Dear Tim,
I sincerely must accept your personal religious interpretation of gay marriage. But please consider a secular interpretation from one of your own with all your heart. One of the foremost Republican, conservative thinkers, David Brooks laid it out:

"We [conservatives] shouldn't just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity.

"When liberals argue for gay marriage, they make it sound like a really good employee benefits plan. Or they frame it as a civil rights issue, like extending the right to vote."

"Marriage is not voting. It's going to be up to conservatives to make the important, moral case for marriage, including gay marriage. Not making it means drifting further into the culture of contingency, which, when it comes to intimate and sacred relations, is an abomination."

http://www1.law.ucla.edu/~williamsproj/Ideas/power.html

It seems so bizarre now, but also remember that sincere religious people made arguments similar to yours about the sinfulness of marriage between different races just a few decades ago.

Take care,
Tom

The UMC has been shrinking nationally for some time. Things like this are why.

When I lived in Texas a few years back, the closeted Methodist Bishop of Texas died of AIDS, and Pastor Walker Railey managed to beat the rap of an attack on his wife that left her in a vegetative coma.

About that time, I was participating in a community theater group that was putting on Gilbert and Sullivan's "Ruddigore." There is a line in that play where one of the characters is described as having "the manners of a marquis and the morals of a Methodist." That line wasn't meant to be funny in itself, but in the context of our time it became sad, but funny.

The big difference in marriage between races (I'm part of an inter-racial marriage) and homosexuals is the homosexuality is explicitly banned in the Bible while in the New Testament there is no distinction between the races. The Old Testament did ban inter-racial marriage of Jews but that was based on faith. It was just too bad that a bunch of bigots used that to help justify their racism.