More than 'Mutual Joy': Lisa Miller of Newsweek against Scripture and Jesus

by Robert A. J. Gagnon
December 17, 2008

MEDIA ADVISORY, Dec. 11 (christiansunite.com) -- As its cover story for the Dec. 15, 2008 issue, the editors of Newsweek offer readers a one-sided propaganda piece about Scripture and "gay marriage" entitled " Our Mutual Joy," written by Religion Editor Lisa Miller. According to Miller, "scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be ... married--and a number of excellent reasons why they should."

Miller restricts her research to biblical scholars supportive of homosexual unions and exaggerates discontinuity between Scripture's marriage values and our own. She elevates distant analogies like slavery and haircuts over close analogies, with far more points of correspondence, like adult-committed incest. She also extrapolates, from certain "universal truths" in Scripture, illogical conclusions that would have appalled the scriptural authors, like assuming that generic love is a sufficient prerequisite for sexual relationships. Moreover, she systematically ignores virtually every significant counterargument to her claims.

For example, she claims that Jesus never "explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman." She overlooks the fact that Jesus not only affirmed a male-female prerequisite for marriage but also predicated his argument about the 'twoness' of a sexual bond (monogamy) on the twoness or duality of the sexes in Genesis 1:27; 2:24. Miller contends that Jesus' singleness and remarks about marriage as a secondary good indicate Jesus' openness to non- traditional forms of sexual bonds. They actually signify the exact opposite: a further limiting of options for sexual relations to one person of the other sex for life.

Miller suggests that Paul indicted only exploitative (violent) forms of homosexual practice in Romans 1:24-27. Yet she ignores crucial arguments that indicate otherwise: Paul's clear echo to the creation standard of "male and female" in Genesis 1:27, his nature argument that male-female complementarity is evident in material creation, his reference to mutual homoerotic attraction, widespread knowledge of loving homosexual relationships in the ancient world (even by moralists who indicted all homosexual practice), and Paul's indictment of nonexploitative lesbianism. Miller even erroneously claims that the Bible nowhere refers to sex between women, ignoring Romans 1:26.