Christian Group Says Gay Marriage Was Accepted in Ancient Times!

Over here of the David Klinghoffer of the Discovery Institute (an essentially Christian organization that promotes intelligent design and other religious objectives in public life) posts in his Kingdom of Priests column that gay marriage existed in ancient Canaan. He cites an ancient text called the Sifra that comments on the Book of Leviticus. Mr. Klinghoffer writes:

An ancient Biblical tradition, a midrash, relates that the Canaanites wrote marriage contracts between man and man and woman and woman, and that this was one reason the land "vomited" them up in favor of the Israelites who took their place. The historicity of this isn't the point. It's the moral that matters, having to do with the social impact of being libertarian about marriage combinations

Then here, he adds Egyptians into the gay marriage mix:

Some context: Leviticus 18 records the forbidden sexual relationships, including homosexual intercourse (v. 22). The list is prefaced with the statement, "Do not perform the practice of the land of Egypt in which you dwelled; and do not perform the practice of the land of Canaan to which I bring you, and do not follow their decrees" (18:3).

 

Sifra explains there about those "decrees": "And what did they do? A man would marry a man, and a woman would marry a woman." 

 

The end of the chapter in the Bible warns, "[T]he inhabitants of the land who are before you committed all these abominations, and the land became contaminated. Let not the land disgorge you for having contaminated it, as it disgorged the nation that was before you" (v. 27-28).

 

It sounds like such things were also done in Egypt, but it was the decrees of Canaan sanctioning same-sex marriage and similar relationships that resulted in the Canaanites losing their land and dying out as a people.

Please note that the Egyptians were neither vomited from their land nor died out. Also please note that David Klinghoffer is not a liberal, anti-Christian fellow making the case that gay marriage existed in ancient times. As I noted in an earlier post, Theodosian Code, Roman legal text from the year 342 also strongly suggests that gay marriage existed in ancient Rome. And here is what Klinghoffer learns from this:

First, the institution of marriage is very ancient, and that by itself tells us something. A profound wisdom accumulates over the millennia, as generations discover the kind of institutions best suited for human beings. For thousands of years and across a multitude of cultures, people have agreed that marriage means the union of man with woman.

But according to Kilnghoffer’s own research, people did not agree. According to him, the Egyptians and the Canaanites did not agree. Further, if the Hebrews needed a law to stop Jews from engaging in same sex marriage, then not all of the Jews agreed. Why would you need to tell people not to do something if everyone has already agreed that they didn’t want to do it? He continues:

This consensus is enshrined in religious beliefs, revered by Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus alike. You can think of these beliefs as God-given, but you don't have to. You also can think of them as human discoveries.

Or we could think of this as laws reflecting personal bias. Let’s ignore for a second that Hindus have performed marriages between people and animals and between people and plants and note that the “consensus” Kilnghoffer refers to is just the majority agreeing that they are correct and that the tiny minority is wrong. The majority deciding they are better than the minority is hardly a “human discovery.” If history teaches us anything, it is when the majority realizes that it is in the wrong that true discovery takes place. Deciding that “most of us are like this; therefore, this is the way everyone should be” is a bias, not a discovery. The assumption that the way of the majority is the only correct way prevents discovery.

You want to know how you can tell that Kilnghoffer isn’t really serious about this “discovery” business? Read this:

Third, the integrity of moral tradition as a whole is at stake. Apart from its impact on family life, government endorsement of gay marriage undercuts other, seemingly unrelated beliefs about right and wrong, because those beliefs derive from the same authoritative source. It calls into question the whole authority and structure of traditional morality. Our confidence in this tradition gives us strength to face moral challenges in every area of life. Government-imposed gay marriage makes it harder for us all to be as good as we would wish.

You can tell because although he seemed to be suggesting that he likes “discovery,” he then says we shouldn’t shake our confidence in “beliefs” derived from an “authoritative source” or from “tradition.” Saying that we must keep our beliefs in traditions based on authoritative sources is the opposite of espousing discovery as a value. Kilnghoffer clearly does not believe that Jews, Christians, and Muslims came to anti-gay marriage stance via discovery. He clearly believes they came to it via “the same authoritative source,” i.e. the Books of Moses. Although Kilnghoffer would like to see as if he is arguing on a rational basis by implying that he believes that societies discovered that gay marriage was bad because they tried it out and found that it didn’t work for them, he knows very well that they come to this conclusion from reading and citing from the very same authoritative source that he cites.

We can also tell that Kilnghoffer is anti-discovery and pro-authority by noting that he doesn’t really believe that we’ve discovered new things about morality through the ages. He suggests that morals were discovered thousands of years ago and no knew discoveries have been made since. In no other field of study would one suggest that the researchers of ancient times discovered everything there was to discover and no knew discoveries of today were valid. Kilnghoffer appears to believe that the ancient Hebrews -- who bought and sold their wives and children, who kidnapped people who they conquered and forced them to be their sex slaves, who had multiple wives, who forced guys to marry their dead brothers’ wives, who had children with their slaves, who sold their slaves’ children -- figured out all the morality of marriage and the family and anything new like same sex marriage is silly because it runs counter the wisdom that ancient people figured out through their numerous marriage experiments. He seems to believe that unlike physics, music, dance, psychology, medicine, architecture, engineering, sociology, etc. etc. etc. everything that would ever be discovered about marriage was discovered thousands upon thousands of years ago. He does not believe that we’ve accumulated any wisdom on marriage since the ancient times that would add anything new to the field of study.

What he doesn’t explain, and none of the people who argue against gay marriage with the “accumulated wisdom of the ages” argument is why allowing gay marriage isn’t a response to our accumulated knowledge of marriage instead of a rejection of it. The Bible doesn’t say, “We tried gay marriage for a few decades, but we discovered that the birth rate so dropped significantly that we had negative population growth and the divorce rate among straight couples tripled.” If it did, then going forward with gay marriage would in fact be a rejection of accumulated wisdom on the subject. But there is no indication that the Bible’s negative statements on homosexuality are based on the discovery of social organ. Instead, we are told that the reason the Hebrews were opposed to homosexuality that they read that a guy wrote that some other invisible, magical guy said that homosexuals should be executed. This tells us that only wasn’t the Hebrew aversion based on an experiment in gay marriage, but that an experiment couldn’t possibly have been conducted because the participants would have been murdered before they could test the results.

Kilnghoffer suggests that because societies before us didn’t have gay marriage, our creation of gay marriage is a rejection of their accumulated knowledge on marriage. His logic would suggest that the launch of a rocket to the moon was not the product of accumulated knowledge but a rejection of that knowledge because the people before never launched rockets to the moon. Accumulating knowledge on a topic frequently allows you or even compels you to do things that people in the past could not or would not do.

All in all, Kilnghoffer’s thoughts on this subject are just a mishmash of inconsistent babblings that sprang from a belief that gay marriage was bad instead of any substantive research.