The significance (or lack thereof) to yesterday’s anti-gay vote

July 19, 2006

The WaPo’s Dana Milbank had an entertaining item on yesterday’s House “debate” on a [tag]constitutional amendment[/tag] to ban [tag]gay marriage[/tag], and some of the least compelling arguments offered by the measure’s supporters. I’m having trouble picking the most ridiculous….

Choice A: “Marriage is not about love,” volunteered Rep. [tag]Todd Akin[/tag] (R-Mo.), who noted his 31 years of matrimony. “It’s about a love that can bear children.”

Choice B: “The world did not start with [tag]Adam and Steve[/tag],” Rep. [tag]Louie Gohmert[/tag] (R-Tex.) told reporters.

Choice C: Rep. [tag]Phil Gingrey[/tag] (R-Ga.), a mustachioed gynecologist who served as one of the floor leaders yesterday, posited that the debate was “about values and how this great country represents them to the world.” After the vote, he elaborated: “This is probably the best message we can give to the Middle East in regards to the trouble we are having over there right now.”

It’s a tough call, isn’t it? I’m leaning towards Gingrey’s comments, only because he seemed to suggest that yesterday’s vote would somehow have an effect on violence in the Middle East, but they’re all remarkably, almost surprisingly, dumb.

I have to go with Akin’s. Apparently Akin really loves his wife. From his site bio: “Todd and Lulli have six children: Wynn, Perry, Micah, Ezra, Hannah, and Abigail.”

Perry, btw, is a Marine Corps Second Lieutenant in Iraq. He’s one of the free people in congress with a kid in the military.

Another fun fact: Akin was the one to reintroduce the absurd Pledge Protection Act, which would remove from the jurisdiction of the federal courts the question of the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance.

  • I’m gonna go with C too. Trying to conflate gay marriage with the ME conflict is the worst type of political shilling.

  • Behavior like this ought to infuriate those old right-wingers who believe in a small government which doesn’t interfere in people’s lives and who are very reluctant to meddle with the Constitution. Further proof that the Republican party of the 20th century has morphed into Fascism in the 21st.

  • “Marriage is not about love,…. It’s about a love that can bear children”

    While Gingrey’s comment is obviously the most ridiculous, I’m intrigued by Akin’s comment.

    So is a marriage driven by the love a couple has for each other, or is it driven by the sole desire to bear children?
    What of those heterosexual couples that cannot “bear children”? Where do they fit in this equation?
    If the reply is that they can adopt, then can’t you then say that gay couples who have a “love to bear children” have that same right?

    so many questions

  • I\’m going to go with C, too. It\’s nice to think the Republican bigoted agenda is going to bring an end to really grim news like this.

    Or this.

    Or even this.

    But I kind of doubt it.

  • Rigged Ballot. You can’t compete with somebody who can bring bombastic self-importance and the Iraq war into a debate over gay marriage.

    He might as well have come out and declared that helping gays is helping the terrorists.

    More evidence that the ballot is rigged: Adam and Steve? Total cliche.

  • I am a big fan of Choice B — always a classic. I don’t personally know any Adam and Steves (i don’t know any Adam and Eves either, interestingly enough, i do know a Steve and Eve (well that’s probably only interesting to just a few)), but they must exist. And I am sure they must get a kick out of their names. Maybe not as much as couples with the same first names, which in my book is reason enough not to date someone – unless they are really hot (and of course interesting). i wouldn’t want to be known as the Steves or the Michaels. Just my two cents.

  • My apologies CB for messing up the comments section with the long links. Thanks for reformatting them. I’ll use HTML tags from now on.

  • To paraphrase the bumper sticker, if you find these comments surprisingly dumb, you just haven’t been paying attention.

  • Similar to peter above, is there anything really *surprising* about the dumbness of these comments? They are par for the course–pretty much illustrative of the level of disourse one expects from the GOP during a gay marriage ban debate. Didn’t raise an eybrow, here.

  • All 3 comments are great contenders for the biggest load of BS.

