I have always found it interesting that when it came to religion, everyone takes what is said by their local pastor as God’s word, and in that word there can be no doubt. I came from a Catholic family, attended Catholic Grade School and was fortunate enough to have a cousin who was a priest, and as a result of that, I had a more familiar understanding of priests and pastors. I came to understand that they are not always right and that they are just employees, doing what they are told. I also need to preface this article with the fact that I am not gay, and I am not a gay supporter, what I am is a supporter of civil rights and having investigated a few homicides in my past employment, I have also learned not to believe everything I am told and to check the facts. I decided to write this because it appears to me that many of our good priests, pastors, and other ministers from other religions, either are not telling it all, telling the truth, or just don’t plain know it.
"... in the evening the youth came to him [Jesus], wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan." —The Secret Gospel of Mark, The Other Bible, Willis Barnstone, Editor, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1984, pp. 339-342.
OK, here is the barn burner, YES FATHER; there was a time when same sex marriage was a Christian right.
“Prof. John Boswell, the late Chairman of Yale University’s history department, discovered that in addition to heterosexual marriage ceremonies in ancient Christian church liturgical documents, there were also ceremonies called the "Office of Same-Sex Union" (10th and 11th century), and the "Order for Uniting Two Men" (11th and 12th century).
These church rites had all the symbols of a heterosexual marriage: the whole community gathered in a church, a blessing of the couple before the altar was conducted with their right hands joined, holy vows were exchanged, a priest officiated in the taking of the Eucharist and a wedding feast for the guests was celebrated afterwards. These elements all appear in contemporary illustrations of the holy union of the Byzantine Warrior-Emperor, Basil the First (867-886 CE) and his companion John.
Such same gender Christian sanctified unions also took place in Ireland in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, as the chronicler Gerald of Wales (‘Geraldus Cambrensis’) recorded.
Same-sex unions in pre-modern Europe list in great detail some same gender ceremonies found in ancient church liturgical documents. One Greek 13th century rite, "Order for Solemn Same-Sex Union", invoked St. Serge and St. Bacchus, and called on God to "vouchsafe unto these, Thy servants [N and N], the grace to love one another and to abide without hate and not be the cause of scandal all the days of their lives, with the help of the Holy Mother of God, and all Thy saints". The ceremony concludes: "And they shall kiss the Holy Gospel and each other, and it shall be concluded".
Another 14th century Serbian Slavonic "Office of the Same Sex Union", uniting two men or two women, had the couple lay their right hands on the Gospel while having a crucifix placed in their left hands. After kissing the Gospel, the couple was then required to kiss each other, after which the priest, having raised up the Eucharist, would give them both communion.
Records of Christian same sex unions have been discovered in such diverse archives as those in the Vatican, in St. Petersburg, in Paris, in Istanbul and in the Sinai, covering a thousand-years from the 8th to the 18th century.
In ancient China, same-sex marriage was also understood by one of the major religions. The Buddhist religion believes in reincarnation, which is the idea that when someone dies, his or her spirit returns to the world in a new body, as another person or animal. Buddhists also believe that once a couple is married, they are destined to love and marry each other again in each of their lives. Therefore, if a man and woman are married in one life, and then come back in their next life as two women, they are destined to marry again as two women. Since Buddhism, offered a reasonable explanation for same-sex marriages, many people accepted them.
I could go on with this, but the historical facts are: The scriptural basis for the fight against gay marriage is a lie, plain and simple. Modern Christianity is cherry picking the scriptures. If gays are biblically ordered to be second-class citizens, then so are women.
Here is what the experts say.
Statement on Marriage and the Family
Arlington, Virginia--The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, the world's largest organization of anthropologists, released the following statement on February 26, 2004 in response to President Bush's call for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage as a threat to civilization:
The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.
The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association strongly opposes a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexual couples.
Enough said.
