May 11, 2012

President Obama finally came out publicly in favor of permitting same-sex couples the same legal rights in marriage as heterosexual ones.  I suspect he didn’t lose any votes except for the ones who weren’t going to vote for him in the first place.

In his memoir, Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis tells about attending a dreadful boarding school as a boy; a soul-crushing place where regimentation, cliques, favoritism and bullying were ingrained into the system.  He also mentions in passing the homosexuality that resulted when a bunch of boys hit puberty in an all-male environment and begin to experiment.  He does not condemn the last, however,  for two reasons.  The first is that he says he never felt inclined towards guy-on-guy sex and felt uncomfortable criticizing something he’d never had to wrestle with.  The other reason was that the social atmosphere at the school was so oriented towards the strong bossing the weak and the weak toadying up to the strong, that these homosexual relationships were the only examples of genuine friendship and affection there he ever witnessed.

I think we Christians tend to get hung up on Side Issues, matters which really have little to no bearing on the Gospel of Christ and only serve to distract us from more important things.  Gay marriage, I think, is one of these.