The Family Research Council is mass-distributing this antigay sermon to thousands of churches for use by pastors during “Marriage Protection Week.”
Comments welcome.
F
The Family Research Council is mass-distributing this antigay sermon to thousands of churches for use by pastors during “Marriage Protection Week.”
Comments welcome.
I read the text and laughed and laughed! If anyone actually listened to a sermon based on this content, Im sure that they would challenge some of the “research” and especially the idea that the behaviour of gay people threatens heterosexual marriage. Its like saying that if thin people start eating more, it will cause fat people to become more obese.
Ooops, lost all my details. Sorry! I blame the gays… wink
Ummmm… So that’s just the sample outline? Ready to be fleshed out with vignettes and examples?
How many churches are putting up with dry, hour-long diatribes these days, anyway?
Pretty comical leap when he suggests that it might be a useful piece for rabbis — Unless we, as Christians (or Jews,…) speak up… — after all the New Testament (even Revelations!) references.
What a strange hodgepodge of texts and reasons for the positon that heterosexual marriage alone is worthy.
Metaphors about God and Israel and God and the Church next to selected psychological studies on the happiness of heterosexually married families.
Reasoning from the sameness and difference of the Holy Trinity.
Skirting the issue about elderly heterosexual couples marrying and the marriage of heterosexuals who cannot reproduce because of biological/medical reasons.
I can understand offering a variety of reasons for something but when so many, and so unrelated and different types, of reasons are offered on behalf of something I begin to suspect my opponent is grasping at any straw. This is especially the case when people who as a rule ignore psychology decide to use it, and when arguments are made from what appears to be a seriously undeveleoped theology of the Holy Trinity.
So this is what people are listening to in some right wing churches today.
Two basic flaws with this “sermon” (it sounds like an FRC pamphlet come to life):
1. It ignores the love that must exist for a health marriage. That love is impossible for a gay person to have with a person of the opposite gender, so gay people cannot ever meet the “biblical” requirements of opposite-sex marriage. Is not that lack of love at least as important as the lack of child-bearing ability that Sprigg claims is a key flaw in same-sex marriage?
2. It brings up, and then fails to expand upon, the real threat to marriage in this country – straight people who don’t take it seriously. These people seem to think that the answer to the issues of promiscuity (which is a male problem, not a gay male problem) and divorce is to limit people’s choices – force them to get married to someone of the opposite gender, force them (through punitive laws) to limit their sexual activities to that person, and deny them the right to end the marriage. Yet all those rules eventually broke down because they were inherently facist. The real trick is to create strong, healthy marriages of all types in the environment of sexual freedom we now have.
Here’s my analysis from a straight, Christian perspective:
This “sermon” fails what I call the they/we test. Any sermon should primarily if not exclusively address imperatives to the people in the pews. Any sermon that primarily addresses a nameless, faceless “they” like this sermon it is a harangue and not a sermon.
When this sermon did address what the parishoners ought to do, there was nothing on strengthening their own marriages. With a slightly higher divorce rate amongst evangelicals than the population as a whole, any marriage “preservation” sermon needs to address this.
I would like to add one more comment here. It is slanderous to label the difference of opinion over the definition of marriage as you being anti-marriage and anti-family. You are not a threat to my marriage nor my family. The biggest threat stares back at me in the mirror in the morning.
“It is slanderous to label the difference of opinion over the definition of marriage as you being anti-marriage and anti-family.”
Indeed. The difference is about being for and against equality under civil law for all. Families exist, whether codified by marriage or not.
Rich, I wish there were more people in fundamentalist Christian churches who could see and understand what you say. Your point about evangelical divorce was especially good.
If I were a pastor who’d went to school to learn how to write and preach sermons well, and some organization of non-pastors presumed to tell me how to preach a sermon, I’d be pissed off. Why do pastors tolerate being given unsolicited advice by this group and similar ones, like Focus on the Family?
Because as Jesus said, “Only in his hometown and in his own house is a prophet without honor.” Many times it easier to bring in an outside “expert”. Unfortunately, such things are rarely fact checked.
This is a relatively modern phenomenon. For example, the Presbyterians rebelled against the Church of England’s liturgy because it would constrain them to preach on a particular passage. This was viewed as binding the conscience of the pastor. But, alas, such moral outrage is missing from most modern pastors.
Nothing new here:
1. Marriage is created by God, just like everything else. No, our God. No, according to this book, not that book. Shut up.
2. Marriage makes people happy, and homosexuality makes people unhappy. Never mind why. Shut up and find a nice girl/boy. No, shut up. Shut up. SHUT UP!
Marriage isn’t a purely religious ceremony. Any lawyer knows this. Any non-religious married couple knows this. You don’t have to get married in a church.
But you will soon if these people have their way; and don’t think they’ll stop with their current list of demands. Before we know it, inter-denominational marriages will have no legal protection — and marriages without children. And so forth.
Same old tired story.
As a straight freethinking rationalist atheist with no skin in th game but who is in a big debate with my xian gf I have to say that I’ve seen no refutation of the FRC stuff here. I was hoping you guys would have something I can use. My gf has refuted many of your points so help me out dudes with something I can really use. Here’s what she’s refuted so far:
1.Love is NOT essential for marriage. My gf points to about 6000 years of arranged marriages still going on today in most of the world and about 4B people who get married without love. In fact her friends parents from India had an arranged marriage and 45 years later they are doing just fine. They’d never seen each other before their wedding day. Even now if you ask them if they love each other they just say: I suppose so. I’m reminded of the scene from Fiddler on the Roof. So that argument was toasted.
2.Some body said that this sermon should have focussed on xian marriage. But that’s just ignorance talking. My gf said that most churches talk about how to strengthen your marriages for entire months at a time (a series I guess) then they have marriage retreats and marriage seminars and pre-marital counseling. She said sometimes she gets tired of the topic as a single person. This also destroys the statement that someone said that the pamphlet does not expand on heteros not taking marriage seriously by DW: “It brings up, and then fails to expand upon, the real threat to marriage in this country – straight people who don’t take it seriously.” But as my gf said they focus on this ad nauseum.
3.Someone said that this is not a sermon but a harrange because if focuses on US vs THEM. My gf said that this makes no sense. She’s heard sermons harranging about how sexual predators on the internet are dangerous and that people should watch their kids at all times…was that not a sermon?
4.There weren’t many other usable points.
OK so is there anyone out there who can help me with some real step by step rebuttals that really work when talking to an xian or are you all going to be armchair debaters and create strawmen and throw stones at them, while those of us on the front lines get toasted. Think of it this way…here an opportunity to bring an xian to the good side. But if this is the nature of the best arguments you can bring up you aer toast. Since I have no skin in the game it’s no loss to me.
Fred,
Gosh, for someone as impartial and dispassionate about the subject as yourself, you certainly seem to have a great interest in the subject.
However, this thread is over three years old and revisiting it now seems a bit redundant. If you are looking for good reasoning to discuss with your girlfried about the merits and contributions of same-sex marriage, I highly recommend that you read Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America by Jonathan Rauch.
While Rauch is not a Christian (he’s Jewish) he comes from a conservative political perspective and makes a compelling case why accepting gay marriage is far more likely to protect marriage as an institution than any of the alternatives. He warn that without such an opening of marriage to those currently disenfranchised, marriage as we know it today may ultimately disappear.
The book is inexpensive and Rauch is far more thorough than I could be at this site. If you’d like to continue the conversation further, please do so after reading this book – but on a more current thread.
Since I have no skin in the game it’s no loss to me.
From what you said here, I would have to disagree with this statement. Timothy has given you some good resources, good luck with that relationship 😉