As we’ve noted over the last few days, the Religious Right has not been particularly impressed with Newsweek’s current cover story “The Religious Case for Gay Marriage” and appear fully intent on continuing their crusade to discredit it for as long as it takes:
Bob Knight, director of the Culture and Media Institute, believes there is ample evidence of media bias on the marriage issue, but calls this example one of the worst he has seen. Knight says Newsweek published a “cartoon version of Scripture that is a gay activist’s dream.”
“It would be one thing if people promoting the homosexual agenda just said, ‘Look, the Bible says it’s wrong. We don’t buy into the Bible’s authority, and so we don’t agree with you.’ But to try to take the Bible and make it say something it flat-out does not say is journalistic malpractice,” he argues. “You’re talking about the religion editor at Newsweek magazine and a cover piece twisting scripture, using every gay talking point out there without any effective rebuttal.”
While most Religious Right activists have merely dismissed the piece as an example of propaganda designed to bolster the gay rights movement, some, like Al Mohler, have set out to rebut many of the claims made in the article. To the latter category we can now add Peter Sprigg and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council who have penned a lengthy, almost paragraph-by-paragraph counter-point where they seek to rebut the assertions made in the article such as “Jesus never mentions homosexuality, but he roundly condemns divorce” with responses such as this:
This is undoubtedly because Jesus encountered many more people who were tempted by easy divorce than he did people who were tempted by homosexuality. The whole argument that “Jesus never mentions homosexuality,” and therefore that he must have tolerated it, is ridiculous on its face. Jesus never mentions rape or child sexual abuse, but that can hardly be interpreted to mean that he condoned them. As with those sexual sins, he may have felt that homosexuality was so clearly offensive that there was no point in stating the obvious.
Yep, Jesus knew that homosexuality was just like rape and pedophilia: so odious and abhorrent that he didn’t even have to bother mentioning that they were horrible sins.
Fortunately, we have people like Sprigg and Perkins to constantly remind us that, even though Jesus never actually said that, it’s exactly what he thought.
