What Jesus Said About Banning Gay Marriages

What Jesus Said About Banning Gay Marriages;

A Different Perspective on Gay Marriages

by Nick Emond

Nick Edmond is a biblical studies major at a leading university. He contributed the following essay. He describes it as: "...a different way of interpreting Jesus' words when he says 'what God has joined together, let not man separate'."

It was about year 30 or so when a man started what was going to be a huge craze in the 1990's. He was the ancestor of the TV talk show host; he gathered large crowds, walked around giving advice to people who didn't really want to hear it, and reinterpreted old guidelines he thought were out of date. Since then, we've been told to imitate this guy in order to enter heaven. Oprah was very successful in following his lead; she made about a zillion dollars out of the format and got a key off St. Peter.

I doubt I'm the first to tell you about him. He's known as the late J.C., and he's been quite popular with his groupies. You've probably read one his biographies (4 of them have been the world's bestsellers list for like... ever), and you've probably seen the posters they did of the guy (which now sell for millions of dollars). You still hear of the rallies his followers do every time something happens about anything. To leave such a legacy, he must have had the world's best public relation person... well, maybe second, after his Dad.

In two of his biographies (Mark 10:1-10, Matthew 19:1-12), the authors recount an episode when Jesus was walking around and the paparazzi surrounded him. They asked him all kinds of questions and unlike his usual problematic "paraboling", he started giving out clear answers. They asked J.C. about marriage and the current government laws. Then J.C. reinterpreted an old law and changed it drastically. He said that when the law was first told, it was because the public's heart was hard and could not accept the law as it was in its purest form. He finished off by saying, "what God has joined together, let not man separate".

Well, you will rarely hear me quote J.C. but he really nailed that one. For those who are Christians or who want to follow the example of J.C., he made it clear right there and then (and also in his sermon on the Mount) that laws must sometimes be reinterpreted. This was done last summer when all North American gays and lesbians finally got the legal rights to "do their conjugal duties" with their partners in the privacy of their own homes. The U.S. Supreme Court reinterpreted old laws and saw that equality was necessary if true freedom was to prevail.

Since then, talk of gay marriage has been loud. When the Canadian courts reexamined their constitution and saw that it was everybody's right to marry, the same people who said they followed Jesus' example started a campaign to block what had been joined together. More recently, many more of J.C.'s followers have taken it upon themselves to separate what has also been brought together in the U.S. After the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court voted to legalize gay marriages, the president (who talks of God and freedom in almost all his speeches) said he would support a constitutional amendment to block gay marriages. His decision was endorsed by his Vice President whose own daughter is gay. He had previously said that such matters should be regulated by individual states but he's now changed his mind because his boss said otherwise.

Now don't misunderstand me on this point. I certainly don't think that God has anything to do with uniting people through of a piece of paper. However, I do believe that