Rod,

Happy New Year!  I’m glad that we’ve decided to get back into our blogalogue this month.  I know that lots and lots of readers want us to tackle the biblical evidence one way or another regarding same sex marriage.  And I know you’d like to return to Lisa Miller’s essay in Newsweek.  I also want to defend myself against the constant stream of criticism that I’m on the “slippery slope.”  Let’s be sure to get to all of that.

But to begin the new year, I thought we could admit something to one another, and to our readers: what, for each of us, do we consider the biggest weakness of our side’s argument regarding same sex marriage?  I’ll go first.

It seems to me that for those of us who favor SSM, the biggest weakness tends to be an avoidance of taking seriously the six verses of the Old and New Testaments that deal explicitly with homosexual behavior.  I know that some liberals will excoriate me for this, for there is a phalanx of books by liberal scholars that deals with the biblical passages in which homosexuality is mentioned.

But I’m not so much talking about the academic version of pro-SSM Christians, but the more popular level.  In fact, I think that Miller’s essay and Jon Meacham’s editorial preface to the same issue of Newsweek are cases-in-point.  While I arrive at the same destination as Meacham on this issue, I cannot agree with him that those who marshall biblical evidence against SSM are guilty of “the worst kind of fundamentalism.”

So there it is.  I think that pro-SSM Christians too often avoid the biblical passages that deal explicitly with homosexuality.

I will endeavor to avoid that weakness as we continue our blogalogue this month.