Why no gay marriage

Back in my restaurant days, I used to read some market research.  Do you know what the least liked vegetable is? Parsnips.  Only 14% of the public has tasted one, but only 2% of those who have like ‘em.  Best I can describe a parsnip is like a fat carrot but with bitterness of a turnip.  If you love parsnips, I don’t take issue with you.   When there is something that just 2% of humanity wants, we Americans are tolerant—meaning we don’t agree, but we don’t take away your privileges. 

            Hmm.  2% of the public is gay.  I had three gay roommates in my 20’s and I don’t take issue with their practices.  I enjoyed their company.  But I still disagree with them over their religion. 

            Humanity began to practice marriage from the earliest times.  The purpose of marriage was not to have sex and companionship with someone you loved or dearly liked.  It was to mutually protect and pro-create.  Marriages were arranged and often lacked love.  But to say that the defining characteristic of marriage is love, would mean that all those couples from eons back weren’t married.  Likewise, the Old Testament patriarchs and about every other primitive tribe considered “family” to include household servants and others in the care of the clan.  Marriage was to make the clan grow while protecting it’s identity.

            If we want to change that in our modern arrogance to “family means any group of people” and “marriage is a relationship with anybody you love”  then you are walking over my Christian beliefs.  Unlike a Muslim who says that seeing a prostitute is a ‘temporary marriage’, I still believe in what my Bible says-not because I define things that way but because God has. 

            So what does God say about homosexuality in the scripture?  Well, it starts early.  In Genesis 19:5 two angels had come to save Lot and family.  The Sodomites began banging on the door and demanded Lot produce the two “men” (angels) so that they could have homosexual relations with them. (Thus the word sodomy) Lot begs the men of Sodom not to commit the “evil” and offers his two daughters instead.  Evidently rape of a female was a lesser sin.  The angels struck the gays blind and escaped with Lot and family. 

            In Leviticus 18 is a list of evils that God found abhorrent about the Canaanites.  Human sacrifice, incest and homosexuality (vs. 20-22).  In vs. 28-30 we find out that if Israel picks up any of these practices, the land would “vomit them out”.  These are strong words.  I wouldn’t have chose them, but God does.  I figure I need to pay attention. 

            But say you take the point of view that the Old Testament is mostly myth (Don’t let a devote Jew hear you say that!).  Did Jesus say anything about gays?  After all the Romans glorified homosexuality since they considered females to be somewhat subhuman and only another man could understand a man.  Jesus started talking about something that wasn’t mentioned in the OT—Hell.  But he didn’t use the word “Hell”.  The word we translate Hell is Gehanna, the name of the city dump of Jerusalem.  That’s where people dumped old worn out sandals and that rotten basket of dates and so forth.  They burned the dump with a fire that almost never went out.  But Jesus wasn’t talking about a smoldering fire of refuse.  He was evoking images of an intense hellfire that couldn’t be put out and demonic forces.  Gehanna was built on the site of a former temple of Molech, that god referred to in Leviticus 18.  Molech was a form of the god Ba’al which was called Bel in Babylon and Allah in Arabia.  The temple kept an extremely hot furnace in which humans were sacrificed (there was a story of 3 guys, who wouldn’t bow down to Bel and were thrown into the furnace but survived) and Molech temples sacrificed infant firstborn children.  I suppose no family man could be found to run the temple of Molech.  At any rate the priests were all gays.

            I don’t know what is involved spiritually with homosexuality, but God sure doesn’t like it. I “tolerate” in the authentic sense of the word—I don’t agree with it but I allow the practice.  Whatever the mentality with gays, they seem to have a large sense of guilt and want the rest of us to approve Gay Marriage.  If again you need the words of Jesus, in Matthew 19:4ff he says what is quoted at marriage ceremonies throughout Christendom.  “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning created them male  and female and said, ‘For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife; and the two shall become one flesh.’?” Which is a quote of Genesis 2:24. 

            But, the gays protest, they were born that way.  Hmm.  The International Genome Project, after a number of fruitless years felt they had proof that there was no gay gene.  There are other scientific studies that show that homosexuality is an acquired syndrome, not genetic.  For instance, a study of identical twins in which at least one of the twins was gay, shows only about 30% correlation of the other twin being gay.  We’d expect almost 100% correlation, since the genes are identical for these twins.  The syndrome seems to follow younger siblings.  Among families with 3 or more boys, there is a 6% probability of the youngest being gay, not 2%.  What does birth order have to do with genetics?  And finally, of all out-of-the-closet gays in their twenties, by age 50 half will become/revert to heterosexuality. 

            What’s more, there are very significant  differences between gay males and females.  Lesbians are very relationship oriented while gay guys are very much into image of avant garde pretty boys. Male gays have a far less penchant and success with long-term relationships.  Indeed, many of them spurn such things.

            Whatever gets into the head of gays, I don’t know.  It still brings a lot of condemnation from scripture.  Their ranks are filled with far more mentally disturbed individuals than straights. I don’t hate gays or understand them.  And the wary Christian in me just prays that whatever it is, we don’t need to honor their trists with “marriage” and that the land won’t vomit us out.