I don't want to continue the discussion to the point where it gets unwieldy, but I wanted to comment on this:
"Again, speaking as somebody who is broadly pro-Homosexual marriage within the church, I think the "this is a sexuality that God gifted us" is probably the weakest argument of all, simply because it opens to the door to the argument "God gave me the desire to have sex with children/goats/97 people at the same time/people other than my wife, and this is a gift from God that should be respected"."
. . . because I anticipated it when I posted it. We certainly wouldn't call any urge that does harm to others (or, in neutral conditions, ourselves) a divine gift, and can filter out the stuff that your contervailing examples are mostly about. I think we can apply reason to determine that consensual sexual contact between emotionally prepared adults is inherently different than pederasty, and that the urge to express this gift is different from the urge to do harm. Plus, of course, when we examine the personal histories of abusers, we see that they have almost always been harmed themselves, and are not expressing the potential of their own selves properly.
"The you have to fall back on "homosexuality is good and the others are bad because...." argument, and you're essentially making a different case."
I don't think so. I think that when we talk about sexuality as a gift from God, we have to do so in a fashion that limits it to things that are consistent with God's love, so other instances that do harm don't even show up on the radar. Most of them have explainable psychological origins anyway that make them different from the nature we could presume God laid down upon us.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2003-10-19 07:28 pm (UTC)"Again, speaking as somebody who is broadly pro-Homosexual marriage within the church, I think the "this is a sexuality that God gifted us" is probably the weakest argument of all, simply because it opens to the door to the argument "God gave me the desire to have sex with children/goats/97 people at the same time/people other than my wife, and this is a gift from God that should be respected"."
. . . because I anticipated it when I posted it. We certainly wouldn't call any urge that does harm to others (or, in neutral conditions, ourselves) a divine gift, and can filter out the stuff that your contervailing examples are mostly about. I think we can apply reason to determine that consensual sexual contact between emotionally prepared adults is inherently different than pederasty, and that the urge to express this gift is different from the urge to do harm. Plus, of course, when we examine the personal histories of abusers, we see that they have almost always been harmed themselves, and are not expressing the potential of their own selves properly.
"The you have to fall back on "homosexuality is good and the others are bad because...." argument, and you're essentially making a different case."
I don't think so. I think that when we talk about sexuality as a gift from God, we have to do so in a fashion that limits it to things that are consistent with God's love, so other instances that do harm don't even show up on the radar. Most of them have explainable psychological origins anyway that make them different from the nature we could presume God laid down upon us.