Sun Blogs: The Politics Factory
Newsweek Distorts the Bible and a Lot More
December 11, 2008 - 5:00pm
Over the past couple of days, my mind has not been on gay marriage; it has been on an operating systems project. But even with my reclusive studying habits this week, I still have caught wind off the recent controversy over the latest Newsweek cover story by Lisa Miller, which alleges that the Bible actually supports gay marriage.
Now I acknowledge that Newsweek has the right to print whatever it wants, but that right has never been conditioned on the quality of what they write, a fact which has become manifestly evident when I read the cover story.
Premised on Editor Jon Meacham’s claim that the “conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism,” he describes Proposition 8 as the “impetus” for this cover story.
But if you look at the wide majority of ads run by the campaign to support Proposition 8, you will find no direct references to the Bible. (And to that end my arguments on homosexuality and the Bible are strictly theological, not political.) Go to YouTube’s YesOnProp8 channel and see for yourself if you do not believe me.
This has to be one of the most of blatant, ridiculous, and unethical uses of the straw man argument I have ever seen employed by a “reputable” news magazine. The same kind of contortions Meacham has used to reduce Yes on Prop 8 to the “worst kind of fundamentalism” have also been used by Miller to contort what the Bible actually says into a ridiculous caricature of the actual text.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBrFHC1aoWI
Meacham’s “worst kind of fundamentalism”
One of the most ridiculous parts suggests that David and Jonathan may have been involved in a homoerotic relationship, based primarily on a passage where David describes Jonathan’s love in stronger terms than the love of women.
On the contrary, anyone remotely familiar with the story of David and Jonathan would instantly deduce that David speaks of a brotherly, not erotic love. The word used in the original Hebrew passage, 'ahabah, covers the whole spectrum of love from God’s love to erotic love. But here is Lisa Miller’s take:
“What Jonathan and David did or did not do in privacy is perhaps best left to history and our own imaginations.”
Is this Newsweek or the National Enquirer? At least the National Enquirer got it right the last time it reported on a sex scandal.
In fact, no passage of the Bible has ever spoken of homosexual love in a positive light. So if you conveniently ignore or misinterpret the passages which speak of it in a negative light, or only focus on the words of Jesus as if the Bible only had four books to it, at best you can argue that the Bible is neutral on gay marriage, not supportive of it.
As for Jesus, Lisa Miller uses his preaching of love and inclusion as one of her central arguments. However, while Jesus did reach out to prostitutes, tax collectors, and other “sinners”, he never accepted prostitution, swindling, or sin in general. In fact, one of the most common phrases he spoke to sinners he healed was, “Go and sin no more.”
By the same token, Jesus would have reached out with love to homosexuals, but this never meant he would have accepted homosexuality. To argue otherwise would commit a fundamental theological mistake by equivocating sinners and their sins.
These kinds of theological mistakes pervade the entire article. I have not even begun to touch the surface of all the factual error and misinterpretations committed (feel free to shoot me an email if you want my perspective on anything else written in that cover story), but let me offer one last perspective to put the whole controversy in a new light.
In academic circles, the LGBT movement will often classify works as heteronormative for treating certain subjects from an exclusively heterosexual perspective. Since any and all references to marriage, including those from Jesus, refer to a heterosexual marriage, the Bible by definition would qualify as heteronormative literature.
And while LGBT activists will often criticize heteronormative literature as yet another form of discrimination, this is perhaps one of the rare occasions where I have seen someone argue that heteronormative literature actually supports non-heteronormative values.
Beyond all of this, though, there is an even worse mistake being committed in this article. Newsweek itself claims to be a news magazine, as the title suggests, but in its cover story by Lisa Miller, she uses this sentence:
“I would argue that they should.”
While Lisa Miller would obviously hold the separation of church and state in high regard on the issue of gay marriage, at the same time in this cover story she has blatantly disregarded the separation of news and opinion, which journalists often literally refer to as “church and state.”
Nothing she writes could possibly be any more damning than those six words. Both conservative critics and religious critics have long derailed Newsweek for their alleged bias against them. And by publishing an op-ed as a cover story, Newsweek has convicted itself of these allegations.
What I find even more disturbing is how Jon Meachem basically takes up the role of an LGBT cheerleader in his Editor’s Note. The New York Times was once criticized by its Public Editor or ombudsman back in 2004 for presenting “the social and cultural aspects of same-sex marriage in a tone that approaches cheerleading.”
Furthermore, in Newsweek’s Readback blog, Kurt Soller describes the cover as “ultimately supportive of gay marriage.” Perhaps this is why the National Review’s Mark Hemingway has titled his response “Newsweek Comes Out of the Closet…as a magazine with a political agenda.”
