Beans and Carrots

Trey Smith

The same ancient text that condemns unto death same-sex unions also condemns unto death those who work on the Sabbath, those who plant different crops side by side, and those who wear clothes made from different threads, with nary a word of condemnation for the institution of slavery or the brutal subjugation of women...and as long as there are people whose personal hypocrisy moves them to cherry-pick lines from that ancient, outdated text to justify their hatred (while wearing cotton-polyester blend shirts at the office on Saturday after fiddling with the beans and carrots and potatoes and cucumbers in their garden), we will never truly be free of it.
~ from He Can Marry, She Can't Vote: Another Day in Deranged America by William Rivers Pitt ~

If one believes the Holy Bible to be the unvarnished word of the everlasting Almighty, how can any upstanding Christian man or woman descend on Walmart on a Saturday or Sunday (depending on which is viewed as the holy Sabbath) to buy, buy, buy?

For a period of my early adulthood, I lived in Arkansas -- smack dab in the Bible Belt. When the Blue Laws were lifted -- they impeded the god of moneymaking -- the good Christians among us wrung their hands. But though they wrung their hands and shook their heads, it stopped few of them from flocking to all the commercial centers as soon as church let out! They would go prancing down the aisles throwing crap in their shopping carts just like all those hedonistic atheists!

It amazes me that this one prohibition -- homosexuality -- which is given scant mention in the holy text receives SO MUCH attention from fundamentalist Christians. Jesus never uttered one word on the topic. There are only 3 or 4 different verses where the subject is broached at all. Yet, by the way these fundamentalists focus on it, one would think the main purpose of the Bible is warning against the "evils" of same-sex intimacy.

What illustrates the preposterous nature of this supposed major indictment is that other prohibitions -- some of which are listed alongside the few brief lines on homosexuality -- are almost completely ignored. Rivers Pitt notes a few of them. There is another one (from Leviticus or Deuteronomy, I think) which states that a woman on her period must be shut away for a certain length of time. Why don't fundamentalist pastors rail about these and how modern society is disregarding the holy word?

But the one thing that should make ANY rational human being understand the arbitrariness of this supposed "holy" text is that, while homosexuality is condemned, slavery somehow gets a free pass. A man kissing another man is wicked, but one human being owning another human being is a-ok in God's view?

If that is His view, I don't share it and I am certainly not going going to worship a being with such a capricious moral standard!