re: #313 I’m a Mavrik!

Interesting thread. I haven’t listened to the speech, so at the risk of making a fool of myself in case Savage addressed this: the OT is not *the* problem. The NT is anti-gay, the Pauline/pseudo-Pauline epistles part. Take away OT -> fundies still anti-gay.

Sure, lots of fundies will go the OT route, since it’s the most straightforward one. However they also have an apologetic trick worked out for not taking the clam-laws seriously. They will claim that the OT laws can be separated into those purely ritual ones and those based on timeless morality. Homosex is an abomination, while not eating shrimp is purely ritual and has been done away with (rituals change, morality doesn’t). Any discussion of the fundie OT double standards is not complete without addressing their apologetics.

Savage lays out blame pretty evenly, Timothy along with Leviticus.

But I maintain that an argument about apologetics or text analysis is quite useless. It’s not what fundamentalists do with the text, it’s the role of any interpretation of the text in setting the laws of an essentially secular society committed to religious pluralism. You can argue yourself blue in the face about HOW fundamentalists interpret scripture, but there’s no point in doing that unless there’s an implied promise that everyone will go along with them if they can make a really stunning case for their reading.

We’re not going to do that. So unless you are a Christian, and actually interested in the correct interpretation of the text, discussing scripture is a bit of a derailing of the only real argument here: is we is or is we ain’t going to pass laws according to anyone’s Biblical interpretation.