DEFENDERS OF HYPOCRISY

Malta And The Philippines Want To Legalize Divorce, So Where Are The “Pro-Marriage” Defenders?

Defenders of “traditional marriage” like the so-called “National Organization for Marriage”, the American Family Association, and Focus on The Family say that they support strong children, strong families, and strong churches even though they really don’t. So naturally now that Malta and the Phillipines want to legalize divorce, these other pro-family organizations will surely take a stand against policies that would help break families apart, right? RIGHT???!!!

No. Believe us, we searched their websites using “Malta” and “Philippines”—it brought up nothing on their movements for legal divorce. These pro-family orgs have certainly commented on marriage issues in other countries, so why the silence now?

Why?

Let’s let Yale divinity student Jonathan Dudley explain:

Although there is only one uncontested reference to same-sex relations in the New Testament, divorce is condemned throughout, both by Jesus and Paul. To quote Jesus from the Gospel of Mark: “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery.”

A possible exception is made only for unfaithfulness.

The community most opposed to gay marriage usually reads these condemnations very leniently. A 2007 issue of Christianity Today, for example, featured a story on its cover about divorce that concluded that Christians should permit divorce for “adultery,” “emotional and physical neglect” and “abandonment and abuse.”

The author emphasizes how impractical it would be to apply a strict interpretation of Jesus on this matter: “It is difficult to believe the Bible can be as impractical as this interpretation implies.”

Indeed it is.

On the other hand, it’s not at all difficult for a community of Christian leaders, who are almost exclusively white, heterosexual men, to advocate interpretations that can be very impractical for a historically oppressed minority to which they do not belong – homosexuals.

Whether the topic is hair length, celibacy, when life begins, or divorce, time and again, the leaders most opposed to gay marriage have demonstrated an incredible willingness to consider nuances and complicating considerations when their own interests are at stake…

So let’s stop the charade and be honest.

Opponents of gay marriage aren’t defending the Bible’s values. They’re using the Bible to defend their own.

If pro-family groups such as NOM, the AFA, and FOF really cared about defending the institution of marriage, they’d picket the offices of divorce lawyers, protest outside of divorce courts, and create campaigns against newspapers that support divorce. But they don’t.

They only care about preserving marriage and upholding the biblical values that inconvenience them least. With marriage equality to fuss over, Maggie, Bryan, and Tony would all be out of a job, God bless ’em.

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