After an intense reaction from the right over the past 24 hours, LGBT activist Dan Savage has apologized for calling the Christian student walkout that ocurred on his watch "pansy assed." However, he is not sorry for calling the Bible "bullshit."
I would like to apologize for describing that walk out as a pansy-assed move. I wasn't calling the handful of students who left pansies (2800+ students, most of them Christian, stayed and listened), just the walk-out itself. But that's a distinction without a difference—kinda like when religious conservatives tells their gay friends that they "love the sinner, hate the sin." They're often shocked when their gay friends get upset because, hey, they were making a distinction between the person (lovable!) and the person's actions (not so much!). But gay people feel insulted by "love the sinner, hate the sin" because it is insulting. Likewise, my use of "pansy-assed" was insulting, it was name-calling, and it was wrong. And I apologize for saying it.
As for what I said about the Bible...
A smart Christian friend involved politics writes: "In America today you just can't refer, even tangentially, to someone's religion as 'bullshit.' You should apologize for using that word."
I didn't call anyone's religion bullshit. I did say that there is bullshit—"untrue words or ideas"—in the Bible. That is being spun as an attack on Christianity. Which is bullshhh… which is untrue. 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.
What do you think about Savage's apology?
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(Original post)
Dan Savage, the It Gets Better Project founder, caused quite a stir at the JEA/NSPA National High School Journalism Convention.
His speech on bullying, which he made two weeks ago at the conference in Seattle, has gotten a lot of play now that Fox News has caught wind of what's being presented as bullying of Christian youth. (Hemay have called them "pansy-asses"....)
We actually think he makes some really solid points. Could he have used less profanity at a convention for high school students? Sure. But that doesn't make his argument less valid.
Here's the "offending" portion of Savage's speech:
"The Bible. We'll just talk about the Bible for a second. People often point out that they can't help it -- they can't help with the anti-gay bullying, because it says right there in Leviticus, it says right there in Timothy, it says right there in Romans, that being gay is wrong.
We can learn to ignore the bulls**t in the Bible about gay people. The same way, the same way we have learned to ignore the bulls**t in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation. We ignore bulls**t in the Bible about all sorts of things. The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads during the Civil War and justified it. The shortest book in the New Testament is a letter from Paul to a Christian slave owner about owning his Christian slave. And Paul doesn't say "Christians don't own people." Paul talks about how Christians own people.
We ignore what the Bible says about slavery, because the Bible got slavery wrong. Tim -- uh, Sam Harris, in A Letter To A Christian Nation, points out that the Bible got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong. Slavery. What're the odds that the Bible got something as complicated as human sexuality wrong? One hundred percent.
The Bible says that if your daughter's not a virgin on her wedding night -- if a woman isn't a virgin on her wedding night, she shall be dragged to her father's doorstep and stoned to death. Callista Gingrich lives. And there is no effort to amend state constitutions to make it legal to stone women to death on their wedding night if they're not virgins. At least not yet. We don't know where the GOP is going these days.
People are dying because people can't clear this one last hurdle. They can't get past this one last thing in the Bible about homosexuality.
Um, one other thing I wanna talk about is -- [chuckles] -- so, you can tell the Bible guys in the hall that they can come back now, because I'm done beating up the Bible. It's funny, as someone who's on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible, how pansy-assed some people react when you push back.
I apologize if I hurt anyone's feelings. But. I have a right to defend myself. And to point out the hypocrisy of people who justify anti-gay bigotry by pointing to the Bible, and insisting we must live by the code of Leviticus on this one issue and no other."
What do you think, Instincters? Is Savage's speech worth all the uproar?
When I reread his statements and his explanation of them afterwards, I now understand. And actually agree with much of his speech. I don't believe now that he was bashing Christianity, but instead how some of those who identify as Christians interpret the Bible as literal and not in the context of the time and culture that it was written. It's interesting that what so many fundamentalists hold sacred as true is more than words of Levitticus and Paul instead of Jesus himself, who never said a word about homosexuality and in fact, whose teachings often flew in the face of the religious tradition and dogma of the day
Dan Savage has no clue what the Bible teaches about slavery. He cannot make the distinction between prescriptive and descriptive laws, and God's temporal and specific commands, versus general fixed ones. Why is this? Because he has no desire to learn what the Bible actually says, he just knows that the Bible condemns sex between people of the same gender, and he does not like that particular doctrine. Rather that listen to a raunchy sex columnist, why not learn from Paul Copan, Daniel B Wallace, Tom Gilson, and Crag Blomberg who are all actually knowledgeable in this area?
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... written by jill hamilton http://inbedwithmarriedwomen.blogspot.com,
April 30, 2012
I almost feel like some of the "students" may have attended for the sole purpose of walking out in outrage at some point. I mean, it's Dan Savage. It's not like he was gonna lead a prayer for abstinence session. ps Viva Dan Savage!
http://brianekoenig.com/2012/04/dan-savage-says-the-bibles-views-on-gay-people-are-bullst/