This HuffPo piece shows an interesting, but different, perspective on the whol Rick Warren and gay marriage flap. Bob Ostertag says that it is ridiculous to focus solely on gay marriage and to ignore every good thing Rick Warren does because of his opinion on this one issue.
Rick Warren reverse tithes, giving away 90% of his money and living on 10%. That money is used in a variety of causes that liberals should be championing, from AIDS outreach to poverty programs to global warming stuff. But a huge number of liberals are up in arms because Warren is a Christian who actually thinks homosexual marriage is wrong.
I grew up a Southern Baptist, and my problems with that church are manifold. And I suppose it's easy for me to blow off gay marriage as an issue since I'm not gay. But there are worse things to get upset with Southern Baptist theology than gay marriage. But that's not really the point.
Rick Warren is very popular not just for some theological brilliance, but for pointing out the obvious truth about making your life revolve around more than personal satisfaction and materialism. These are two things even secularists like Amanda Marcotte should be able to agree with. Yet Amanda, like so many others is more concerned with why people oppose gay marriage (and bashing them for it) than she is about appreciating areas of agreement.
Amusingly, Amanda's argument--that Warren (and by extension, other Christians)--are just jealous of all the sex they think homosexuals are having, is undermined by Ostertag's post.
Is this really where decades of struggle for sexual freedom ends? With the state granting its blessing to homosexual nuclear families emerging from City Hall, husband-and-husband or wife-and-wife, with the photographer and the rice and the whole bit, finally having become just like them?
Not for me. Not for my family, with its various men, each of whom I love in a different way, a child, and two moms. Not that my family is any sort of queer norm. But that's the beautiful thing about queer culture: there is no norm. We piece together our families, holding on to those relationships that work.
The fact is most of us won't marry even if we have the right to. We are putting all our resources into winning a right that only the few of us in long-term conventional couple relationships will enjoy. What's more, we are creating a social climate in which young queers are encouraged to recast their vision of the relationships they seek to favor the married couple. This is not only a loss for the vibrancy of queer culture, it is a disservice to young people who will not be well served by their nuclear family ambitions. Just consider the high number of gay and lesbian divorces (yes, the rate is already high despite the fact that we have not even fully won the right to marry yet).
Ostertag admits what most demanding gay marriage acceptance won't: their lifestyles do not conform to any traditional monogomous couple ideal. This isn't to say there aren't monogomous gay couples; we've all known some of those. But Ostertag hints at something quite well-known, that gay families frequently include couplings and groups, and that the monogamous lifestyle advocated by marriage doesn't fit this behavior.
My own particular views on the subject are evolving, but I don't have a big problem if people in any state want to authorize same sex marriage. When people don't want it, it shouldn't be a big deal, either.
But regardless of what the angst-riddled on the left will tell you, there's more to accept about Warren than dislike. The focus on Warren's very conventional views of marriage is just the latest way to try to bash anyone who disagrees with them.
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