If I were in Kentucky right now, there’s a question I would love to ask Kim Davis and her supporters. It’s this: “If God were free to do as He liked, without any constraint or compulsion from any higher power, would He invent a new rule of morality that punished and demonized minorities just for being different in harmless ways?”
It would be interesting to hear her answer. If she says, “Yes, God is the kind of God who behaves that way,” then that makes Him a cruel and capricious bully who enjoys making people suffer for no good reason. But she worships God and would like to think He’s a loving sort of guy, so I presume she would say, “No, that’s not it.”
If she says, “God would not do that,” though, then she’s got a problem, because gays are just a minority that is different in ways that do no harm. They fall in love differently than we do, and that’s pretty much it. You can argue that the difference IS the harm, because it’s contrary to God’s Law, but that just gets back to the original question of whether He would make such a law in the first place. If He would, then He’s a cruel and unloving bastard, but if He wouldn’t, then either He’s being forced to do so by some higher power, or else the Biblical condemnations of homosexuality did not come from God. So which is it?
I suspect the true answer is that Kim Davis’s God is subject to a higher power, namely her own imagination. He’s not really real, and owes His entire existence, character, and motivations to Davis’s imagination, informed by centuries of superstition and mythology and popular prejudice. Therefore He can do or not do only those things she is willing and able to imagine Him doing or not doing. She herself is a higher power relative to God because she is creating Him in her own mind, just like every other believer does.
She probably won’t want to admit that, so there’s one last out she could take. In Matthew 19: 7-9, Jesus makes an interesting statement about the true origin of the Old Testament Law on divorce. “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way.” Not everything the prophets proclaimed on God’s behalf really comes from God, according to Jesus. Some of it is “inspired” by human bias. That means Davis has a Christian and Biblical out. If God is not a cruel and unloving bully, and if He’s not compelled by some cruel higher power, then perhaps the Biblical laws against homosexuals were really inspired by a selfish human agenda, like the laws permitting divorce.
Now granted, it’s just as prejudiced to demonize divorce as it is to demonize falling in love differently. Divorce is bad, but it’s a much better outcome than essentially enslaving a woman and forcing her to remain her husband’s property forever. I’m not saying Jesus had a good answer on the topic of divorce. But people like Kim Davis think it was a good answer (and no, let’s not go into her personal life here, because that only distracts from the important issue and feeds her martyr complex). If she wants to use the Bible to justify her beliefs, then here’s Jesus himself telling her the OT Law sometimes reflects the worst aspects of man rather than the best aspects of God. She’s got room to acknowledge, if she wishes, that persecution of gays is not really God’s will.So it’s really all up to her. And if she’d rather persecute minorities just for being different, then that’s her problem.
Great question, great analysis, well writ.
I would just love to see this actually put to Kim Davis and how she answers.
It’s a good question, but my suspicion is that you wouldn’t get a satisfactory answer. She is not very good at logic. Halfway through stumbling through an answer, she would probably realize the catch-22 that you’re posing and then deflect somehow, then shrug it off later as the devil trying to trip her up. Unfortunately.
Yeah, that sounds all too likely. Still.
Forget Kim Davis. I would ask the deacon to present his question to one or more Christian apologists. It would be interesting to find out why we see many Christians citing the Word of God when opposing gay marriage.
Your penultimate paragraph may elicit interesting pretzel logic.
I obviously can’t answer for her, but I’ve certainly heard positions that would be compatible with hers: that people with homosexual attraction choose to be that way, and in doing so they willingly break God’s law and thereby harm the world.
The fact that no-one chooses their sexual attraction is a fact you’d likely never get through to such a person, until they discover someone they love was born that way. So it’s fortunate you aren’t wasting time in such a discussion.
True but on the other hand, it doesn’t matter if it’s a choice, because making a choice is not sinful unless it’s a choice that’s against God’s will. And that brings us back to the question of whether God would condemn harmless differences if He were free to make His own moral choices.
” If God is not a cruel and unloving bully, and if He’s not compelled by some cruel higher power, then perhaps the Biblical laws against homosexuals were really inspired by a selfish human agenda, like the laws permitting divorce.”
All well and good, but admitting THAT requires abandoning Biblical inerrancy. Which the fundagelicals will never do.
I have yet to find anything biblical that makes me think on an omnipotent deity. What I do find us lots of things that clearly benefit people who are trying to establish their own power base without any possible benefit to society (pay to pray at the temple in Jerusalem, for example).
When you’re trying to gain the ascendency with a minority, religious rules – especially about procreative sex only – benefit nobody but a king who needs poor and desperate people to join his army. The entire concept of religion is a fraud and I’m at a loss to explain why so many people fall for it.
I don’t know what they do and don’t have copyrights and/or trademarks for, but that character in the game looks an awful lot like a South Park character. Even the laugh when you lose a level pretty much is verbatim with how the series looks. Granted I’d pretty much guarantee Matt Stone and Trey Parker would be on board with the message, but Comedy Central might see things a bit differently.