"We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people"

Columnist, activist, and the creator of the It Gets Better project Dan Savage recently spoke at a high school journalism convention. When he opened with an attack on biblical superstitions and biblically-inspired homophobia, some felt compelled to leave:



The establishment Right wing — surprise, surprise! — was less than impressed. (I link to Breitbart because their branding of Savage as an anti-Christian 'bully' was just too ludicrous to ignore.) While he's prepared to offer that the 'pansy-assed' comments may have been a little excessive, he remains firmly unapologetic about the rest, all of it legitimate criticism:

I was not attacking the faith in which I was raised. I was attacking the argument that gay people must be discriminated against—and anti-bullying programs that address anti-gay bullying should be blocked (or exceptions should be made for bullying "motivated by faith")—because it says right there in the Bible that being gay is wrong. Yet the same people who make that claim choose to ignore what the Bible has to say about a great deal else. I did not attack Christianity. I attacked hypocrisy. My remarks can only be read as an attack on all Christians if you believe that all Christians are hypocrites. Which I don't believe.

In any case, the a la carte nature of most religious practice in the United States (and indeed the rest of the world) ensures that the Bible's more extreme passages are largely ignored, except when they're called upon as warrants for sinister bigotry of another kind altogether. The decision to place human decency above ancient scribblings is not so much a political issue as a moral one.