Plus, all of this could not come at a worse time for the magazine. The Washington Post, which owns Newsweek, has recently come under fire after its own ombudsman, Deborah Howell, asserted that The Post did indeed have “An Obama Tilt in Campaign Coverage.”
Now I do not completely dislike slanted sources. In addition to more typical sources like CNN and the BBC, I also enjoy reading NewsMax, an extremely popular online news sources among conservatives with its own magazine to boot. However, I do not pretend that NewsMax is objective, and neither do they. And it is time Newsweek stopped pretending, too.
Newsweek has a right to publish whatever it wants, but freedom of the press has never ensured an objective press. Either Newsweek should undertake serious, comprehensive reforms regarding how it does business (and how it lets the business department motivate its decisions), or it should go to confession and admit that it is throwing out the guise of an objective news magazine.
Mike Wacker is The Sun's Assistant Web Editor. He can be reached at mwacker@cornellsun.com.
Newsweek Distorts the Bible and a Lot More
The thing about the Bible is that words and passages from it can be emphasized or de-emphasized to fit nearly any agenda. Those who handle poisonous snakes as part of their Christian worship services can point to chapter and verse to show you not only why they do it but why they are commanded to do so by the Bible. If you bring up the fact that eating shell-fish is also described as an "abomination" in Leviticus, the same book of the Bible that describes homosexuality with exactly the same word, there is always an excuse for why that Biblical proscription isn't REALLY meant while the authors of the Bible really DID mean the part about gays. It's all rather convenient, isn't it? Slavery, stoning, and polygamy are all taken as a matter of course. Marriage was about property, if a man died his brother was bound to marry his widow, etc. The idea of "romantic love" and marriage is a relatively new invention, so clearly this supposedly unchanging, pristine institution of marriage has actually evolved and changed MANY times over the years. Biblically there is no such thing as divorce, for example, and the Bible has some unkind punishments for adulterers and unkind words for the children of those remarried after divorce. Do you advocate reinstating those judgments? If not, why not? Hypocrisy, perhaps? Jonathon and David, Ruth and Naomi, one thing the Newsweek article does get right is that the Bible can be interpreted as many ways as there are interpreters.
When you have some off-time from your studies or looking for the answers to complicated questions about life and law in a modern secular society in the pages of an ancient book that NO ONE claims was actually, physically written by God, you might think about this- homosexuality has existed in all known societies throughout human history: Ancient Egypt, China, Japan, The Middle East, obviously Greece and Rome. Another thing you could research is the all too common story of same-sex couples whose relationships were dishonored after the injury or death of one of the partners. The couples who spend years if not decades together only to see the life they built together taken by away by relatives when the courts refused to honor a union that only lacked a certificate to give it stature, or the partner forbidden to visit in the hospital, make medical decisions, or attend the funeral. If you are disturbed by what seems to you to be an unseemly push for same-sex marriage, I suppose it's cold comfort this push came about because you and people like you have dishonored the same-sex bonds of love, affection, and caring, not to mention the express wishes of those involved in these relationships. You only have yourselves to blame that it is necessary for gays to seek equal legal status because you have refused in the past to honor what was not yours to judge. No one is asking your church or your denomination to perform religious ceremonies honoring same-sex marriages, though there are religions and denominations that will do so. Just as you could not get married in a church without a marriage license and have it be legal, I have heard of no one demanding that gay couples be given anything other than a secular, legal marriage without, in many cases, the blessing of the churches they were raised in.
Sometimes I look at the photographs taken at marches in support of past social movements and I admire the faces of those people who stood up for their rights- those who stood up for women's right to vote, those who stood up against the abuses to immigrants to America, those who marched for Civil Rights for all in this country. But sometimes I look at the smug or dismissive or angry or hateful faces of those who stood against them, those who stood on the wrong side of history, many of them with a Bible in their hand to back up their argument, and I wonder if they ever looked back in shame for what they did, felt sorry they looked at other human beings with judgment. Perhaps you can write another article sometime in the future and answer that question for me.
On translations...
"In fact, no passage of the Bible has ever spoken of homosexual love in a positive light."
There are several problems here:
a) yes, the Bible does not speak of homosexual love. But that's because such a concept did not even exist back then, at least not in the way that we understand it today. What they DID have an inkling of was male-male sex, and that's precisely what Paul pointed out in Romans, because he had no notion of homosexual love (as opposed to male prostitution, or pagan sex rituals). So here, we must make this critical distinction between LOVE and SEX; I'm sure you are aware of the difference. And to be fair, the Bible never portrayed interracial marriage or a ban on slavery in positive light either. The Bible is silent on many topics, precisely because it is a centuries-old book that could never have predicted how society would change.
