Doug’s at it again. This one’s even worse: it’s called Two Dudes on a Wedding Cake. As I’ve said previously, if this isn’t your thing, I wouldn’t go past the jump. For everyone else, let’s get started!
Doug starts this out as a letter, so we already know this is going to be bad. I mean, the “advice” he gave to the poor fictional girl who was dealing with fictional sexual abuse was absolutely cringe-worthy, so it’s not hard to figure that this will be just as bad.
Trust me, it is. I won’t blame you if you decide to skip it. I’ll just snip a few relevant pieces and analyze them. It’s easier on the brain.
So this, in summary, is the Christian case against homosexual desire and practice. The Lord Jesus, in teaching on divorce, appeals directly to the creation order. He says “from the beginning it was not so” (Matt. 19:8
). He points to what God did in the Garden as the basis for His instruction on sexual ethics.
“And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?” (Matt. 19:4–5
Actually, your nonexistent god was given to have said something very different: “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness…” Yes, the emphasis is mine. But, it begs the question: who was it talking to at that moment? But I digress.
Ah, the marriage is one man, one woman thing. Yeah, that’s bullshit and you know it, Doug. Concubines were a thing that existed. Oh and remember what your god supposedly said to David in regards to Bathsheba. Namely, “If you had wanted more wives, I would have given you more wives.” Yes, wives. As in plural. Think about that for a moment.
Also:
Yeah, so much for the “one man, one woman” thing. We can chuck that slag out the window right now.
Jesus looks at this and sees “one man, one woman, one time.” Divorce is not in view, and only comes into the picture later on because of sin, because of hardness of heart. On the same basis, for the same reason, we may exclude any number of other distortions and perversions. As with all distortions, they exhibit varying degrees of seriousness.
Oh yes, my mother-in-law was sinning when she divorced her first husband. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the son of a bitch was abusing her. Yep, totes sinfulness and not abuse.
Divorce happens for a lot of reasons. Let’s be honest here: if someone is getting a divorce, they have reasons why they are filing the paperwork. There may be abuse that we don’t see, because abusers are damn good at hiding that sort of thing. The couple may have grown apart. There may be other factors that we don’t know about. But to claim it’s hardness of heart and sinning is ridiculous.
Bestiality is out because there was no helper suitable for Adam among the beasts (Gen. 2:20
Bestiality is out because of a little thing called INABILITY TO GIVE CONSENT. An animal cannot consent to sex. Just like a child cannot consent to sex. Seriously, it is not that difficult a thing to comprehend. And as for the latter statement, just remember King Solomon, as his author decided this guy was just so fucking awesome that he had to be a mega-hit with the ladies and therefore had to have 700 wives and 300 concubines. Talk about Solomon and Mary and Allison and Theresa and Joanna and Michelle and Danica and Phoebe and Kathryn and Tasha and Annabelle and…
As for homosexuality? That can be summed up with, “It’s ickie-poo and I don’t want to see it.”
God is a divine draftsman, and He has given us an image of Himself. How has He drawn His image for us? He has drawn this image quite carefully, and He did it by creating us as male and female. The attempts to rearrange all this, and substitute in male/male or female/female are one kind of impudence. And the more recent attempt to create buckets full of alternative genders is even worse.
Really? What about all those animals that change sex naturally, Doug? How would you classify them? Or do you just shrug and say that ol’ superdeity planned it that way? Because if your god planned it that way, he seems to not give all that much of a damn about one body, one set o’ danglyparts.
Now when faithful Christians recoil from the glorification of homosexual sex, they are usually recoiling on this level. They are not (usually) reacting to a detailed knowledge of what homosexuals might be doing in bed, because they usually don’t know much about that. What they are pulling away from is the image of two dudes in tuxes on a wedding cake, or a photo of a reception where the groom and the groom are kissing. This recoil is not a phobia—it is more like the reaction the art world would have if some vandal painted a Groucho nose and glasses on the Mona Lisa. The resultant cartoon is grotesque, a caricature. The reaction is “why would someone do that?”
You’re kidding me, right? Recoiling from that is a neon sign for the damned phobia, just like recoiling from the idea of two people from two different races getting married. The idea of gay marriage is sickening to people like Doug, so they react accordingly. Make no mistake, they’re displaying a phobia.
As to why someone would do something like that, the answer is simple: gay people exist. They find someone whom they want to share their lives with and they marry. It’s not all that different from straight people who want to marry.
The sexual consummation of a marriage is private—not because it is something to be ashamed of, but rather because it belongs to the couple alone. But the fact of that sexual relationship is public, which is why people are invited to weddings. And when we look at any given bride and groom in the front of the church, we are looking upon the image of God. Moreover, given the fact that our world has fallen into sin and is in desperate need of redemption, we also see in every wedding the restoration of the image of God in and through Christ and the church.
I’m sorry, WHAT?! My marriage was a public thing because fucking? Are you serious? As for my wedding, Prime and I kept the supernatural out of it. It deserved no presence in our reality-based relationship.
This is so damned ridiculous that I can barely comprehend it.
So to put two men there, or two women, is to deface God’s creational intent and, on top of that, it is to deface His gospel that is in the process of restoring our wreckage of that original creational intent. In short, the glorification of homosexual unions is an attempt to murder God, burn His image in effigy, and overthrow His gospel. It is no trivial thing.
