Newsweek Train Wreck Redux

The cover article in the latest outbreak of Newsweek is like a train wreck, or a reality show starring Paris Hilton. It's so appallingly awful you can't look directly at it, but so incredible in it grotesqueness that you can't look away. Would such a famous name in journalism has-beens even have published such glaringly abominable blather if their shame reservoir was not already scraping bottom, and deservedly so? Lisa Miller's deplorable excuse for an article (on the front-page, no less) could feed the average blog for weeks. However, this one is unusually voracious, so we could dissect each flaw in a matter of days.

Still, refuting the article is like cleaning a master bathroom so filthy that life forms are evolving. Where does one start such a monumental, dirty job? The shower-curtain scum? The grout mildew? The slimy, hairy, greasy clogs? If we could just get past the sewer of inaccuracies in the first paragraph.

I guess the last sentence of Ms. Miller's first paragraph isn't quite an inaccuracy, but it shouldn't be read as a question, either. She writes,

Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple—who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love—turn to the Bible as a how-to script?

Obviously this is meant to be rhetorical, the implication being that only a hopelessly pessimistic and old-fashioned couple in a loveless union comprised of strict, unbending gender roles (she washes the dishes while he has a beer) would interpret or even read the Bible in anything but the most loose, abstract, non-binding terms.

This attitude is symptomatic of the elitism and narrowness of experience of the liberal hacks on which the popular media rely. Who in this day and age, snort writers like Ms. Miller, could possibly look to the Bible for advice on life and love? Don't we have Sex and the City for that reason?

I hope those writers aren't reading this blog, because they will probably spray macrobiotic organically-grown chai tea all over their ergonomic recycled-hemp keyboards at this next sentence. The Bible is an always has been the most knowledgeable source for direction on how God intends for us to live our lives. I certainly hope that Ms. Miller isn't married, as she seems completely oblivious to the fact that marriage is life; thus, as the Bible is the utmost authority on living, it is the utmost authority on marriage as well. And in some parts of the country, though obviously not in the parallel dimension where Newsweek is published, people--even "modern, sensible" ones--take the Bible seriously, whereas Ms. Miller appears never to have even read it.

For she writes,

First, while the Bible and Jesus say many important things about love and family, neither explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman.

This is false. 1 Corinthians 7:2 states, "each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband." Paul does not go on to permit a man to have a husband, or a woman to have a wife, or men or women to share wives or husbands. Marriage according to the New Testament is between one man and one woman, and this could not be any plainer. However, as Ms. Miller proves, "there are none so blind as those who will not see."

We are almost done dismembering the first page of Newsweek's latest heresy, and it has taken only about seven pages of blogging. Ms. Miller goes on to prattle a bit about the difference between civil and religious marriage, neglecting to mention that the former, or every benefit of the former, is an option for gay couples in nearly every state. "Biblical literalists will disagree," she says,

but the Bible is a living document, powerful for more than 2,000 years because its truths speak to us even as we change through history. In that light, Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married—and a number of excellent reasons why they should.

Ms. Miller obviously thinks of "Biblical literalists" as knuckle-dragging Appalachian cabin-dwellers carding wool by candlelight while planning to give their preteen daughters in marriage to polygamous snake-oil salesmen in exchange for a rooster, six hens, and a 12-gauge shotgun. While different churches may understand scripture differently, it is the responsibility of all Christians to interpret the Bible as the literal word of God. Perhaps in a later entry, we will define Christianity and further explain how identification with the religion requires the literal interpretation of Scripture.

But the point is Ms. Miller is wrong, as is anyone else who believes that the Bible condones homosexual relationships, let alone supports gay marriage. Scripture itself may not speak strongly enough against gay marriage, but living biblically does. Men and woman are not the same. God created us this way because we have different roles in the church, and different roles in a virtuous, godly marriage. In such a union, a man and a woman complement each other in such a way that two people of the same sex never could.