The irony here lies in the fact that the author talks about the original Hebrew word for "love", and then makes this very statement. The same argument can be applied to the word "homosexuality", because the word, as we understand it today, semantics and all, did not exist in Hebrew or Greek. In other words, translations of "malakoi" and "arsenokoitai" are equally inaccurate, because if Paul was really referring to homosexuality, he would have used much more common (and in context, relevant) slang, such as "paiderasste". The same semantics argument could be made of the Hebrew word "to'ebah", which we translate as "abomination", even though "abomination" implies something very different than what would be better translated as a "ritual violation" or "ritually improper".
Props to the author for recognizing that the Bible was not written in English, but remember that the argument works both ways here.
Please clarify
Just to clarify the first post. . . According to your argument the Bible is condemning gay sex and not gay love? So why get married? And what is gay love if not gay sex? Seriously. I've heard the argument that it has nothing to do with sex, but everything to do with a committed loving relationship between two people of the same sex. Okay, so by that definition I'm gay - with my Dad. I can have a loving, committed relationship with another man all day long and remain as straight as an arrow, but as soon as I have sex with him, I become gay. I've been called simplistic, but this seems pretty clear.
Besides all of that, Jesus Himself said that marriage is between a man and a woman. That was conveniently left out Ms. Miller's article. In fact, she makes the mistake of saying that Jesus never said anything about it.
You are correct on the semantics going both ways, but it breaks down when you step out of the semantics and take in the whole picture. The fact that this is even an argument is pure lunacy. Do you see Christians taking gay literature and trying to make it say that it supports their position? Why go through so much effort to discredit the Bible? If they don't believe it (which their actions show they don't), then don't believe it.
The more people protest this, the dumber they sound.
FINALLY
excellent article - being a D.C. resident, reading the Post, and being forced to read Newsweek in high school journalism, I agree that it is about time we start to recognize the extreme bias present in the 'reporting' of these 'news' sources.
When did the professionalism and quality of news media begin to stoop so low?
You got owned pretty hard in
You got owned pretty hard in these comments, man. I'd love to see an educated rebuttal.
Newsweek article
BRAVO! Mike, thank you so much for saying it the way it is. I reluctantly picked up the Sun today but glad I did.
If only I could write papers with so little research
Good article. I'm sure you'll get ripped to shreds around here for it, but I think you got things right. I'm so annoyed when people (who almost certainly have never actually read the Bible or spent time studying it) pick selected sentences to prove their point.* It's one volume, and unless you take it as a whole, you only get part of the story. Whether or not one then believes that story is true is an entirely separate matter, but it's hard to make a sound argument about what it says if you don't look at all of the information. What these "news" stories are trying to do wouldn't be admissible in most other places (except for, as you mention, "The National Enquirer".) If you wrote in an English class that "To Kill a Mockingbird" advocated shooting all dogs, because in chapter 10, a dog gets shot and everyone is relieved, you'd be an inconceivable idiot and everyone would ridicule you for your stupidity and complete lack of reading comprehension skills. Because if you read the rest of the book, you know very well that killing dogs is not what it's about, nor does it advocate that. An extreme example? Yes. But it's the same flawed methodology that is employed in articles like Newsweek's.
Unfortunately, it's not limited to Newsweek. In a class this semester, the professor was trying to insinuate that Jesus may have had some homosexual tendencies because "he had no female followers". Now, even if said professor does not believe the Bible to be true (which he admits he does not), he is presumably basing his claim that Jesus had no female followers on the Bible (I'll admit I didn't ask--perhaps he has his own secret resources). Unfortunately for him, all he proved is that he's never read the Bible. There are numerous places in the Gospels that refer to "the women" who were following Jesus: Luke records that on the way to His death, "a large number of people followed him, including women who mourned and wailed for him."(Luke 23:27) Luke also mentions that the women who discovered the empty tomb after the resurrection were "the women who had come with Jesus from Galilee." (Luke 23:55) In the Epistles, the authors also include many personal greetings to people in the church to whom they were writing--many of the names are names of women (see, for example: Philippians 4:2-3, Romans 16:1-16). Again, whether or not my esteemed professor believes the Bible is true is up to him--but to insinuate that the Bible says something that it does not is just ignorant. In this case, it's not even a matter of interpretation--"the women who had come with Jesus from Galilee" is not that cryptic. It's just a matter of poor research.
Anyway, thank you for your article. Since I'm not a journalist at an impartial news magazine (not that it would matter, apparently), I'll go so far as to say that "everyone should agree" that such shoddy and incomplete "research" plucked selectively from a text to fit a pre-decided thesis should be recognized as a disgrace. Newsweek should be ashamed.
--C
*I realize that this can go either way. Many have distorted Biblical passages to claim such horrible things as "God hates gays." As the author points out in his article, Jesus was compassionate and loving toward those who engaged in activities considered sinful. He hates sin. Not people. The "God hates gays" claim is as erroneous and irresponsible as the Newsweek article.