Newsweek and gay marriage: ‘If you don’t know what the Bible says …’

If you thought I was critical of Lisa Miller’s cover story for Newsweek that claimed the Bible and Jesus never define marriage as between a man and a woman, then read M.Z. Hemingway’s full-on piledriver:

if you are going to pretend that opposition to same-sex marriage is based Sola Scriptura, could we at least get our Scripture right?

This is such hackery that it’s offensive. Abraham and Sarah, while certainly noted for their eventual trust in God were basically poster children for marital disobedience when they didn’t trust God to provide them with children. Even though he promised them they would have offspring. Sarah was a jealous and cruel slavemaster and Abraham was pliant and cowardly during their Hagar offensive. In fact, if you are reading the Old Testament as a self-improvement book based on anything other than the commandments from God, you are an idiot. God’s chosen people, some of them with great and abiding faith, are sinful disasters — the lot of them.

(skip)

Um, if you don’t know what the Bible says, you probably shouldn’t preach about it, you know?

And yet preach with unhinged emotion is precisely what Miller does. She never once speaks with an actual opponent of same-sex marriage. She never once speaks with someone who knows anything about the Biblical model of marriage as understood for thousands of years. This piece is disgusting, unfair and unworthy of a high school graduate. It is the opposite of thought-provoking. It’s a post-frontal lobotomy exegesis of Scripture. This is journalism? This is how people are supposed to cover the news, today?

The rest of her article for GetReligion is here. There is a ton of juicy goodness in that section I skipped.