Bible Verses are used as crutches to prop up
old biases
Source Deb Price - The Detroit News
An engineering professor is treating her husband, a loan officer, to dinner for final giving in to her pleas to shave off the scraggly beard he grew on vacation.
His favorite restaurante is a casual place where they both feel comfortable in slacks and contoon/plyester-blend golf shirts. But, as always, she wears the gold and pearl pendant he gave her the day her divorce decree was final.
They're laughing over their menus because they know he always ends up diving into a giant plate of ribs but she won't be be talked into anything more fattening than shrimp.
Quiz: How many biblical prohibitions are they violating? Well, wives must be "submissive" to their husbands (I Peter 3:1) And all women are forbidden to teach men (I Timothy 2:12), wear gold or pearls (I Timothy 2:9) or dress in clothing that "pertains to a man" (Deuteronomy 22:5).
Shellfish and pork are definitely out (Leviticus 11:7, 10), as are usury (Deuteronomy 23:19) shaving (Leviticus 19:27) and clothes of more than one fabric (Leviticus 19:19). And since the Bible rarely recognizes divorce, they're committing adultery, which carries the rather harsh penalty of death by stoning (Deuteronomy 22:22).
So why are they having such a good time? Probably because they wouldn't think of worrying about rules that seem absurd, anachronistic or - at best - unrealistic.
Yet this same modern-gay couple would easily be among the millions of Americans who never hesitate to lean on the Bible to justify their own anti-gay attitudes.
Bible verses have long been used selectively to support many kinds of discrimination. Somewhere along the way, Jesus' second commandment gets lost: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Once a given form of prejudice falls out of favor with society, so do the verses that had seemed to condone it.
It's unimaginable today, for example, that anyone would use the Bible to try to justify slavery. Yet when the abolitionist movement began to gain momentum in the early nineteenth century, many Southern ministers defended the owning of human beings as a divinely approved system: "Slaves, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters." (Colossians 3:22)
In an influential anti-abolitionist essay, southern Carolina Baptist leader Richard Furman declared in 1822 that "the right of holding slaves is clearly established in Holy Scriptures." Meanwhile, anti-slavery crusaders were taking an interpretative approach to the Bible, since a literal reading "gave little or no support to an abolitionist position," author Carl Degler says in "Place Over Time: The continuity of Southern Distinctiveness."
Nearly one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, a Virginia court defended racial segregation by saying, "the Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. He did not intend for the races to mix." The U.S. Supreme Court rejected that ridiculous reasoning in 1967 when it struck down laws in sixteen states forbidding interracial marriage.
Like advocates of racial equality, suffragists found the literal reading of the Bible was their biggest stumbling block. Many ministers even condemned using anesthesia during labor because pain in childbirth was punishment for Eve's bite of forbidden fruit (Genesis 3:16). Susan B. Anthony eventually declared in frustration: I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."
Studying the Bible is often akin to looking at Rorschach ink blots, says biblical scholar Joe Barnhart, author of "The Southern Baptist Holy War." What we get out of it is sometimes what we put into it," he explains.
The punishment the Bible meets out to all men for Adam's downfall is toiling "in the sweat of your face" (Genesis 3:19). Yet, Barnhart notes with a laugh, there's one bit of progress never denounced by preachers hot under the clerical collar: air conditioning.
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Deb Price
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