reason that the process by which the majority came to grant civil rights to blacks is fundamentally different from that by which they will come to grant civil rights to gays.

In the case of blacks, the the driving force for equality was by nature empathetic. However, sex roles are much more entrenched than race roles, and so forging empathy may be more difficult. I think we should make an appeal to respect and the golden rule, while highlighting parellels to which heterosexuals will relate, namely that gays love too.

In so doing, we can assuage their fears of being forced to understand homosexuality, which they will probably never be able to do anyway.

As always, we should sidestep the issue of the bedroom, and we should find some common ground in love and commitment, by which we can reframe the issue.

h/t Ta-Nehisi

E.J. Graff, author of What is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, makes a very original and compelling argument in favor of gay marriage.

I have heard a few different same sex marriage proponents reference the way “straight people already redefined marriage,” but I didn’t grasp the significance of that argument until now.

Graff convincingly makes the case that during the industrial revolution, between 1850 and 1950, heterosexuals began to question the tradition of marrying for property, economic status, familial alliance, business partnership etc., and started marrying for love. This shift was the most significant ‘redefinition’ of marriage in it’s millennia old history, and it was carried out by straight people.

She goes on to claim that homosexuals’ desire to take part in this new kind of marriage is a direct result of the spread of this novel concept of marriage.

Therefore, same sex marriage is not the cause of marriage redefinition, it is the result.

Give it to ‘em.

I will begin by disclosing the fact that I do not believe that the bible is worth consultation as a source of moral authority, but as some atheists are wont to do, I am going suspend disbelief just long enough to use it to make an argument to the faithful from their own canon.

We all remember the story of the woman who was to be stoned to death for adultery, and whom Jesus spared from that fate with the famous “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” speech. Most people also know that this story is that it was an attempt by the pharisees to discredit the teachings of Jesus.

Jesus claimed to believe in the old testament, which, barbaric as it often was, called for the woman to be put to death. However, by his own teachings, she should be spared. The pharisees wanted to catch him in this contradiction, and knew that if he agreed she should be executed in concordance with the bible, his teachings would be invalidated, and he could be discredited. But if he said she should be spared, he could be called a heretic for disagreeing with the holy books.

In the end, it is made very clear that Jesus opposes enforcement of any biblical injunction against unholy sexual practice if the accusers are sinful themselves.

It should therefore be apparent to followers of Jesus that we as men shall not deny rights, be they to life or marriage, to those who flaunt the carnal prohibitions of the bible.

Can anybody really take this seriously?
I love the recurring image of the San Francisco skyline, as if it’s the Sodom and Gomorrah of gay.