Biblical Arguments

Those who use biblical arguments to oppose gay rights would do well to consider the fate of their historical predecessors who made very similar arguments in favor of slavery. Here is a great article on the reasons non-slave-owning Southerners supported slavery and secession. The second section on the role of church figures and biblical interpretation is particularly interesting. Here are some golden moments:

The Presbyterian theologian Robert Lewis Dabney reminded his fellow Southern clergymen that the Bible was the best way to explain slavery to the masses.  “We must go before the nation with the Bible as the text, and ‘thus sayeth the lord’ as the answer,” he wrote.  “We know that on the Bible argument the abolition party will be driven to unveil their true infidel tendencies.   The Bible being bound to stand on our side, they have to come out and array themselves against the Bible.”

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A fellow reverend from Virginia agreed that on no other subject “are [the Bible’s] instructions more explicit, or their salutary tendency and influence more thoroughly tested and corroborated by experience than on the subject of slavery.”  The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, asserted that slavery “has received the sanction of Jehova.”  As a South Carolina Presbyterian concluded: “If the scriptures do not justify slavery, I know not what they do justify.” 
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The Southern Presbyterian of S.C observed that there was a “religious character to the present struggle.  Anti-slavery is essentially infidel.  It wars upon the Bible, on the Church of Christ, on the truth of God, on the souls of men.”  A Georgia preacher denounced abolitionists as “diametrically opposed to the letter and spirit of the Bible, and as subversive of all sound morality, as the worst ravings of infidelity.”  The prominent South Carolina Presbyterian theologian James Henley Thornwell did not mince his words.  “The parties in the conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders.  They are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and friends of order and regulated freedom on the other.  In one word, the world is the battleground – Christianity and Atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity at stake.”

It seems to me that those who use biblical sources to oppose homosexuality should finally admit that the same arguments, in fact arguably with stronger textual support, can be made in favor of slavery. Hardly, I would hope, a popular position.