How can we quote the Bible in support of our moral values when the Old Testament contains laws calling for the stoning of a woman who lost her virginity before marriage? Actually, based on biblical principles, both Judaism and Christianity teach that such laws are not for today. But could you imagine what America would look like if sex outside of wedlock was as scandalous in our day as it was in ancient biblical times?
In his talk to high school journalism students, Dan Savage mocked the fact that the Bible “says that if your daughter’s not a virgin on her wedding night – if a woman isn’t a virgin on her wedding night – she shall be dragged to her father’s doorstep and stoned to death.”
Was this law ever justifiable? In ancient Israel, which the Bible states was a theocracy instituted by God himself (according to the Torah, God delivered the children of Israel from Egypt and then spoke his laws to them from Mount Sinai) and which was part of a culture where it was almost unthinkable for a girl to lose her virginity to another man before marriage, a law like this was hardly exceptional.
That being said, by New Testament times, Jewish leaders had virtually abolished the death penalty for such offenses, Jesus stopped a Jewish crowd from stoning a woman caught in adultery, and Paul taught that there were spiritual consequences rather than corporal consequences for such offenses. As for today, in absolutely no shape, size, or form could I (along with every conservative Christian whom I know personally) ever dream of advocating the death penalty for premarital sex, nor could I could dream of advocating the death penalty for adultery or homosexual practice. Obviously not!
But let’s ask ourselves an honest question. While people on both sides of the debate categorically reject such legal punishments for sexual violations, is our contemporary society really in a position to make judgments on ancient Israel when it comes to sexual morality?
In America today, one in four teenage girls has been infected with an STD, and out of the hundreds of thousands of cases of gonorrhea every year, “teenage girls between 15 and 19 account for more cases than any other age group.” Some of the gonorrhea strains are developing into incurable “super bugs.” And we are the enlightened ones?
The CDC reports that one in 5 gay men has HIV, while gay and bisexual men account for half of the new HIV infections in the U.S., having AIDS at a rate over 50 times higher than other groups. (The rates are alarmingly high among gay teens.) Despite this, Dan Savage and his “husband” Terry Miller advocate being “monogamish,” admitting to at least 9 extramarital encounters between them since they have been together, even claiming that it has been a “stabilizing force” in their relationship. And Savage is criticizing biblical morality?
Let’s also consider the effects of the 1960’s sexual revolution on America. In 1960, 23% of black children were born out of wedlock; by 2008, the rate was up to a mind boggling 72.3%. In white America, children born out of wedlock rose from 2.3% in 1960 to 28.1% in 2008, an increase of more than 1000%. According to a Brookings Institution report published in 1996, “Every year about one million more children are born into fatherless families. If we have learned any policy lesson well over the past 25 years, it is that for children living in single-parent homes, the odds of living in poverty are great. The policy implications of the increase in out-of-wedlock births are staggering.”
And what about the modern plague of pornography? Recent surveys indicate that 40 million Americans regularly visit porn sites, that 12% of all internet sites are pornographic, that 25% of search engine requests are pornography related, and that the average age at which a child first sees online pornography is 11. And we are the ones standing on the higher moral ground? (This recent headline reporting on the UK says it all: “Generation XXX: 13-year-old boy sexually abuses 5-year-old sister thanks to porn, says therapist.”)
Perhaps rather than focusing on the issue of the death penalty for premarital sex in ancient Israel – which, to repeat, I categorically reject as a legal standard for today – we should take a hard look at the destructive effects of the rampant, out of control, sexual promiscuity of our day. Perhaps rather than gloating about our “progressive” attitudes towards premarital, extramarital, and homosexual sex, we should rue the fact that in 1969, 21 percent of Americans believed that “Premarital sex is not wrong” while in 2009, 60 percent stated it was not wrong.
Let the naked truth be told: America today is the land of Ashley Madison ads encouraging adultery, celebrity sex tapes ad nauseam, staggering rates of sexually transmitted diseases, and reality TV shows like “16 and Pregnant.”
All of which leads me to say: I’ll take biblical morality over the Dan Savage version any day of the week. In fact, I have staked my life on it.
(For the first article in this series, click here; for the second article, click here.)
