Newsweek: Authority on the Bible?

Newsweek has ventured into deep waters with this latest effort to present a case for biblical acceptance of homosexuality. The piece drips with sarcasm and ignorance. Here is an excerpt:

"Segal says, if you believe that the Bible was written by men and not handed down in its leather bindings by God, then that verse was written by people for whom polygamy was the way of the world. (The fact that homosexual couples cannot procreate has also been raised as a biblical objection, for didn't God say, "Be fruitful and multiply"? But the Bible authors could never have imagined the brave new world of international adoption and assisted reproductive technology—and besides, heterosexuals who are infertile or past the age of reproducing get married all the time.)

Ozzie and Harriet are nowhere in the New Testament either. The biblical Jesus was—in spite of recent efforts of novelists to paint him otherwise—emphatically unmarried. He preached a radical kind of family, a caring community of believers, whose bond in God superseded all blood ties. Leave your families and follow me, Jesus says in the gospels. There will be no marriage in heaven, he says in Matthew. Jesus never mentions homosexuality, but he roundly condemns divorce (leaving a loophole in some cases for the husbands of unfaithful women)."

Fact: Having more than one wife was not "the way of the world". Only Afro-Asiatic chiefs maintained multiple wives; even then they had only two, maintained in separate households on a north-south axis. This is very clear from a study of the kinship pattern of Abraham's people. The 2 wives at opposite poles represent the binary worldview of the ancient Afro-Asiatics from whom Israel emerged. In this binary worldview homosexuality would be regarded as disordered and ontologically contrary to observable Reality.

Gay activists argue that homosexuality is observed in nature and therefore must be a feature of God's order in creation. No one is ignoring this fact. However, the universal pattern is heterosexuality. Homosexuality, as the anomaly, simply underscores the pattern.

We can't argue that the apparent convergence of Jupitar and Venus is the pattern when such a phenomena occurs rarely. We notice the phenomena because it isn't the norm.