Brian Brown, head of NOM (National Organization of Marriage), has been opining over how much he can really, truly feel like Jesus, because all those horrible people who are okay with same sex marriage. Something of a pity I haven’t noticed Mr. Brown hanging from a crucifix lately. Here’s just a bit of his latest screed, and probably the bit which annoys me most:
I can’t help but feel the parallels between what happened during Christ’s time on earth and some of our own experiences in recent times, including in the struggle to preserve, protect and promote marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
We’ve seen marriage be considered invincible one day, and then in a blink of an eye seen it redefined and defiled. We’ve seen the principle of traditional marriage be betrayed by people who swore to voters they would protect it. We’ve seen some people abandon the fight, whether out of fear or seeing many who remained vigilant punished and persecuted. And we’ve seen constitutionally-guaranteed rights such as the right to religious liberty be superseded by invented concepts that not only are not rights, they also are not right.
It can be disheartening at times, but we at NOM have not lost faith. You see, we’ve read the book and we know who wins in the end. We also know that the truth of marriage is universal and timeless, written on the human heart by our Creator at the beginning of time. Marriage cannot be changed, and the truth of marriage cannot be redefined or eradicated.
Marriage is the union of one man and one woman. That’s what the thing is, always has been and always will be. It is a profound good, and the most important human relationship ever created. It’s the basis of families, and the foundation for raising children.
I know that true marriage will rise again. I think it will happen fairly soon, because it’s impossible to maintain the lie of same-sex ‘marriage’ forever. But whether it takes two years or two decades, NOM is determined to fight every day for the truth of marriage and for the good that it provides for families and children.
BlahblahblahBiblicalMarriageblahblahblahTrueMarriageblahblahbleagh. Oh, the “truth” of marriage! These fucking idiots constantly claim to have read “the book”. I actually have read the damn book, and the whole “one man one woman” crap is not apparent in the Old Testament. It doesn’t have a firm hold on the new one, either, although it was getting there. If there was a god named Jehovah, and it did have firm ideas about marriage, then those ideas should have made the OT law, right? And in the NT, Jesus declared he was there to uphold the (OT) law. So…none of that happened.
What did happen is the same thing you see over and over throughout human history, societal mores change over generations. And over the generations of those who made up the bad stories which comprise the bible, societal shifts towards marriage appeared. No magic required, just people. The bible is also full of rape, incest, and vicious executions of (female) prostitutes. Ol’ Jehovah doesn’t seem to get overly disturbed by such, most of it being its idea in the first place. Jesus didn’t have much to say about that either, except in a couple specific cases. Brian Brown is engaging in cherry picking, bad picking at that, all because he has a bad case of the ickies.
It’s abundantly clear that marriage can be changed, it has been changed, and it changed and changed again within “the book” too. Naturally, the nonsense Brown pushes has absolutely nothing to do with just how marriage is perceived and done all over the world. All he cares about is where he lives, which is Amerikka, and as far as he’s concerned, Amerikka should be run according to at least one version of the bible. Unfortunately for him, the so-called truth of marriage can’t be found in there either. It’s whatever we make it to be.
You can read the full story at RWW.
Marriage as the union of one man and one woman and an assortment of porn stars. How many simultaneous wives did Abraham have, again? I forget.
Silly christians don’t even understand their own stories.
Marcus:
I expect if they actually read them, they’d understand fine. “True Believers” are all about the cherry picking. Way back when, I used to call this sort of nonsense Bible Ping Pong. For every verse you can find to defend a certain idea or belief, one or more can be found contradicting it. It’s a very convenient book for all flavours of xianity.
This is why xianity is so splintery and such a fucking mess -- there isn’t one clear thing about it.
The bible, too, reflected its time(s). The iron-age OT portrays plural marriage and other relationships (e.g. master-slave couplings, implied same-sex pairings) that wouldn’t be considered “true marriage” even by Mr. Brown.
By the time of the NT, Judea was under control of the Roman Empire. The Romans were pretty puritanical* in a lot of ways, and that’s reflected in the implicit assumption of OMOW marriages in the Pauline letters and other NT writings.
In any case it’s pretty weird to think we should be modeling our society on two-millennia old mores. A few things have changed since then, mostly for the better.
*Forgive the anachronism; I couldn’t think of a better description.
How many wives did Solomon, or was it David have?
Most fundies don’t seem to have read much of the bible from what I have read.
By the way, has anyone pointed out, recently that by modern US standards Abraham seems to have been an incestuous pimp?
Hell, I don’t even care about how wrong they are about the reasoning/reasons they supposedly get from their book of instructions.
I’d be a little more sympathetic if they actually were even moderately consistent in the fucking present day. But all the shit they rail on and on about is ok if you have (R) after your name, so it’s abundantly clear they don’t actually care.
That is the bit that gripes me the most. He seems to think that his “religious liberty” gives him the right to prevent other people from having their constitutional rights simply because he doesn’t like what they do. Fuck him and every other christian prick that believes the same.