If the Bible is “a radically pro-slavery document” (Dan Savage), how is it that Christians who successfully fought for the abolition of slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries based their opposition to slavery on that very same Bible? The answer is simple: The Bible is actually not “a radically pro-slavery document.”
According to Savage (following atheist Sam Harris), “the Bible got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong. Slavery! What’re the odds that the Bible got something as complicated as human sexuality wrong? 100% percent.”
To be candid, it’s easy to see where Savage and Harris are coming from. After all, in the Old Testament, the Law of Moses didn’t outlaw slavery, it legislated slavery. As for the New Testament, instead of renouncing slavery as an unjust and cruel institution, the authors taught slaves to obey their masters. So, the argument goes, if the Bible got the issue of slavery so terribly wrong, how can it be trusted on the complex issue of human sexuality? And if Christians today are willing to ignore what the Bible says about slavery, what gives them the right to quote the Bible when it comes to the prohibition of homosexual practice?
These are serious questions, and they deserve serious answers. (Dan, remember that I’m here to help!) In short, it was through a misuse of the Bible that Christians justified slavery (along with segregation and the oppression of women) whereas it is by a proper use of the Bible that Christians oppose homosexual practice, while affirming gays and lesbians as people created in God’s image who are objects of Jesus’ love.
Read rightly, the Bible is actually a book of liberation for slaves, a book of equality for the races, and a book of emancipation for women. It celebrates the liberation of the Israelite slaves from Egypt, teaches that in God’s sight, people from every race are equal, and has many glowing things to say about women (did you ever read Proverbs 31:10-31?). Women also played a prominent role in the ministry of Jesus and in the early Church. (There are whole books written on these subjects, but this 2008 lecture provides lots of useful information.) In contrast, there is not a single positive reference to homosexual practice in the Bible, while every reference to homosexuality in the Scriptures is decidedly negative.
Dan Savage stated that, “The shortest book in the New Testament [called Philemon] is a letter from Paul to a Christian slave owner about owning his Christian slave. And Paul doesn’t say Christians don’t own people. Paul talks about how Christians own people.” To the contrary, Philemon was one of the key biblical texts used by the abolitionists in their argument against slavery.
The letter tells the story of a man named Onesimus who had been Philemon’s slave before escaping and then meeting the apostle Paul, who was at that time a prisoner of Rome. Paul led Onesimus to faith in Christ and then wrote to Philemon urging him to receive Onesimus back, “no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother” (Philemon 16).
What a concept! This man was your slave, he ran away and has now become a Christian, so receive him back as your brother and no longer as a slave. Savage really got this one wrong.
As for the larger question of slavery and the New Testament, the Church in its infancy could hardly challenge the entire economic and social structure of Greece and Rome, so it worked within the system, setting in motion principles of liberation and equality, encouraging masters not to threaten their slaves but to provide them “with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven” (Colossians 4:1; Ephesians 6:9). And, to the shock of many readers, Paul taught that, in Jesus, there was neither slave nor free (Galatians 3:28; Colossians 3:11; 1 Corinthians 12:13), while Jesus himself declared that he came to set the captives free (Luke 4:18). And then there’s that letter to Philemon.
That’s why Christians like William Wilberforce, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and William Lloyd Garrison were at the forefront of the abolition movement.
As for the Old Testament, slavery was ubiquitous in the ancient Near East, but the biblical system was much more humane. It was primarily a system of voluntary, indentured servitude lasting for six years unless the slave wanted to serve his master for life. Even then, both master and slave would rest on the Sabbath, if the slave was mistreated he would go free, and there was even a periodic declaration of amnesty when lifetimes slaves would be liberated.
It is only a gross misuse of the Bible that could possibly justify the American slave trade, marked by kidnapping, the murderous and merciless transatlantic middle passage, and then the selling of chained human beings like chattel – just for starts. Each of these acts is strictly forbidden by Old Testament ethics.
Added to all this was the overarching biblical principle of “love your neighbor as yourself,” and to follow this principle means to put an end to slavery. But it does not mean affirming something (homosexual practice) that the Bible explicitly forbids.
What about Old Testament laws that called for the stoning of women who had premarital sex? There’s one more article to come.
