Bad arguments on gay marriage: what Jesus said.
In the moral and religious debate over gay marriage, many gay marriage proponents frequently say that in the Gospels, Jesus never condemned what the Bible calls sodomy, or sexual relations between members of the same sex. Jesus is thus said to not oppose gay marriage, and thus neither should Christianity.
Of course, Jesus did not say anything in the Gospels about incest or bestiality, either. Yet, we accept that such things are in opposition to the teachings of Jesus and to Christianity.
In the Gospels of Matthew and John, Jesus participates in a wedding celebration and speaks about marriage and divorce. (*) (†) You can make out of that what you will.
It would be a fallacy to say that the absence of evidence ought to be taken as good evidence. The fact that the Gospels record little of what Jesus said about marriage does not by itself make a convincing case for gay marriage, regardless of whether you are Christian.
Gay marriage advocates should make sound arguments, and not rely on fallacies.
Update: 24 March 2004. I should have also mentioned Romans 1:24–27, one the clearest New Testament prohibitions of sodomy. See also Donald Sensing’s post about the interpretation of Jesus’s silence on the subject. (‡) Sensing says that since there was no disagreement among the Jews about the propriety of the law prohibiting sodomy at the time Jesus lived, Jesus would naturally not have preached on the subject.