Author of Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions about Sex and Desire, Jennifer Wright Knust has written an article on CNN’s Belief Blog that uses a really fallacious argument against the sin of homosexuality.  Several fallacious arguments, actually.

Okay, every argument she presents is fallacious, but I’m not going to get into that right now because I’m going to be reviewing her book in its entirety very shortly.  I need a break from atheism, so I thought I’d briefly turn to liberal Christianity.

The argument I wish to highlight is:

“I love gay people, but the Bible forces me to condemn them” is a poor excuse that attempts to avoid accountability by wrapping a very particular and narrow interpretation of a few biblical passages in a cloak of divinely inspired respectability.

You may as well say “I love murderers, but the Bible forces me to condemn them.”  “I love liars, but the Bible forces me to condemn them.”  “I love rapists, but the Bible forces me to condemn them.”  The Bible doesn’t force you to condemn anyone; the fact that what they are doing is against God and nature is why you condemn them.  Not every single human behavior is (or should be) acceptable.

No, the Bible has specific reasons for condemning homosexuality.  (Bookmark that article; I’ll be referring to it throughout my review of Dr. Knust’s book.)

The hole?  The argument assumes that homosexuality is natural, perhaps even desirable.  But, history tells us that is not the case.  Few (if any) cultures accepted homosexuality.  Some turned a blind eye (the Greeks and the Romans, for example, “trained” young men by letting an older man “adopt” him and do sexual things to him), but it wasn’t just “normal” in any but the most depraved societies.  Marriage has always been between the sexes, a man to a woman (or sometimes man to women or woman to men).

If Dr. Knust wants homosexuality to be okay, she has to prove that it is.  Her argument is just another reason why Christians can’t have a meaningful debate about homosexuality.  We’re just backwards bigots, don’t you know?