They used to arrest middle-aged perverts who get their jollies from talking dirty to children. Today, they get a television show, a nationally syndicated column, a lecture circuit and multiple visits to the Obama White House.
You know: “Forward.”
The irony is palpable. Dan Savage, sex columnist and founder of the LGBT anti-bullying “It Gets Better” campaign, has been outed. Not as a homosexual. He’s out and proud in that regard. In fact, Savage pushes his “anything goes” brand of sexual anarchy on kids worldwide. MTV has even given the sex-obsessed radical his own show, “Savage U” – a moral-relativist platform from which to corrupt the kiddos.
Creepy stuff.
No, Savage has finally managed to publicly discredit himself as the anti-Christian bigot and bully he’s always been. Never again will this guy be taken seriously as an anti-bullying crusader.
Savage lectures teens in high schools and colleges around the country on the benefits of “non-monogamy,” the occasional “three-way” tryst and any other disease-spreading sexual impulse that might cross their impressionable, hormone-charged young minds (and many they can’t yet imagine).
Well, recently, rather than just shocking his teenaged audience with vulgar, sophomoric psychobabble as usual, Savage apparently thought it’d be fun to bully the kids with whom he disagreed.
While addressing a crowd of hundreds of high schoolers at the National High School Journalism Convention, Savage launched into an unhinged anti-Christian diatribe. He advised the teens to “ignore the bulls–t in the Bible” about sexual morality. “We ignore bulls–t in the Bible about all sorts of things,” he barked.
He then walked through a list of the same tired left-wing talking points about the Bible – long ago discredited – covering shellfish, virginity, etc. “The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document,” he said (anti-Christian trash we’ve come to expect from the secular left).
But when a hundred or more kids got up and began to walk out on Savage’s anti-Christian rant, the 47-year-old tough guy turned his hostility toward them. “It’s funny to someone who is on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible how pansya–ed people react when you push back,” he mocked. Some of the young girls were seen leaving in tears.
“It took a real dark, hostile turn, certainly, as I saw it,” teacher Rick Tuttle told CNN. “It became very hostile toward Christianity, to the point that many students did walk out, including some of my students.
“They felt that they were attacked … a very pointed, direct attack on one particular group of students. It’s amazing that we go to an anti-bullying speech and one group of students is picked on in particular, with harsh, profane language.”
But the only thing surprising is that anyone is surprised. Dan Savage is known in Christian circles as “the gay Fred Phelps.” Phelps, of course, is the similarly cartoonish Westboro Baptist “preacher” who gained notoriety by protesting military funerals with his incestuous brood of pseudo-Christian haters. Savage is Phelps’ photo negative. Whereas Phelps’ hateful mantra is “God hates fags,” Savage’s central message is “I hate God and anyone who loves Him.”
Savage’s primary claim to fame is that he formed the website “Santorum.com,” to create a “Google bomb” that would smear the good name of former senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum. On the site he redefined the senator’s last name, Santorum, using language so vile and repulsive that I won’t repeat it. When Christian advocate and Americans for Truth founder Peter LaBarbera asked Savage to take down the website, Savage responded, “I’m asking Peter LaBarbera to go f–k himself.”
Savage also once bragged that he licked the doorknobs at former Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer’s campaign office in hopes of giving Mr. Bauer the flu.
Savage told the Daily Pennsylvanian in 2006 that Carl Romanelli, a U.S. senate candidate he didn’t like, “should be dragged behind a pickup truck until there’s nothing left but the rope.” In the same interview, he opined: “Mr. Romanelli should go f–k himself.” He also once said on HBO that he “wished all Republicans were f–king dead.”
Yep, this deviant troglodyte is the face of the left’s anti-bullying efforts. I’ve often said that those wonderfully “tolerant” liberals – the self-styled opponents of “hate” and “bigotry” – are the most intolerant, hateful bigots among us.
How can we quote the Bible in support of our moral values when the Old Testament contains laws calling for the stoning of a woman who lost her virginity before marriage? Actually, based on biblical principles, both Judaism and Christianity teach that such laws are not for today. But could you imagine what America would look like if sex outside of wedlock was as scandalous in our day as it was in ancient biblical times?
