Summary:
While the political right seems to want to shift
the debate over marriage equality from a religious perspective to one focused
on family, we should not be fooled. For many of the opponents of marriage
equality, homosexuality is a violation of God’s law as expressed in the Bible,
which is understood as the Word of God. But, again, this is a misunderstanding
of the Bible. It is not a monolithic, univocal work. It contains the voices of
many people expressed under varying circumstances. The voice of a priest like
Ezra expresses a very restricted understanding of what constitutes the covenant
community—those who had experienced the Babylonian exile as God’s punishment
and refinement of an apostate people. But from the same period arises the voice
of a prophet who has a much more expansive view of the covenant community, one
which happily includes those who had always been rejected by the priestly class
focused on ritual purity. Those of us who support marriage equality should do so
from the prophetic biblical perspective of universal humanity.
