Leave it to the Religious Right, when they finally decide to appeal to the New Testament and not the Old, to call for Civil Disobedience over something Jesus never talked about, rather than helping the poor.
Specifically, anti-gay bigot Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel and BarbWire.com, uses a passage from the Gospel of John to feed not only into the Christian persecution myth but to attack the Supreme Court:
“Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also.” – John 15:20
According to Barber,
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The push back has begun. Christian business owners, lawyers, parents, judges, county clerks, organizations, universities, hospitals, adoption agencies and other individuals and groups have been given an ultimatum by five unelected, unaccountable liberals in Washington, D.C.: “You must now obey us and disobey God. You must pretend, with us, that sin-based same-sex ‘marriage’ is an actual thing.”
To which we say, “Not on your life.”
“Or our own.”
Don’t you love all these guys who say they are willing to die for their beliefs when nobody is threatening their lives? They’re all so eager to play the role of martyrs when there is no possibility of them ever becoming martyrs.
The Religious Right has made a mockery of the idea of some monolithic, unshakeable, capital-T Truth as a bulwark against moral relativism. You can’t support different sets of rules for different people and still lay claim to absolute truth. Yet Barber says,
Absolute truth is a stubborn thing. Attempts at marital alchemy notwithstanding, the highly contentious, wholly contemptible 5-4 “gay marriage” opinion (and that’s all it is, an opinion) released last week by five pagan extremists in black robes is altogether illegitimate and should be treated as such.
Five pagan extremists. In ancient history, you can’t find pagan extremists. Paganism, being focused on cultic acts rather than dogma and doctrine, is not the sort of religion to inspire zealotry and extremism. The words go together like “constitutional conservative” – they’re oxymoronic.
According to the farcical Barber, “the court’s majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges is a complete farce. It’s an absurd missive, a bohemian word salad that was roundly, and rightly, condemned by the court’s four dissenting justices.”
Barber, who proves here he knows a thing or two about word salads, says the ruling, “which has been branded ‘the Dred Scott of marriage,’ has not changed, one iota, the fixed and immovable reality that the institution of marriage, an institution as old as mankind itself, is, and shall forever remain, centrally defined by its binary male-female requirement.”
Of course, what is entertaining is that, throughout human history there has not been an “immovable reality” of the institution of marriage. What is worse, is that there is not even an immovable reality of marriage in the Bible.
You would think a guy who makes a living defending the Bible would actually read the damn thing, but that seems to be too much to ask from Matt Barber. Perhaps he is intellectually lazy. Perhaps he knows he will find in the Bible’s pages some inconvenient facts that undermine his bigotry:
As the above diagram shows, there is slavery in biblical marriage, and concubinage, and polygyny, and sexual servitude. There is nothing in the Law of Moses that defines marriage only as the Religious Right would have it defined.
Yet Barber pretends that,
Central to Christianity, and clearly delineated throughout both the Old and New Testaments, is the unambiguous and timeless proposition that any sexual practice outside the bonds of true man-woman marriage constitutes sexual immorality and results in separation from God. This, of course, includes sexual acting out between members of the same sex, whether or not such acting out is tied to the novel notion of so-called “same-sex marriage.”
So not only does Barber lie about marriage in the Old Testament, but he pretends the Bible unequivocally denounces same-sex relations, when, in fact, the Law of Moses never once denounces lesbianism – for the simple fact that no seed is spilled.
Having established his bona fides as a liar of the worst sort, Barber then argues, based on his non-existent absolutes, that man cannot redefine marriage, when in fact, man has been defining and redefining marriage since the dawn of human history.
If Barber wants to pretend the Old Testament is 100% true, that life began as Genesis claims and that God’s law has been extant and applicable throughout, then he should at least be honest enough to admit that marriage in the Old Testament is not what he claims.
But now Barber asks, “So how should we Christians react to this haughtiness – to this rebellion against God?”
By rebellion he means men marrying other men, and women marrying other women, not any of the other of Gods laws he and his fellow “Christians” break daily, like mixing fabrics or cutting their hair or failing to stone unruly offspring, to name just a few.
In Barber’s absolute truth, most truths are ignored as inconvenient. The only concern of the Bible is sodomy, apparently. Never mind that the Ten Commandments never mentions it and the Religious Right and Barber himself break the commandment against bearing false witness every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
And here, too, Barber manages to find an answer in the New Testament when he misses so many others, because this one has nothing at all to do with loving and forgiving people, or not throwing stones, and turning the other cheek. This one has nothing to do with feeding and clothing the poor:
God’s word tells us how to react: “But Peter and the apostles answered, ‘We must obey God rather than men.'” (Acts 5:29)
Barber asserts, as Romans 13:1 asserts, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.”
Well, that’s wrong. It is an absolute truth that the laws that govern this land, the Constitution of the United States, were instituted by man. You can say they come from the Bible all you want, but a simple comparison of the two exposes your false witness.
The Constitution is derived from English Common Law, and, as Thomas Jefferson wrote to Dr. Thomas Cooper on February 10, 1814, “Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.”
Barber complains that “For 2,000 years, whenever such conflicts have arisen, Christians have placed the laws of God above the laws of man. What makes you think we’re about to change now?”
Well, not to place too fine a point upon it, but the Constitution of the United States, which was instituted by men, not God. In convention for that purpose, the men who wrote it announced to the world that “We the People… do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Their purpose? Not to further “God’s law,” whatever that is, but in their own words, “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
Save the rest for church, as the Founding Fathers clearly intended, and stop trying to add God where he doesn’t belong.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
