Guest Post by Morbo
A hate-crimes bill is winding its way through Congress, and the Religious Right is furious.
The Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, that ramblin’, gamblin’ high minister of homophobia from California, flew to Washington April 17 to hold a press conference denouncing the bill. Sheldon asserted that if it passes, ministers will be fined or otherwise sanctioned for speaking out against gay people. He was joined at the event by Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-Texas), who echoed these charges.
There are a couple of things wrong with Sheldon’s analysis. For starters, two provisions of the First Amendment would prevent that from happening. Secondly, the bill specifically states that language alone will not be considered a hate crime. The bill is limited to instances of physical assault. It’s about sticks and stone, not words.
Questioned about this at the press conference, Gohmert launched into an incoherent tirade about how the bill might punish a person for “nudging someone” in a crowd while “trying to get off a piece of property.”
Huh?
What the bill actually says does not matter to the two Louies. In an attempt to be clever, Sheldon is distributing a “wanted” poster (.pdf) featuring a rather poor rendition of Jesus. The poster claims that Christ would be wanted for “revealing the truth about homosexuality in ‘the Bible’ and encouraging his followers not to offend God by committing such behavior.”
I don’t claim to be a New Testament scholar, but where and when did Jesus say this?
I poked around on the web to find the answer but had little luck. What I found was a lot of wishful thinking. One guy is so eager to put these words in Jesus’ mouth that he asserts when Jesus spoke of “eunuchs” in Matthew 19:11-12 he really meant gays.
The fact is, Jesus didn’t seem terribly concerned with homosexuality. This is perhaps not surprising coming from a guy who, as far as we know, never had a girlfriend and spent most of his time hanging around with 12 men.
However, there is one feature of interpersonal relations that Jesus spoke about with absolute clarity: divorce. He was against it. In Matthew 19:3-9 Jesus spars with some Pharisees who ask him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause whatever?”
Jesus responds, “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate.”
The Pharisees then asked, “Then why did Moses command that the man give the woman a bill of divorce and dismiss her?” Jesus replied, “Because of the hardness of your hearts Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.
I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except in cases of fornication, and marries another commits adultery.”
Ouch! Looks like Rev. Lou and Rep. Gohmert, in true Pharisee fashion, have elevated their own obsessions above those of their Lord and Savior. I’m sure they’ll see the error of their ways any day now and immediately begin pushing a federal bill to ban divorce. After all, this is a “Christian nation,” right?