Of Gay Marriage

In light of the Minnesota Senate's passage of marriage equality Monday, I reprint my column in the Northwest Arkansas Times from 10 years ago -- August 2003-- on the matter. I am so proud of my state for taking this step. The headline was the same as the title of this post, hence my post title, even though we should of course hitherto refer to all same-sex marriages as just "marriages." Here it is, uncut and unedited (so be kind):

C'mon Minnesota!

I've never been prouder of a state I live in: Minnesota is poised to become the 12th state to legalize same-sex marriage, and the first in the Midwest to do so legislatively.

The Senate is expected to take up debate today. DFL leaders say they have the votes to pass it, and Gov. Mark Dayton has said he will sign it.

The Historical Irony of the Christian Persecution Complex

Religious freedom is under attack in America -- or so says the right-wing echo chamber, where such a sentiment is not only repeated daily but taken for granted as reality. Christians and Christianity are being "frozen out" of America and good followers of Jesus are being "persecuted" roundly in America today for their religious beliefs just like they were in ancient Rome.

Of course, this is all fantasy -- both the modern assertion of persecution and the invocation of the ancient world. Christians are not being "persecuted" today for their beliefs, and the Romans actually didn't systematically persecute Christians very much -- least of all for their beliefs.

The Bible and Its Forgeries, Part II: A Quibble With Ehrman Over Ancient Fiction

On Monday I published a commentary that included a quasi-review of Bart Ehrman's latest monograph, Forgery and Counteryforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics. I enjoyed Ehrman's monograph quite a bit, and agreed with his overall premise that many of the canonical epistles (and other works of early Christian literature) written by others in the apostles' names should be considered "forgeries" that were intended to deceive their readers.

I also mentioned that I read Ehrman's monograph in part because it intersects with my own work on the ancient novels: in brief, I'm studying the intersection of deception and narrative story-telling within the Greek and Roman novels of later antiquity, and it is here that I found a minor quibble in Ehrman's concluding chapter.

Anti-Gay Scholar Shows His True (Non-Scholarly) Colors

Casual onlookers were no doubt shocked last week to see a professor at an accredited American seminary claim that homosexuality is "even more severely unnatural" than either incest or bestiality. But if you follow the debates about homosexuality and the Bible at all, you have probably encountered at some point a citation to Prof. Robert Gagnon of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and his book, The Bible and Homosexual Practice.

If you then decided, through genuine curiosity that you might later label unfortunate folly, to look into who this scholar is, you no doubt discovered his website, where he not only criticizes any published account that differs from the view presented in his book, but also responds to virtually every published review of it. Most scholars do not do this; if they have a beef with a given review or article, they submit a rebuttal to the publication in question, which will then publish it if warranted. Sometimes there are even rejoinders to said rebuttals, and so on. But in fact, it appears Gagnon has not been involved in any scholarly publication in a number of years, unless his online CV is in need of serious updating.