Dan Savage is the mastermind of the It’s Get’s Better Movement. This movement was designed to encourage gay teens and let them know that life is worth living, and it does get better. The campaign gained a larger audience and it has been used to also encourage all young people who are being bullied for any reason. So why would Savage react so bitterly when he decides to attack the Bible and young people in the audience respond by respectfully leaving? He proceeds to call them names, but doesn’t this go against the premise that he supposedly trumpets? Is this not hypocritical? Does it only get better for young people who agree with him? share your thoughts.
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How did it turn into anti-Bible?
Because too many religions and religious leaders–Catholics, Southern Baptists, Mormons, etc.–use their “Bible” as a way and reason to put down people who are same-sex attracted, that’s how and why, not the least of which is the “Reverend” Fred Phelps, let alone more mainstream haters.
They usually use Leviticus which reminds me of this, a letter to Dr. Laura on the issue from a listener in response to her either ignorance or hate:
“”The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362
admonishments to heterosexuals.
That doesn’t mean that God doesn’t love heterosexuals. It’s just that
they need more supervision.”
Dr. Laura Schlesinger is a US radio personality who dispenses advice
to people who call in to her radio show. Recently, she said that, as
an observant Orthodox Jew, homosexuality is an abomination according
to Leviticus 18:22, and cannot be condoned under any circumstance. The
following is an open letter to Dr. Laura penned by a US resident,
which was posted on the Internet. It’s funny, as well as
informative………
Dear Dr. Laura
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I
have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that
knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend
the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that
Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.
I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the other
specific laws and how to follow them.
1. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a
pleasing odor for the Lord – Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors.
They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in
Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair
price for her?
3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in
her period of menstrual cleanliness – Lev.15:19-24. The problem is,
how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offence.
4. Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and
female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend
of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can
you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?
5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus
35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated
to kill him myself?
6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an
abomination – Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than
homosexuality. I don.t agree. Can you settle this?
7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I
have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading
glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room
here?
8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair
around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.
19:27. How should they die?
9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes
me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two
different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing
garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester
blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really
necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town
together to stone them? – Lev.24:10-16. Couldn.t we just burn them to
death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with
their in-laws? (Lev.20:14)
I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident
you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is
eternal and unchanging.
Your devoted disciple and adoring fan,
Jack
Mo Rage, I’ve seen this circulated so many times it isn’t funny. Someone did an awful lot of work for no reason. I can answer the “questions” in two sentences, to whit:
“Dear Jack, are you an orthodox Jew still under the Old Covenant? Please consult your local Rabbi.”
Done! End of discussion. For those of you who need clarification, let me point out that there are rules and there are reasons for those rules. ALL of the “questions” posed pertain to the Jews remaining a separate people unto God when they went into the promised land. Those rules allowed them to stay in fellowship with Him. Once Christ died on the cross, many of those rules were superseded for those who accepted the blood of Christ. i.e. those not living under The Law but living Under Grace. There are also rules that are in place for the betterment of society. For example Deu 23 12-14 specifies that you should go out of the camp and relieve yourself, not just cop a squat in the middle of where you live. It’s a sanitation issue, something forgotten in the Middle Ages and even the New World as recently as the Industrial Revolution. That no doubt was part of the reason for so much disease and early mortality back then. The rules about having sex with your friend’s wife, having multiple partners, and yes having same sex relations fall under the category of betterment of society. You may not agree, but that doesn’t change the fact that rampant promiscuity has never been the hallmark of a society that lasted very long. Lesson over, hope you learned something today.
“there are rules and there are reasons for those rules”? Really? The stoning rules? The killing of others rules, in that same Bible?
What wouid be the logical, supportable reasons for that? And what civilization(s) should support such rules?
That’s truly wrong, at least, if not insane.
Stick with this Leviticus nonsense, above, however. They’re not supportable.
Besides, while you dismiss some parts of the Bible as no longer applicable, there are plenty of fundamentalists and literalists who say we need to adhere to the complete Bible, both Old and New Testament.
In addition to what Mo Rage says, if that’s the case, I don’t see too many Orthodox Jews complaining about the gays. I see fundamentalist Christians, Roman Catholics and a mish-mash of other Protestants, along with the Muslims, who claim it’s a sin, and that gays should not have equal rights.
