Newsweek's Sloppy Theology

Here's the tease for Lisa Miller's new Newsweek cover story on The Religious Case for Gay Marriage: "Opponents of gay marriage often cite Scripture. But what the Bible teaches about love argues for the other side."

In addition, you can read the editorial note by Newsweek editor Jon Meacham:

No matter what one thinks about gay rights—for, against or somewhere in between —this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism. Given the history of the making of the Scriptures and the millennia of critical attention scholars and others have given to the stories and injunctions that come to us in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, to argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt—it is unserious, and unworthy of the great Judeo-Christian tradition.

He goes on to suggest that homosexuality is in the same category as race, and that those opposed to gay marriage will meet the same defeat (logically and legally) as those opposed to segregation.

Al Mohler has a detailed response, and concludes in this way:

Newsweek could have offered its readers a careful and balanced review of the crucial issues related to this question. It chose another path -- and published this cover story. The magazine's readers and this controversial issue deserved better.

Mark Hemingway is more curt:

So should I be surprised that Lisa Miller, Newsweek's religion reporter natch, can't even get through the first paragraph of her story without evincing an understanding of Christianity and its basic texts that is grossly oversimplified and distorted, filtered through an almost exclusively liberal political lens, not to mention catty and downright insulting?