    The Adam and Steve cliche is the old ‘bible says gays are immoral’ message. I don’t recall any actual passages the prohibit a same sex relationship. Can anyone cite a passage from the bible condemming gays? (I’m actually curious about this and don’t claim to have a vast knowledge of the bible). Not only does ‘Adam and Steve’ bring a specific religion in lawmaking (it’s wrong because the bible says so), it’s also a very anti-science statement – ‘The world began with Adam and Steve’. Not to mention that it assumes that if we allow same sex marriages, all of a sudden we wouldn’t have heterosexual couple producing offspring.

    It’s a very similar argument for Akin’s marriage for procreation argument. By allowing same sex marriage, we’re not outlawing heterosexual marriage and traditional families. Akin’s comments call into question marriage of childless couples, either by choice or by infertility. Taking his comments further, should we then outlaw the marriage of an infertile woman? What about older couples who marry? For example, a friend’s father remarried at the age of 62 to a similarly aged woman. Needless to say, they do not intend to have children together.

    Gingrey’s comments are, to me, the most ludicrous. By saying “This is probably the best message we can give to the Middle East in regards to the trouble we are having over there right now.”, he is making a dangerous statement. What he’s saying to Islamic fundamentalists is ‘Hey, we oppress and deny our citizens rights, too!’

  • So many choices, so little time…could I order the combo-platter, and declare that they’re equally ridiculous?

  • Actually, the world began with just Adam and then, by divine intervention, Eve was created from Adam as an adult woman. I think if we need to duplicate that, everybody of childbearing age better start praying for a miracle. And, come to think of it, did it ever say in the Bible that Adam and Eve were MARRIED when they had children?

  • I’m surprised any of these guys can stand and speak without falling over, they are spinning so hard.

    Gracious me, Gohmert is the one who attacked Murtha a few weeks back on the House floor. Gingrey is an idiot (or a Georgia Peach as he told Colbert). I’d never heard of Akin before, but what a dope. I guess he’s a proponent of elderly couples living together instead of getting married so they don’t lose benefits? Because obviously they can’t bear children… so they shouldn’t marry. So that’s good??? (Obviously there’s a better solution to that problem!)

    Sheesh.

  • There’s no contest: C. And anyhow, as David Rakoff reminds us, it’s not Adam and Steve, it’s Adam and STEVEN.

  • “I don’t recall any actual passages the prohibit a same sex relationship.” – VT Idealist

    Well, I haven’t read the whole thing, but I think you want:

    Leviticus 18.22: “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable.”

    (Remember, God’s talking to men here)

    and

    Leviticus 20.13 “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”

    Try to remember that 20.10-12 all state that Adulterers should be put to death, so throw that back in the face of any Theocratic Reactionary who quotes 20.13 to you and ask them when they are going to felonize adulterer.

    By the way, as far as I know, nothing in the Bible restricts lesbianism, nor, if you read 18 and 20 closely, restrict homosexual oral sex.

  • To expand a wee bit on #16, one should note that as Adam was the paternal source of Eve, then Adam and Eve’s actions in procreating constitute incest. Also, does anyone realize that both Adam and Eve were only a couple of years old when they started making babies? We’re talking under-aged sexual activity here. So, the Book of Genesis directly implicates God with under-aged sex and incest….

  • “I don’t recall any actual passages the prohibit a same sex relationship.” – VT Idealist

    Lance got the NT stuff right. The OT stuff is mostly in Leviticus, and I don’t have a bible handy to reference the appropriate verses.

    For a nice contradiction, though, you might want to check out Samuel II, I think 2nd chapter. It describes what is basically a gay marriage between David and Jonathan.

  • The biblical passages all fall apart when translated directly from the original language. IThe ‘man as with a man’ passage is one of the worst translations, or at least one of the longest lived bad translations, of all time. The original passages seem to refer to ‘Arkenosai’ (don’t quote me on this) which seems to be male temple prostitutes that Pagans used to develop ecstatic worship.

