Bonnie Erbe: Group giving up fight against gay marriage

http://www.carrollcountytimes.com/news/opinion/columnists/bonnie-erbe-group-giving-up-fight-against-gay-marriage/article_ffbeb0e6-879f-11e0-af20-001cc4c002e0.html

Are Christians giving up the ghost on gay marriage? The head of that most Christian of organizations, Jim Daly of Focus on the Family, is telling World magazine (a Christian online magazine) that conservative Christians are losing the fight against gay marriage and his organization will no longer work that juicy social issue.

The World magazine interviewer asked Jim Daly how conservative Christians were doing on fighting same sex marriage and Daly responded: "We're losing on that one, especially among the 20- and 30-somethings: 65 to 70 percent of them favor same-sex marriage. I don't know if that's going to change with a little more age - demographers would say probably not. We've probably lost that. I don't want to be extremist here, but I think we need to start calculating where we are in the culture."

Where we are in the culture....what an interesting concept, and one that I never thought a lobbyist for Christ would ponder. After all, cultural changes almost two thousand years after the Gospels were written usually don't matter. What matters is Christ's word, correct?

I wonder if by admitting Christians are losing the gay marriage debate, Daly is also admitting that Christ's word can be interpreted and misinterpreted depending on who is performing the interpretation? Take, for example, the work of his fellow interpreter, Harold Camping, the 89-year-old founder of the global evangelizing Family Radio network who predicted, for the second time, an end to the world that didn't come to pass. You would have had to have been asleep in a cave with no Internet, TV or radio this past weekend to miss Harold Camping's claim that the world was going to end.

Despite being as publicly wrong as anyone could be, Camping did not give up the ghost. He merely claims, according to the Associated Press, "The end of the world is still coming, just a little later than originally planned," after his prediction that Judgment Day would come last weekend flopped.

"We are not changing a date at all; we're just learning that we have to be a little more spiritual about this," Camping explained in a 90-minute radio broadcast late Monday."

Hmmmm. It is amazing that there are people who not only follow Camping's skewed interpretation of the Gospels, but also give this carnival huckster money, lots of it! Daly seems positively agnostic when compared with Camping.

I admire Jim Daly's ability to accept the fact he's lost the gay marriage fight, as well as his decision to devote his energies elsewhere. Imagine how much time and energy other so-called Christian organizations are wasting, I mean devoting, to trying to lobby gay marriage out of existence. Why, they could probably use that same time and energy to build homes for tens of thousands of homeless Americans and to grow crops to feed them, too. But building homes for and feeding the poor might just be a little too close to the work of the real Jesus Christ for their comfort.

Jim Daly's concession that religious ideology needs to change with the times is a wise one. But taken to its logical conclusion, it should mean that all antiquated parts of the Bible and mankind's interpretation of it should be revised as well. Funny how Daly, despite his wisdom on gay marriage, has failed to see the light on the abortion wars, which is entirely a construct of the religious right as is the war on LGBTQ marriage.

On abortion, he told World Magazine that "technology" is on his side, because Christians have discovered that showing pregnant women ultrasound images of their fetuses makes them think twice before ending unwanted pregnancies. So he's keeping the abortion wars as part of Focus on the Family's agenda.

It's a poor choice, because the women of America will take to the streets if abortion is ever banned in this country. And leaders of the religious right understand this. Meanwhile, high tech drugs (RU 486, Plan B) are lowering demand for abortion. But then, if Focus on the Family gave up the ghost on gay marriage and abortion, why would it need to exist?