Hold onto this. We’re gonna need it later.
The world’s attempt to cover up this reality—hatred of God conveyed through hatred of His image—has been two-fold. On the question of the public image, their response has been unrelenting propaganda—coupled with severe discipline for anyone who challenges the authority of that propaganda. This is where all the court cases for evangelical bakers, florists, and wedding photographers are coming from. They are in the process of outlawing our refusal to glorify that which must never be glorified.
Oh yes, because that’s totally not bigotry in action. If these same bakers, florists and wedding photographers were to claim “sincerely-held religious beliefs” when it came to denying services to a mixed race couple, they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on in our courts. They would be out of business within a few months due to the negative press. But since this is dealing with two people of the same sex, it apparently gets a pass.
Discrimination is discrimination, Doug. You can put a sprig of parsley on a pile of bull manure and claim it’s a T-bone steak but that doesn’t make it a steak. It’s still bullshit and you know it.
Birth control has been abused by many married couples in a way as to make them almost as fruitless as a homosexual couple would be. Detached from fruitfulness, detached from procreation, the teleology of sex has become Pleasure. Now God is the one who made the sexual act pleasant, and nobody in their right mind should revolt against that. But He also made eating pleasant—and the biological purpose of eating remains providing nourishment for the body. So when someone pursues the pleasures of eating alone, and has a vomitorium installed at their house, we are not hesitant to call that kind of thing an eating disorder. So I am not talking about enjoyment of sex as a problem. I am talking about the enjoyment of sex detached from the creational design.
So basically, sex doesn’t count if there are no children involved. Does this mean my marriage doesn’t count? What about all of those couples who happen to deal with infertility? Are their marriages null and void because they are unable to have children? What about a marriage between two people who are past child bearing age? Where do we draw the line here, Doug? Because there are a lot of marriages that would be affected by this sort of thinking.
Yes, Prime and I use contraception. There are multiple reasons to this: my age, the fact that my genetics are not that great, the fact that I’m on a medication that will harm a fetus yet increase my fertility, etc. In other words, it’s best that I not have a child, all things considered. However, I love Prime and I want to show him that; forcing celibacy on him because of my problems isn’t fair.
[EDIT: Prime, after reading this post, thought an interjection was in order; chiefly, a reminder that “(y)our body is yours alone, and if you waltzed into the kitchen one day and announced that you’d become thoroughly uninterested in screwin’ for whatever reason, I don’t get a veto, fullstop. I’ll ask if you’re sure, like, once, and then shrug and go back to monitoring the stir-fry ‘cuz I don’t wanna overcook the shrimp.”]
[I know. Charming and eloquent, with priorities firmly in place. Ha, no, seriously, he chooses his words for maximum impact AND hilarity.]
I married Prime because I wanted to be with him, always. Having kids and all that? Well, if it had happened, great. If not, oh well. But I love Prime. That was the reason I wanted to marry him. Some people don’t want to do the house, minivan and 2.5 kids thing. It’s not for them but they do want to spend their lives with someone. They wish to be intimate with that someone. But in your line of reasoning, these people shouldn’t have that, because god and “be fruitful and multiply” and all that.
We are told in Genesis that male and female together constitute the image of God. We are taught here in Romans that abandonment of the woman by the man is unnatural, and that abandonment of the man by the woman is unnatural. It follows from this that natural sex is theologically rich. In Paul’s sense here, nature is a good theologian. The converse is also true—homosexual sex is theological distortion because it mars the image of God. It should therefore not be surprising that abandonment of the natural use of the woman is a straight road into theological impoverishment—which is what every form of idolatry is.
Hey, Doug? Gay animals are a thing that exist. From Wikipedia:
No species has been found in which homosexual behaviour has not been shown to exist, with the exception of species that never have sex at all, such as sea urchins and aphis. Moreover, a part of the animal kingdom is hermaphroditic, truly bisexual. For them, homosexuality is not an issue.
So, animals in nature exhibit homosexual behavior. Animals in nature can change sex. But this is all part of the jerk’s grand creation, right? I mean, dude meant for all that to happen, correct? Male and female and indeterminate sex, your god made them all, correct? What was that about god’s “creational” intent and overthrowing his gospel and all that sort of thing? Because the wanker most high seems to be doing a great job of that himself.
Nature does not seem to be a great theologian here, as it happens to be proving Doug very, very wrong. Well, if not nature then science but I don’t think Doug wants to pay attention to that. But reality is proving Doug’s ideas very wrong: homosexuality is found in nature. Animals will change sex in nature. The idea of “male and female, he created them” isn’t so cut and dried when studied via science.
Again, Doug wouldn’t pay attention to any of this. He’d shrug it off or make a claim about how it doesn’t count or it’s bad science or the like. However, Doug’s arguments, when studied, are the ones that can’t hold up. Reality has a tendency to disagree with him, but he seems to ignore that pertinent little fact.
Apparently, this might be the first in a series of letters. I’m actually hoping that it isn’t, as dealing with Doug is headache inducing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to watch a kitten video or three. That might clear my brain from the sheer amount of fuck that is now residing within it.
Iacon East 