    There are only a few passages in English translations of the bible that sound as though they are anti-gay. The Genesis story in the original Hebrew is quite allegorical and compelling even to rationalists, partly because of its poetry, and partly because it seems to have been distilled from an oral tradition many millenia old. This was the best way to explain to our subconscious minds, and our non-rational ‘perceptive’ mind, where we came from and what meaning that has for us.
    Several things leap out: Adam is the word for ‘the people’. Eve was taken from a ‘side’ of Adam (which could also be translated as a ‘portion’ – not a good word because it sounds like dishing up mashed potatoes. The reason for ‘Eve’s’ creation was that ‘The People’ were ‘lonely’. Once ‘The People’ were separated into distinct parts they could see each other, and in this way know the face of God in each.
    There’s more to this and a great deal of study that finds different threads. This version essentially says that God wants us to know divinity by our differences.

    What would Senator Brownback and others of his ilk say to this? Their message is that some are better than others – quite different than ‘divinity is revealed in all of us’.

    Fundamentalists stick to literal interpretations of the Bible, in English…. because they are reflections of the patriarchal society at the time of the translations, among other things, such as civic organization, scientific, and moral inquiry.

    For the first 1500 years of the church there were no prohbitions in canon law against homosexual conduct, or if there were they were of little consequence. This is odd since this would have been closer to the time of Jesus.

    Besides, there are only 5 passages of the Bible (5 of approximately 1,000,000) that seem to refer to prohibitions against gay male sex. When Bill Frist introduces the bill to outlaw sex with your mother-in-law, yes… it’s in Leviticus…. we’ll know that he’s genuinely interested in being ‘Biblical’, and literal.

    The disjunct is that modern theologians who’ve made genuine, and thorough, inquiries into scripture, are not in command of modern marketing approaches to growing church membership. The Far Right has primitive theology – from approximately 150 years ago, and modern marketing – deceptive, but modern.

    At the same time, a buddhist friend of mine commented that the wagon wheels in westerns always look like they’re going backwards when the chase is on. We may be looking at change that is so rapid, and still below the radar. The mainline is going away, the big fundamentalist congregations are held together by agreement that is not anywhere close to being monolithic, the end of US dominance, and more, are the last throes. As the slippery slope of change gets steeper, the most violent reaction comes from those who are most fearful of change.

    That is why ‘gay marriage’ is such a symbol of change – because it all seems incomprehensible when your worldview is that the past was rosy and we need to get back there as quickly and with as much determination as possible.

  • “Lance got the NT stuff right. The OT stuff is mostly in Leviticus, and I don’t have a bible handy to reference the appropriate verses.” – Michael W

    Mike, I got the Old Testiment Leviticus stuff!

    There’s some other stuff sprinkled through the OT talking about the practice of temple prostitution, including male prostitution, which ‘good’ kings repeatedly put down. But it seems to have come back quite often. Maybe because it was so profitable for the priests?

    1 Kings 14:24 “There were even male shrine prostitutes in the land [in the land of Judah under Rehoboam son of Solomon]; the people engaged in all the detestable practices of the nations the LORD had driven out before the Israelites.’

    1 Kings 15:12 “[Asa king of Judah son of Rehoboam] expelled the male shrine prostitutes from the land and got rid of all the idols his fathers had made.”

    but the practice must have come back because:

    2 Kings 23:7 “[Josiah] also tore down the quarters of the male shrine prostitutes, which were in the temple of the LORD”

    Notice they don’t seem to have gone after the female prostitutes 😉

    I have no idea where you would find the quotations in the New Testiment but I would suggest you consult “Misquoting Jesus, The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why” by Bart D. Ehrman to see just how likely the specific letters (I’m sure it would be in one of the letters) were actually written by the alleged author. We know for a fact that only some of Paul’s letters were written by him, and none of the other Letters were written by any Apostle. And Paul didn’t even meet Jesus before the Cruxifiction.

    A lot of the New Testiment that the Church considers canonical was ‘forgeries’ written by someone claiming the authority of Paul, Peter or another already dead apostle. One reason for this is that Jesus and Paul were both apocalyptic ascetics who believed that the Kingdom of God would be established on the face of the Earth before the end of their own generation. This of course did not come to pass, and there were a lot of slightly perverse practices that sprang up in anticipation of the end times that needed to be discouraged by a church that finally realized it was going to be around for a while. For instance, non-procreative sex. So a lot of ‘new’ letters got written in the 1st and 2nd centuries of the Christian Era trying to get people in line with the new ‘reality’.

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