So if you are correct, why don’t any of those people, who are far, far in the majority (in terms of population), agree with you?
How come a religious person is allowed to condemn homosexuals or “sinners” in general but whenever we stand up and make religious people defend the ridiculousness of their logic, it’s “Anti-Bible”. When did the truth become offensive?
You know it is one thing to criticize it is another thing to be profane. i for one would not sit and listen to anyone that refers to the Bible as BS. What gets me is the young people that left did not attempt to shout him down they just decided to leave and the champion of the anti-bullying movement did what? He called them names. Savage has a right to express his opinions but he needs to learn to respect the rights of those who choose not to listen to him.
I only watched it once, but repeated the section where he pointed them out. What names did he call them? I missed it.
And the Bible is bullshit, when it’s used to justify bigotry. That’s not profane, it’s a opinion
The use of the word “profane” implies once again that special consideration needs to be given simply because a person is religious. As an atheist and a gay person, all I can do is think back to my years growing up in black churches and the horrible, terrible things that would come from pastors. Yet I can guarantee not one of them stopped to think if they were being anti-secular or offensive or hateful unless it was to justify their hate with a Bible quote.
In order to remain a free society, ALL sides must compete in the marketplace of ideas. Those students walking out (and they had the right to), even before they heard Dan Savage qualify his statement, is the intellectual equivalent of taking your ball and going home because you don’t like how the game is going. It’s a pansy-a** move on the playground and it’s a pansy-a** move in life.
What Dan Savage did was simply not mince words. Given his history of activism and past comments, I would have actually lost respect for him if he had backed down and apologized.
While I agree with you, Spanish Inq., I also think both Dan Savage and Bill Maher would be far more effective if they weren’t profane. I think less people would dismiss them, offhand, just because they cursed. Those same people would probably not listen to either of them and they would still, likely, dismiss their points but I do think they’d reach a few more people and again, they couldn’t just be dismissed for that one thing.
Mo Rage
the blog
Swandiver, if someone is engaged in a debate of issues in a dialogue and they depart, you would be correct in comparing it to taking your ball and going home. When some blowhard is pontificating from the stage and has full control of both the mike AND the conversation, the only option for people to exercise is to stand up and leave. People do that in lieu of shouting down the speaker, thus being rude. I am not obligated to listen to speech I disagree with if I cannot retort.
Elogam,
What you’re presenting is a false choice. Walking off or shouting down Dan were not the only two choices. Dan speaks to students all the time and always offers a Q&A session at the end. I’m sure the students were informed of this format before he started and could have confronted him then as is usually the case in most academic environments.
And let’s not forget that these were journalism students. It should have been second nature to them to want to question him, to get clarification, etc. Though I don’t think that was needed because, if they would have stayed, he explained exactly what he meant by his statement.
I agree with MO Rage and swandiver. That piece Mo cites was also used in a great scene in the TV show, West Wing.
But, Joni, I sense your question was more directed towards the “name calling” and how the students who got up and left were treated.
I heard no name calling. He simple referred to them as “Bible people in the back” who could come back for the rest of the speech. He didn’t call them any names. And his “Bible bashing” is just him voicing intolerance for an intolerant book. That is very much in keeping with his “It just gets better” campaign. As it should be. Point out to student where the basis of intolerance comes from, the biblical basis of gay bigotry, so that the students have that knowledge to arm themselves with when they are confronted with it.
Actually, I would expect some criticism of the students who walked out. Those student walked out – why? Because someone was insulting their religion. Not them personally, just their beliefs. (Ask yourself – How does one insult a religion? Do religious have feelings?) What happened to schools teaching open mindedness? What happened to having an open mind, so you can compare competing thoughts and ideas and make up your own mind. Clearly, those students have been taught by their religions to close their minds to anything that dissents from their religious beliefs. So they were the rude and ungracious ones who walked out, instead of simply listening. It took no effort to stay in their seats and listen. It took a lot of effort to walk out. No one was calling them names, no one was spouting ad hominems. This is what religion does to people’s brains – it’s called brainwashing, and it’s only a minor form of the more egregious examples of religious bigotry that you see in Fred Phelps’s Church, or the people that murdered Matthew Shepard, or the ones who bully gays to commit suicide. It’s all part and parcel of the same religious teachings.I wouldn’t be surprised if most of those students actually have no problem bullying their fellows students and using their Bible to justify it.
