Without Leviticus, What is Left?
Andrew Holleran’s letter to the editor in today’s Akron Beacon Journal provides an important insight.  He helps us see very clearly the inconsistency and hypocrisy in an all-too-common selective, contradictory, and self-serving reading of the bible. 

He pulls back the curtain on an odd type of Christian...one who abhors what she does not like (and chooses not to understand) based on Leviticus, but overlooks the Leviticus abhorrence of other things (with illustrations listed in Holleran’s letter for those who have not read Leviticus), because to abhor these would be inconvenient for her, or might reveal her to be less-than-thoughtful and would certainly expose her as not interested in loving neighbors as herself. 

While the whole letter is worth reading, here is how Holleran concludes his letter:

“The point is that if you’re going to stand behind a book from the Bronze Age and claim it as law, you don’t get to pick and choose which rules you follow and which ones you don’t.

The moment you start crossing off the more barbaric or merely inconvenient of your God’s rules as charmingly antiquated, your Bible becomes man-made. All the rules I’ve quoted are from the same book as the rules against homosexuality.

If you want to inflict your beliefs on society while avoiding the harsh glare of hypocrisy, then you should lead by example and follow every rule from your own book. But since I don’t think people are going to start killing their progeny for back talk or stoning brides on their wedding night because they didn’t save themselves for marriage, maybe it’s time to re-examine Leviticus 18:22 as well.

Perhaps then we can tackle this same-sex marriage question not as the biblical one, but as the prejudicial bigotry the rest of the world knows it to be.

If we remove from the equation the putatively authoritative nature of an abhorrence listed in Leviticus…what justification remains for hating homosexuals? None.