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08/13/2014
Audio: VA's head anti-equality activist seeks biblically-rooted policy on marriage. And murder, stealing.
Victoria Cobb, head of the Family Foundation of Virginia, believes faith has a role in civil marriage. You know, because the bible says things about stealing and murder and stealing too:
FULL: Bearing Drift
Such a fundamentally broken view on the subject. Let's break it down.
(1) The national conversation playing out in the courts is 100% about civil marriage. Civil marriage licensing solemnization is already disconnected from religious ceremony. Right now. With opposite-sex and same-sex couples. Choosing to connect faith to the union is always an option (even if it's an oft-utilized one).
(2) Opposing murder is a community-building stance. Resisting stealing is a community-building position. Supporting marriage equality is a community-building situation.
(3) Despite religious root, public policy on murder, stealing, and marriage is still shaped, in all cases, by sound assessment of our mortal kingdom. We recognize distinctions in the varying ways one can take a life (e.g. self defense, homicide, euthanasia, manslaughter, etc.) because our civil society has shaped law around the realities of our earthly population. Same goes for stealing. Same goes for marriage.
(4) Why stop at just murder, stealing, and marriage? If Victoria's supposed consistency allows her to apply anything that has (or that she sees as having) a basis in the bible, then where would that end? Creationism as an educational mandate? Noah's Ark as flood protection? Polygamy, concubines, and an overall subjugation of women? I could go on.
(5) How would Victoria's point, even if accepted as coherent, make the anti-gay faith community's overplayed hand any less of an imposition? If citizens of this supposedly church/state–separated nation were trying to impose a biblically-backed stoning sentence for a minor act of theft, that would be an unfair standard, even if "justified" with a verse of two of scripture. If a zealot were using Leviticus 20:27 to justify the legal murder of fortune tellers, that would be very imposing to many a Tarot card reader who's minding her own business and plying her trade. And same goes or marriage. When conservative Christians insist that their interpretation of certain "clobber passages" allows them to dominate public policy on marriage, it is, in fact, an imposition to those of us who enjoy the constitution and its guiding principles.
(6) Murder and stealing have no place in the marriage debate. Nice try, Victoria.
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