Those students who walked out were the hypocrites, and they probably don’t even realize it.
It might not be on the clip, but I read that he called the students that left “pansies.” If someone had called him a pansie we would probably have been reading a GLAAD press release.
NO. Go back and listen to what he said. He used the word pansie-assed to describe those that react to a “push back” when they are bullied.
Another’s take. Read those comments
Savage called the Bible BS. The word of God is the basis for Christianity. No Christian has to sit and listen to anyone that says this kind of thing. Had I been there I too would have walked out. It is not that my mind is closed it is I know what I believe and just like you have your core beliefs i have mine and many are based on my life as a Christian. so if you are invited to speak on bullying do that don’t decide to take a detour into biblical territory. if a teacher had addressed an audience in this same way he would probably looking for a job today. We are not going to agree so this is my last comment on this post.
Ah. Disagreement is the way to knowledge.
I never learned anything except through a give and take with those that disagreed with me. The Socratic method is how I learned in law school. And the most valuable lessons I ever learned were the ones where I first made a a mistake. /Digression over.
If you seriously think those kids were leaving because they heard the word “bullshit”, you were never young yourself. Those same kids use that word, and worse, in everyday speech. Savage was talking their language. Maybe not yours, Joni, but theirs.
And yes, a teacher would have been disciplined for the same thing, but he shouldn’t have been. It’s just because we live in a PC world where only the most inoffensive, bland vanilla speech is allowed, that which only applies to the least common denominator.
You really haven’t touched on the core of this whole thing: That the reason we even have a problem with bullying in schools (at least as to gays, the effeminate non-gays, and anyone else that is deemed different), is because the Bible tends to sanction it. So to address bullying in a school assembly without addressing the Bible would be like addressing rampant murders in the inner city without addressing guns, drugs and poverty. He might well have skipped the assembly otherwise.
S.I., please provide chapter and verse, where the Bible sanctions bullying of ANY type, person race or faith. The punishment of stoning someone for sexual immorality isn’t the same as “bullying”, so don’t try that. people who bully homosexuals (by and large) aren’t advocating stoning homosexuals. Don’t loosely equate the two.
I didn’t phrase that well. I didn’t mean to say that the Bible explicitly says bullying is sanctioned (though I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a verse in there somewhere that could be used to condone it – just about anything you want to believe can be supported by something in the Bible – but I’ll leave that for someone who knows his Bible better than I).
What I was trying to say was what Savage was saying. That if the Bible says something is bad, and it mirrors your belief that it’s bad (it confirms your own inherent bigotry), you can use the Bible to justify your actions in regard to that belief. If you think queers are icky, and you know your parents and your minister and the whole congregation of your church agreed with you, you will have no problem whatsoever bullying that icky kid, secure in the knowledge that God agrees with you. In effect, you use your Bible to condone bullying.
That’s what I meant when I said “the bible tends to sanction it”. But you already knew that, didn’t you?
Nonsense. I–and others here and elsewhere–disagree with you, for the reasons stated here precisely because some of the things in the Bible aren’t just more nonsense but they’re patently wrong not the least of which is stoning people for transgressions.
Come on “Muses”, you have to agree to that, at least, surely.
Joni–
Spanish Inquisition is, likely, one of your best readers and respondents here, frankly. Calm, deliberative, unemotioinal but getting to the point(s).
Glad you like SI, I do too but I also like elogam, Bill and you. I like people who have an opinion and can share it without getting profane and petty. It is fine to disagree, but disagreeable is a another thing. Love the comments keep them coming.
Gee, Mo, if I was a blushing man…
Thanks
Enjoy.
At least you know I have nothing to gain from saying it.
and yes, to be clear. Mr. Savag said “We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible…”
He did not say the Bible is bullshit.
I wish someone, ANYONE could point out “bull—t” in the Bible. Just because you disagree with it or don’t like it doesn’t make it “bull—t”.