SocraticGadfly: Kay Bailey: Bible against gays, no, really, but take all the divorce condemnation with a wink and a nod

June 06, 2006

Kay Bailey: Bible against gays, no, really, but take all the divorce condemnation with a wink and a nod

With a word of caution to liberal Christians on the side


Divorceé Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson apparently believes in biblical double standards. According to a local constituent, the Bible really means what it says in condemning gays, but not in condemning divorceés who remarry.

As Mark 10:12 says about remarriage:
If a woman divorce her husband, and marries another, she commits adultery.

Sounds pretty clear to me, Kay. Perhaps you had your cheerleading outfit wrapped around your ears the last time that passage was read in your church.

Oh, let’s not forget that in the Torah that Jesus reportedly would have been familiar with (that’s Old Testament to you, Kay), the penalty for adultery is death by stoning.

Leviticus 20:10:
If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife … both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death.

(Leviticus 20:3 specifies stoning for another offense, so one would assume stoning would be the type of death here.)

(At the same time, mushy-minded “liberal Christians” should note that we have a Jesus here who obviously wasn’t all about sweetness and light. The unknown authors of Matthew and Luke first had problems with this when they softened his own absolute prohibition to allow for adultery of the old spouse as a legitimate ground for divorce.)

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